...more recent posts
Real life thriller-ish geek stories today. First up is part 4 of Cracked! (Start here for Part 1, then Part 2, then Part 3.) It's been fun following this. An interesting inside look at a giant community site system administrator trying to combat a very sophisticated cracker. A little technical, but the story flows like a suspense novel, and how else are you going to learn? Then, as if that wasn't enough of the cloak and dagger cyber stuff, Cam had this link to the story of a spammer who forged the wrong domain name. I've always wondered who these people were. Now I know way too much about them. You can too. Oh yeah, and remember, your data is not safe.
Today I spent a lot of time wandering through David McCusker's site tree dragon. He is writing a new high level scripting language. I can't understand most of what he is talking about, but I want to learn more. (This is a classic example of a personal log posting that probably nobody else would find interesting. Sort of self centered I guess, except I'm not really forcing this on anyone. I'm just documenting what is important to me as I go - and not really for anyone else (although I like the idea that people might care to read all this) but just for the discipline of formalizing some things, of choosing which bits out of my day need to be written out in a way that someone else could understand.)
Something is coming into focus for me. For a while I had my head down and was really caught up in building something. Then, although it isn't, and probably won't ever be, finished, I felt like I crossed the threshold. I took things about as far as possible given my not too incredible starting assumptions. So I started to pick my head up and sniff the air for the next thing. I'm ready to start in again (on another learning curve) but I'm a little wiser now about the necessity of picking really good problems. A good problem will take you a long way in the process of working through it. I think I'm starting to get hold of one. At least I have some sort of central nugget in hand. It feels good to turn it over in my mind, to have something to work on.
Here's John Perry Barlow on Napster. I keep going through cycles of being fed up with this whole story, and then rediscovering it again from a different angle. Add in gnutella and freenet, and the conversation can start to swerve into some interesting areas. The Barlow piece is good background.
The New York Press has this interesting piece on the future of digital projection movie theatres. Some interesting ideas about how digital content (and wireless delivery of that content) will change the whole business model.
[T]he advantage... is that it will allow theaters to program much besides canned entertainment like movies: every sort of live event from basketball playoffs to rock concerts to telethons. I argued in my "Death of Film" article last year that this will be the real revolution, since it’s destined to produce a new form of entertainment palace that will owe as much to the programming paradigms of television as it does to traditional movies. In fact, this revolution is already under way: in January, Canada’s Famous Players chain started beaming live professional wrestling matches into its theaters. The shows have been selling out at $15 a seat.Entertainment palace... ummmm....
Dave linked to an article yesterday at edge.org, and while I was there I spied this other gem: Is the Market on Prozac? I hadn't thought this before, but it really could be the case. Here's a little from the piece by Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.:
The press has been preoccupied with possible explanations for the current extraordinary boom. Many articles say, as they always do while a bubble grows, that this market is "different." Some attribute the difference to new information technology. Others credit changes in foreign trade, or the baby boomer's lack of experience with a real economic depression. But you never see a serious story about the possibility that this market is different because investor's brains are different. There is good reason to suspect that they are.
Prescriptions for psychoactive drugs have increased from 131 million in 1988 to 233 million in 1998, with nearly 10 million prescriptions filled last year for Prozac alone. The market for antidepressants in the USA is now $6.3 billion per year. Additional huge numbers of people use herbs to influence their moods. I cannot find solid data on how many people in the USA take antidepressants, but a calculation based on sales suggests a rough estimate of 20 million.
What percent of brokers, dealers, and investors are taking antidepressant drugs? Wealthy, stressed urbanites are especially likely to use them. I would not be surprised to learn that one in four large investors has used some kind of mood-altering drug....
Kuro5hin has a write-up of an interesting proposal to fix the current DNS system. I think either it will be reformed (not likely) or a radically more distributed system will arise. Freenet and gnutella are both interesting steps in this direction (and, consequently, both are much more interesting than just the latest way to trade MP3's.)
This is incredibly cool. The BBC is reporting on a project to construct (by 2010) a virtual plant. Modeled after Arabidopsis thaliana, a relative of cabbage, this computer simulation would contain a complete description of all genes, as well as the proteins involved, and their expression at any point in time. A sort of "wiring diagram" of a living plant. Dr. Chory of the Salk Institute said
"We'd love, for instance, to see a four-dimensional view of a plant that covers all the details from when the seed germinates to when the next generation seeds fall off the mother plant. And we'd like to be able to stop the process at any phase in the plant's life-cycle and see which proteins are expressed and how they interact."If a simulation of a plant behaves exactly like a plant, is it one? In any case, cyberspace definitely needs a little greening.
Barbelith reprinted this funny open letter to Dr. Laura.
Brig (no, I don't really know her, but I'll call her Brig as if I did...) has a poll on her page today about webloggers and gender. Pretty even score so far (boys just slightly in the lead.)