{"id":2627,"date":"2009-06-22T23:50:12","date_gmt":"2009-06-23T03:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=2627"},"modified":"2009-06-23T08:46:47","modified_gmt":"2009-06-23T12:46:47","slug":"a-monday-night-gallimaufry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/22\/a-monday-night-gallimaufry\/","title":{"rendered":"A Monday Night Gallimaufry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s see if we can close some of the myriad tabs I&#8217;ve opened in the process of trying to catch up with everything that happened in the non-work world while I was off spending time at the Melbourne office:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who managed to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2008\/05\/teen-decomposes\/\">isolate plastic eating bacteria<\/a> that can decompose plastic bags in a few months for a science fair project.  The projection to a possible industrial solution is very interesting, although I&#8217;m not as blas&eacute; about the waste products as he is&#8211;even if it really is just water and CO<sub>2<\/sub><footnote>What about heat? Required? Released?<\/footnote>, there&#8217;s still some work to be done to sell that at an industrial scale without adding yet more to our industrial carbon dioxide problems. Still, pretty damn impressive for a teen science fair, that&#8217;s for sure.<\/li>\n<li>I do wonder if all the people colouring things green to show support for Iranian democracy realize that they are symbolically aligning themselves with Moussavi&#8211;I suspect a large number never stopped to ask &#8220;why green?&#8221; Even of those who do know it, I wonder what percentage have any idea <a href=\"http:\/\/tomwatson.typepad.com\/tom_watson\/2009\/06\/the-iranian-obama-hardly.html\">about Moussavi&#8217;s history<\/a>. See previous Shirky comment on technology speed. Supporting democracy and the protestors seems like a good idea to me, but that doesn&#8217;t mean shutting down the critical faculties on the question of <em>how<\/em> to support them. (Oh, and if you want a cold-water-in-the-face antidote to the &#8220;Twitter is changing the world&#8221; meme, try <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/blog\/jamais-cascio\/open-future\/twittering-revolution\">this<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>Generally speaking, I love when reviews of non-fiction books take on the entire sweeping area that the book being reviewed attacks, and attempt to place the book in a larger context as part of the review. Of those reviews I particularly love the ones that you can learn a lot from without ever actually reading the book in question. For instance, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/books\/review\/2009\/06\/16\/east_west_sex\/print.html\">Laura Miller&#8217;s review<\/a> of Richard Bernstein&#8217;s book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/East-West-Sex-History-Encounters\/dp\/0375414096\">The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters<\/a>. The book sounds like something that would be interesting to read, with occasional bouts of being frustrating, and I&#8217;ll probably get around to it at some point&#8211;if for no other reason than to use it as part of a program of mockery of one of my friends who has a definite pro-Asian bias in his female aesthetics. That&#8217;s not really relevant to the fact that I quite enjoyed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/books\/review\/2009\/06\/16\/east_west_sex\/print.html\">reading the review<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>In Alaska, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/picturegalleries\/howaboutthat\/5567963\/The-World-Beard-and-Moustache-Championships-2009-in-Anchorage-Alaska.html\">you make your own fun<\/a> on the long, cold winter nights, apparently. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.topatoco.com\/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&#038;Store_Code=TO&#038;Product_Code=WON-BEARDS&#038;Category_Code=WON\">For some reason<\/a> the pictures in that gallery make me think of <a href=\"http:\/\/wondermark.com\/\">Wondermark<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I wonder how many people know even the basics of US-Cuba relations that are laid out in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/doc\/20090629\/jelly-schapiro\/single\">the recent Nation article<\/a>. There were a few things in there that I hadn&#8217;t been aware of on the history side. I wonder about the progression of US-Cuban relations over the near term future. I&#8217;m inclined to be cautiously optimistic, but serious experts in Cuba (whom I&#8217;m related to by marriage) indicate that they don&#8217;t see much potential for any change in the near term.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s certainly a portion of the population<footnote>The &#8220;tinfoil hat&#8221; cypherpunk types. You know who you are.