Stephenson Short Story

Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, Im not a paranoid schizophrenic - this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes in an amber fluid.
The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the edge of the infomercial window. "Hey!" it says, in a goofy, exuberant voice, "Im Raster! Just speak my name - thats Raster - if you need any help."
I dont like Rasters looks. Its likely he was wandering the streets of Toontown and waving a sign saying WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD until he was hired by the cable company. He begins flying around the screen, leaving a trail of glowing fairy dust that fades much too slowly for my taste.
"Give me the damn encyclopedia!" I shout. Hearing the dread word, my nephews erupt from the rug and flee.
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Outlaws/SimoleonCaper.html

Cool: The Integral Fast Reactor

1) is cheaper to build and cheaper to operate than water reactors.
2) is passively safe. It uses a metallic fuel that expands when it overheats, causing the volume to increase which decreases the neutron density to the point where the reaction is shut down by the laws of nature without operator intervention! Loss of coolant poses no threat because the thermal currents of the liquid sodium are sufficient to stabilize the reactor.
3) can be operated in a mode where it uses as its fuel the spent fuel of the water reactors. By far the most lethal nuclear waste on the planet is the spent fuel which is produced in the United States at the rate of 6 tons a day. Currently our government policy is to store this waste for 30,000 years (Yucca Mountain). Electric rate payers are assessed one mill per kilowatt hour of power produced by nuclear reactors to deal with nothing but these spent fuel rods --- to the tune of more than $800 million per year!
http://www.dcia.com/ifr.html

More Ice On Mars

The Martian north pole is honeycombed with frozen water, exceeding the ice deposits detected on Mars southern end and raising hopes of finding traces of past microscopic life, astronomers reported on Thursday. The northern ice lies just below the Red Planets surface, according to Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, part of a team of U.S. and Russian scientists who made the discovery.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20030626/sc_nm/space_mars_dc&e=2&ncid=753

Cool Pic Of Phobos

http://www.rednova.com/news/images/1/2003/06/25/phobos_6big_mgs.jpg

Interview With Designer Tim Brown

The way I think of it, technology travels curves. You can think of the steep part of the curve as the technology push stage, when new technology is changing very fast. And what accelerates that curve are issues of usability and accessibility?that is, having to get people to understand what the technology can do and figure out a way to fit it into their lives. Later on, as the technology change curve starts to flatten out, then users need a different way of differentiating the technologies. A good example is the personal computer: technology does not differentiate PCs these days. The only place you get any differentiation is when somebody recognizes a new need that a PC can address. Thats the role of what we call human factors?the fit of technology to individuals and groups of people.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_brown062503.asp?p=0

Black Holes And Stellar Births

They are the most efficient engines of destruction known to humanity. Their intense gravity is a one-way ticket to oblivion for anything that strays too close; inside them is undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. We see them only because the victims do not go quietly to their doom. Material spiraling into a black hole can heat up to millions of degrees and glow brightly. Some of its kinetic energy and momentum may be transferred to a jet of particles flowing outward at close to the speed of light. Black holes of varying sizes take the rap for fusillades of radiation and plasma that astronomers observe all over the cosmos.
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0004567B-11FB-1EDD-8E1C809EC588EF21

Wired Interviews StrongBad Creators

Every Monday morning, a bare-chested Flash cartoon creature with an indeterminate accent, a potbelly and a Mexican wrestling mask entertains almost 300,000 people with antics like composing an impromptu techno song. Not everyone gets it, but enough people flock to Mike and Matt Chapmans HomestarRunner website that its stars, Strong Bad, Homestar, Marzipan and The Cheat are gaining cult status with pre-teens, the Gen-X crowd and everyone in between. To boot, the Atlanta-based brothers have made a tidy business selling T-shirts featuring their creations. Wired News interviewed the twenty-something Chapman brothers, with contributor Melissa Palmer, who is the voice of Marzipan. Here is an excerpt from the interview.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59261,00.html

