Good Industrial & Electronica Stream

Digital Gunfire is an industrial, ebm, synthpop (and all the other genres, subgenres and wannabe genres) Internet radio station. Its run at 128k quality (which requires approximately 16KBps download speed) through a Shoutcast server.
http://www.digitalgunfire.com

Biosoldiers

The researchers also try to hide behind grandiose-sounding claims of working to the greater good as a way to fool the public, and possibly themselves, into believing that these projects really do have some benign reasons for being, if only to promote the cause of science. That is why nearly every program in the conference guide comes with a suggested benign use (my own flippant phrase). After all, whines Rudolph, todays soldiers brain chip may be tomorrows brain damage therapy. We should be impressed? After all, the same argument was used by Hitlers researchers to justify their heartless medical experiments on Jews, gypsies, retarded children, enemy soldiers, prisoners, et al.). What is truly chilling is that these technologies, in essence, are seeking to turn our soldiers into human fighting machines, sacrificing their autonomy and, very likely, long-term quality of life for short term military savings -savings that will go right into the pockets of the governments beloved defense contractors. There is no way these technologies can be benign -the whole concept is totally against what America stands for and against any other reasonable code of ethics, for that matter. In addition, with the way they are being rushed through the research gamut, there is no way they can be proven safe, especially long-term. I can just imagine the residual tissue damage, cancers, post-traumatic stress disorders, etc, that DARPA-style human enhancement will inflict on our guys and gals in uniform. Remember Agent Orange? Remember aboveground nuke testing? Remember submarine sailors being gassed as a DARPA experiment, or those soldiers, most of them black or Hispanic, fed LSD? As it is, more than half of all Gulf War vets have now filed for disability because of the devastating effects of Gulf War Syndrome.
http://www.newsinsider.org/seal/frankensteins_in_the_pentagon.html

Current Game: Silent Hill 3

... kicks ass. Im about 2 hrs into the game and it rocks.Its not about the puzzles, playability, anything like that.The ambience of the game is nothing like Ive ever seen.Graphics are amazing. Not in a startlingly clear, well-rendered way, but in a gritty, messy way. Everything casts dynamic shadows (the game is very dark and you have a very small flashlight).But what gets you is the sound. I can only play the game for about an hour -- the game gets you after a while. Not in an annoying way, you become very anxious and jumpy. Its freaky. You have to play it on a big screen with surround sound in the dark to understand it.You know that feeling when you first watched blair witch? At the end?The whole game so far is like that.
http://www.konami.com/silenthill3/

Wired AI Article

A new type of thinking machine that could completely change how people interact with computers is being developed at the Department of Energys Sandia National Laboratories. Over the past five years, a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been working on creating intelligent machines: computers that can accurately infer intent, remember prior experiences with users, and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze problems and make decisions. Forsythes team was originally trying to create a "synthetic human" -- software capable of thinking like a person -- for use in national defense.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60153,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail82.html

Interview With Neal Stephenson

The heroes in your books are often hackers. Did you see the roots of that mentality in Newton and his contemporaries in the Royal Society?
Yeah. Something happened where a bunch of these people found each other, and they just seemed to do everything within 20 or 30 years. They did it all. It must have been a remarkable time to be alive. If you have a scientific or hackerish personality, I cant imagine anything better than being there for one of those Royal Society meetings.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/history.html

Growing Fiber Optics

Scientists say they have identified an ocean sponge living in the darkness of the deep sea that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication.The natural glass fibers also are much more flexible than manufactured fiber optic cable that can crack if bent too far.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030820_1203.html

Copying Music Legal In Canada

The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003. While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada.
http://techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-081803C

Meta-Hacking

Is that too big? No. We cannot think in those terms anymore. Like it or not, hacking has changed. We have to think big. Hacking is not just about seeing the limits of a computer system, or even the limits of the political world that has risen up around the modern-day hacker. Hacking is about understanding the system, the complete system. You must hack yourself. Not the digital self, because there is truly no division anymore. We are plugged in, and there aint no going back. We *have* to hack ourselves. Not just the surface tension that is wrapped in a nym, but the core of your hacker self. Explore mental ring zero. Live to hack, and hack to live.This is the future of meta-hacking, not just controlling the operating system, but controlling and influencing what the operators of that system do -- whether those operators do what they do for good or ill, and whether that system is a computer, a political set of ideals, or your own thought processes.This is why we are pursued through cyberspace by USA Patriot and the other horses of the digital apocalypse. It is our potential. If we turned our hacking skills from the systems we have root on to the data stored on those systems *and what that data represents*, we could possibly discover where that 10% is really at.
http://www.nmrc.org/pub/report/sn-dc-2003.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail81.html

Current Read: The Salmon of Doubt

This is of course, not a stand-alone work of fiction. It is instead a collection of works, from the unfinished Dirk Gently novel "Salmon of Doubt" to Douglass many columns and letters. You get a much better perspective on who he is, how he thinks and what he finds important than you could get from his fiction. I laughed my way through this book but from time to time I stopped, stricken by great sadness that Douglas is dead now. It sounds excessive but I really do see him as one of the Great Minds of history. I respect him, his viewpoints and his work.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400045088/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/104-7741374-0914311?v=glance&s=books&vi=customer-reviews