<\/footnote> for whom the received wisdom about the NSA is that they&#8217;re a scary-competent organization, who&#8217;ve recruited the best minds for a couple of generations, and who are probably a decade ahead of what&#8217;s public knowledge about cryptography and related fields of research. Certainly if you read something like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Puzzle-Palace-National-Intelligence-Organization\/dp\/0140067485\">Bamford&#8217;s Puzzle Palace<\/a>, you&#8217;re left with the impression of a very competent organization that was very good at its brief&#8230; at least up to the end of the time period the book covers. Given that, it&#8217;s very interesting to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.examiner.com\/x-13426-CIA-Examiner~y2009m6d10-NSA-illsuited-for-domestic-cybersecurity-role#fragment-2\">an article by a former CIA analyst<\/a> who challenges that with an utterly different message: that the agency is &#8220;a secretive, hidebound culture incapable of keeping up with innovation, or even working with industry&#8221;. That fits in with another set of my prejudices&#8211;about large organizations, agility, and competence&#8211;and thus pleases me. Especially the bits about the &#8220;spectacular failures&#8221; of the projects with the MBAesque codenames.<\/li>\n<li>You know how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technovelgy.com\/ct\/Technology-Article.asp?ArtNum=47\">passive RFID tags<\/a> work, right? You send a radio signal at them, and the signal powers up the chip, which can use that power to send a response. Pretty simple. Well, now we&#8217;ve got some people saying &#8220;hey, there&#8217;s a lot of radio waves around all the time in the air&#8211;why not design some tools to essentially do that same turn-it-to-energy trick and then use that continual harvesting of tiny bits of energy to charge a battery?&#8221; Or, in simpler terms: can we make cell phones that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/communications\/22764\/\">charge themselves out of thin air<\/a>? <\/li>\n<li>I am vaguely interested in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comicbookresources.com\/?page=article&#038;id=21693\">the Longbox project<\/a>. I mean I hate DRM as much as the next guy (unless the next guy is like Cory Doctorow or something), so I&#8217;m not particularly interested in trading my first-sale-doctrine-enabled, reusable, loanable, transportable, obsolescence-proof physical comics for a locked up digital file, but that might not matter. And it might not because the Longbox guys made the very smart decision to support existing non-DRM files, even though they will mostly represent pirate content. I would write at length about why this was a very smart idea if this weren&#8217;t a linkpost, but for the short version let me ask this: would anyone have become interested in iPods if they couldn&#8217;t play your existing MP3s? And how many of those were legitimate content? Q.E.D. Additionally, were the price correct, I could easily see myself doing more &#8220;taste testing&#8221; in the digital space for things I would eventually buy in a print collection&#8211;although I suspect my retailer might not be happy to hear me say so.<\/li>\n<li>I am already mildly disturbed at having had two non-trivial ant incursions into the house already this year. I don&#8217;t need to be worried about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/news\/technology\/science\/fire-ant-infestation-startles-nova-scotians\/article1191447\/\">migrating fire ants invading my territory<\/a>, than you very much.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a pretty reliable test for whether or not you&#8217;re a Canadian computer geek: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/technology\/story\/2009\/06\/18\/tech-090618-ibm-supercomputer-scinet-toronto.html\">read this<\/a>. Now, while you were reading that, did your pulse pick up? Face flush? Feel little thrill of adrenaline? You&#8217;re a big old computer geek<footnote>If any of those reactions occurred primarily in response to the machine working on the LHC calculations, then you might actually be a big old physics geek. Further testing would be required.<\/footnote>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/imgur.com\/gQouk.jpg\">It&#8217;s funny because it&#8217;s true.<\/a><\/li>\n<li>You know what might work even better than <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Buddy_Christ\">Buddy Christ<\/a> marketing to get people to go to church? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/newstopics\/religion\/5587035\/Church-blesses-fathers-with-beer.html\">Free beer<\/a>!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And, since you can&#8217;t really top religion making itself into an SNL commercial parody, that should probably do it for tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Let&#8217;s see if we can close some of the myriad tabs I&#8217;ve opened in the process of trying to catch up with everything that happened in the non-work world while I was off spending time at the Melbourne office: I&#8217;m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who managed to isolate plastic&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/22\/a-monday-night-gallimaufry\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[458,31,360,62,281,95,50,246,398,239,176,133,107,457,67,380,158,159,122,214],"class_list":["post-2627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkapalooza","tag-books","tag-comics","tag-computers","tag-cross-border","tag-cryptography","tag-cultural-differences","tag-deep-geekery","tag-drinking","tag-drm","tag-gadgets","tag-nova-scotia","tag-politics","tag-religion","tag-reviews","tag-science","tag-strange-but-true","tag-the-masses","tag-thinking","tag-usa","tag-youth","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-Gn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2627"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2636,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions\/2636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}