antikoan

 |::| Thursday, April 18, 2002

 |::| Text rendering glitches in mail-to-weblog (big surprise)  3:43:01 PM 

There are definitely some interesting text-string translation things going on with mail-to-weblog, that I haven't seen documented anywhere. This test case goes a ways toward delimiting some of them.

I first noticed the problem realizing that Radio had munged all my Google URLs in a very specific way. Now I realize that it's a text-translation issue, and escaping the offending text doesn't seem to help. Very very strange. Will have to spend some time this weekend doping it out, and may move this entry to a story in the process.

http ://www.google.com/search
?as_epq=bohemian+grove
&as_q=
&num0
&hl=en&

http : //www.google.com/search?
as_epq=bohemian+grove&
as_q=&
num0&
hl=en&

http ://www.google.com/search
?as_epq=bohemian+grove
&as_q=
&num0
&hl=en&

http://www.google.com/search?
as_epq=bohemian+grove&
as_q=&
num0&
hl=en&

http : //www.google.com/search?as_epq=bohemian+grove&as_q=&num0&hl=en&
http : //www.google.com/search?as_epq=bohemian+grove&as_q=&num0&hl=en&

And now, the same links with different inner content:

Escaped "\\="
Not-escaped "\\="

 |::| Resurfacing the Bohemnian Grove  2:11:36 PM 

MeFi today shows a story on a character who busted into the Bohemian Grove in a strange get-up. Too bad he was a wing-nut; or was he? Maybe the psycho bit is a ploy to escape prosecution. Maybe the whole thing was just a ploy to get them into the news....

 |::| That Darn Oxfam Report...  10:17:37 AM 

I listened to the story [real audio] on NPR this morning on my way in. It does indeed sound to me as though they're arguing for radical free-trade: Make the rules the same for everyone. No protections. No unnatural barriers.

Except - and this is the part that nobody, nobody seems to get -- none of the barriers are unnatural. Nations competing with one another is natural. It happened naturally. It wasn't created by magic.One aspect of that competition is trying to limit the extent to which others can compete. If you think you can stop it, because you don't like the results -- fine. Please do try. It won't work, but the fact that you tried will change things. Though exactly how, I couldn't guess...

Oxfam story on MeFi
MeFi disc thread
MeFi disc

 |::| The Real Question Is, "How Do I Forget It?"  9:47:06 AM 

David Thompson, now retired from IBM, offers a more personal vision of the disk drive as video appurtenance. With cameras mounted on eyeglass frames, he suggests, we can document every moment of our lives and create a second-by-second digital diary. "There won’t be any reason ever to forget anything anymore," he says. Vannevar Bush had a similar idea 50 years ago, though in that era the promising storage medium was microfilm rather than magnetic disks.

And this is, of course, why we have memories and not terabyte disk drives.

....
Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: The products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can’t keep up.

And this is, of course, one of the biggest reasons why we edit our memories as extensively as we do: The human imagination can't keep up.

Which leads to the really interesting point: This is the first time we're seriously considering mass storage that exceeds the apparent capacity of the human brain. With this volume of data, we may be forced once an dfor all to really understand the nature of human memory and sensory experience. Either that, or we may once and for all abandon the quest to understand it.

MeFi thread
"Terabyte Territory", by Brian Hughes (American Scientist, May-June 2002)

 |::| "You mean the tanks aren't part of the show?"  8:15:37 AM 

Well, it's a cheap shot, but these folks make Americans seem positively libertine... (Thanks to MeFi.)