The Genome Changes Everything

For the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe, or is in the process of reading its own recipe. That seems to me to be an epochal moment, because were going to get depths of insight into the nature of human nature that we never could have imagined, and that will dwarf anything that philosophers and indeed scientists have managed to produce in the last two millennia. Thats not to denigrate whats gone before, but the genome changes everything. We know that just because the first one or two glimpses inside this box, the first lifting of the lid of the human genome, reveals to us enormous insights into whats going on, and just from the first few genes were looking at.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p2.html

The Aesthetic Imperative

Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that few manufacturers can survive on performance and price alone. To produce value, they must give customers something to please their sensory side. Aesthetics is the killer app.
Public policy professor Richard Florida recalls serving on a Pennsylvania economic development advisory panel. "At one of our meetings," he notes in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, "the states Secretary of Labor and Industry, a big burly man, banged his fist on the table in frustration. Our workforce is out of balance, he steamed. Were turning out too many hairdressers and cosmetologists, and not enough skilled factory workers like welders and machine-tool operators."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/view.html?pg=1

Wormholes A Bit Easier

They key to exotic matter lies in quantum fluctuations, which give empty space a kind of fizziness. Quantum theory says that subatomic particles and their corresponding antiparticles are continually popping in and out of existence in the vacuum of empty space. Exotic matter might arise by suppressing this fizz, or as a physicist would say, by violating the averaged null energy condition (ANEC).
If this were to happen, quantum effects could give rise to tiny amounts of exotic matter. But how much is needed to sustain a wormhole?
That is what Visser and colleagues have now calculated. They find that, if the wormhole is designed carefully, "the total quantity of ANEC-violating matter can be made infinitesimally small". This makes a wormhole considerably easier to create.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030527/030527-12.html

How To Build A Time Machine

...Thorne and his colleagues realized that if a stable wormhole could be created, then it could readily be turned into a time machine. An astronaut who passed through one might come out not only somewhere else in the universe but somewhen else, too--in either the future or the past.
To adapt the wormhole for time travel, one of its mouths could be towed to a neutron star and placed close to its surface. The gravity of the star would slow time near that wormhole mouth, so that a time difference between the ends of the wormhole would gradually accumulate. If both mouths were then parked at a convenient place in space, this time difference would remain frozen in.
Suppose the difference were 10 years. An astronaut passing through the wormhole in one direction would jump 10 years into the future, whereas an astronaut passing in the other direction would jump 10 years into the past. By returning to his starting point at high speed across ordinary space, the second astronaut might get back home before he left. In other words, a closed loop in space could become a loop in time as well. The one restriction is that the astronaut could not return to a time before the wormhole was first built.
A formidable problem that stands in the way of making a wormhole time machine is the creation of the wormhole in the first place. Possibly space is threaded with such structures naturally--relics of the big bang. If so, a supercivilization might commandeer one. Alternatively, wormholes might naturally come into existence on tiny scales, the so-called Planck length, about 20 factors of 10 as small as an atomic nucleus. In principle, such a minute wormhole could be stabilized by a pulse of energy and then somehow inflated to usable dimensions.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0004226A-F77D-1D4A-90FB809EC5880000

No WMD Spells Big Problems in Britain

Saddams elusive weapons of mass destruction seem to be causing more destruction in Britains corridors of power than in Iraq. The failure to find WMD in postwar Iraq has led to a shouting match among the British elite, with leaks, claims and counter-claims about the reliability of the pre-war evidence.
John Reid, leader of the House of Commons, says rogue elements in the intelligence services are questioning the evidence in order to undermine the government. Cabinet ministers accuse shadowy spies of skulduggery. Over 50 New Labour MPs signed a Commons motion demanding an inquiry into British intelligence, causing one loyal Blair official to say, They must really hate us....
Now, both the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee and the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee have launched investigations into the pre-war evidence.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DDE3.htm