Synthetic Diamonds

Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making near-flawless diamonds and plans to begin marketing them by years end. This sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the publics perception of diamonds - and to transform the $7 billion industry. More intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based semiconductors.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

Quantum Logic Gates

Although qubits have been made with trapped photons, atoms and ions, it is generally thought that it should be easier to build working devices with solid-state systems. Several teams have made significant progress with the superconducting approach to solid-state quantum computing. Now Steel and co-workers at Michigan, Michigan State, the Naval Research Laboratory and the University of California at San Diego have demonstrated the first all-optical quantum gate in a semiconductor quantum dot. Steel and co-workers grew a thin gallium arsenide layer 4.2 nm thick between two 25 nm aluminium gallium arsenide barriers to make a quantum dot. Electrons are trapped in the dot because the gallium arsenide layer has a smaller energy band-gap than the surrounding material. When excited by light, electrons from the valence band in the dot move to higher energy levels. The excited electron and the hole it leaves behind combine to form an exciton. The system has four states: a ground state containing two unexcited electrons; two states containing one exciton; and a state containing two excitons (see figure). The two single-exciton states can be distinguished from each other because the excitons have different polarizations.
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/8/5

Turn Off The Lights

A century and a quarter later, electric light turns night into day around the globe. In the first world atlas of artificial night-sky brightness, released in 2001 by the Italian astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano and based on high-resolution satellite data, the heavily developed urban corridors of Japan, Western Europe, and the United States blaze like amusement parks. We flood the heavens with so much artificial light that nearly two-thirds of the worlds people can no longer see the Milky Way. On a clear, dark night far from light-polluted skies, roughly 2,500 celestial points of light can be discerned by the naked eye. For people living in the suburbs of New York, that number dwindles to 250; residents of Manhattan are lucky to see 15. Moreover, as the stars fade from view, a growing body of research suggests that excessive exposure to artificial night light can alter basic biological rhythms in animals, change predator-prey relationships, and even trigger deadly hormonal imbalances in humans.
http://www.discover.com/July_03/featlights.html

Understanding Time

According to both ancient and present day physics, objects in motion have determined relative positions. Indeed, the physics of motion from Zeno to Newton and through to today take this assumption as given. Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. "Theres no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. Its something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, its the outcome of brain function and consciousness."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/icc-gwi072703.php

Dumb Intelligence, Dumber Strategy

The main problem with the doctrine is that it demands absolutes. Bush is notorious for reflecting a simple black-and-white worldview in his speeches and public pronouncements. The world contains good guys and bad guys, us and them. The bad guys might be states or they might be non-state actors, but they all have one thing in common: they threaten our interests and mean us harm. They must therefore be dealt with mercilessly before they have the chance to strike. Yet if there is one thing we have learned from the Iraq conflict, it is that intelligence is rarely black and white. Instead it expresses shades of grey, percentages and probability over which careful judgements must be made. Very often, intelligence will prove nothing, and smoking guns are a rather rare phenomena. But to convince a sceptical media and voters that a pre-emptive strike is justified, the case must be proved - and it must be done in advance, before any evidence can actually be gathered.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000006DEAB.htm

New Battlestar Series Sucks

The original 1970s series debuted on the heels of Star Wars, but lasted only one season. Despite adding up to only 24 hours of show time and a disastrous 80s remake, its fan base exploded when the original went into international syndication. Decades of reruns spawned fans diverse in age, geography and demographics -- but largely united in reaction to the forthcoming miniseries.
They hate it.
"Its a travesty," said Shawn ODonnell, co-host of the Battlestar Galactica Fan Club. The 30-something California resident became a fan in 1979, then contacted original series star Richard Hatch (Capt. Apollo) two decades later to ask for the actors virtual blessing on the clubs newly created website.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59906,00.html

Dracucell

A device that produces electricity from blood could be used to turn people into "human batteries". Researchers in Japan are developing a method of drawing power from blood glucose, mimicking the way the body generates energy from food. Theoretically, it could allow a person to pump out 100 watts - enough to illuminate a light bulb. But that would entail converting all the food eaten by the individual into electricity. In practice, less power would be generated since food is needed by the body.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/03/1059849278131.html

Canada To Join 2007 Mars Mission

NASA announced today that the Scout Mission"Phoenix," that includes a sophisticated instrumentation package developed bya team of Canadian scientists and engineers, has been selected to go to Marsin 2007. The focus of the Canadian team will be on studies of the Martianatmosphere using laser radar (lidar) technology. Researchers from YorkUniversity, headed by Dr. Allan Carswell, Professor Emeritus at York andChairman of Optech Incorporated, will lead the Canadian scientificinvestigations in collaboration with scientists from several other Canadianuniversities.
http://www.newswire.ca/releases/August2003/04/c7798.html