Margret Atwood -- George Orwells Possible Outlook On 911

The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwells Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won - from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we would have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.
But with 9/11, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturers dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina - all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it - their ways of silencing troublesome dissent.
Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things - openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia were promised - dystopia must first hold sway.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,978474,00.html

Good Matrix Parody

http://www.detonate.net/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=4

The MP3 Economy

The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apples (AAPL) iTunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales havent changed much since the vinyl era -- despite the fact that digital files cost very little to produce and distribute. So how much of your buck makes its way back to the artists? Not much, though its clearly a better deal than they get from piracy.
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,49472,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail76.html

/. Thread On Quitting Your Job

Some good points in here, dont agree with the most extreme of them, but having been in bad situations it can be enlightening.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/05/0641208&mode=thread&tid=187

Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness

I dont think that Poindexters nutty scheme has much real-world traction. I think the questions badly formulated, really. I dont think theres much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere. A security cam is one small part of a much larger universe of cams. The much larger effect, socially, politically and economically, is going to come from a much larger trend. I noticed that people are doing a lot of "googling" before a first date nowadays--this represents the real trend. Poindexters doing this and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) allowed him to do it for the propaganda that someones serious about cyberwar someplace. Googling is international. Its not just restricted to cranky Republicans who couldnt erase e-mail in their PROFS (Professional Office System). Thats going to have more of an effect. Its difficult to escape a tragedy in your life thats not your own fault. Years ago, if your husband died in a house fire, you could get a covered wagon and go to Oregon. Now, as soon as you arrive in Oregon, someone could google you. "Oh, well, widow Simpson. Really sorry to hear about the house fire." You dont get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. Youre always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.
http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105_2-1013033.html?tag=printthis

A Working Force Field?

A plasma valve, a device that uses electrically charged particles to act as a barrier between air and vacuum, has been invented by a Brookhaven-Argonne collaboration. These two DOE labs joined forces to provide a needed component for Argonnes Advanced Photon Source and similar facilities worldwide. Inside the walls of accelerators, synchrotrons and storage rings, a good vacuum--empty space mostly devoid of matter--enables particle beams to travel unimpeded for hours. However, if a leak causes air to rush into the vacuum, the particle beam spreads out and deposits its energy onto surrounding walls, disrupting the beam and damaging valuable equipment. The faster the leak can be closed, the less damage will be done to the walls. The plasma valve, which has no moving parts, can activate in a nanosecond, a million times faster than mechanical valves. To keep air from rushing in, the Brookhaven-Argonne team create a dense, high-temperature plasma (collection of charged particles) held together by electric and magnetic fields. Housed inside a hollow copper cylinder, the plasma reaches a temperature of 15,000 degrees Kelvin (about 50 times greater than room temperature)--making the plasma particles bounce around so vigorously that they collide with air molecules and prevent them from passing into the vacuum. Moreover, the valves confining electromagnetic fields prevent the plasma itself from rushing into the vacuum.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2003/split/640-2.html

Apple II Is 26 Years Old Today

This was the first PC I ever wrote code on. I was in grade seven, and I wrote a basic program that showed a Saturn V rocket launching in wonderful low-rez 4 color graphics.
It rocked.
http://apple2history.org/history/ah03.html

Mars Express Launches Today

The missions main objective is to search for sub-surface water from orbit and drop a lander on the Martian surface. Seven scientific instruments onboard the orbiting spacecraft will perform a series of remote sensing experiments designed to shed new light on the Martian atmosphere, the planets structure and geology. The lander, called Beagle 2 after the ship in which Charles Darwin set sail to explore uncharted areas of the Earth in 1831, is an exciting opportunity for Europe to contribute to the search for life on Mars. After coming to rest on the surface, Beagle 2 will perform exobiology and geochemistry research. As well as its science objectives, Mars Express will also provide relay communication services between the Earth and landers deployed on the surface by other nations, thus forming a centre piece of the international effort in Mars exploration.
http://sci.esa.int/marsexpress/