Ah, Donald Rumsfeld... Secretary of Defense, coddler of dictators , and master of many arcane forms of martial arts. Truly a man for all seasons.

Half a year (or so) ago I decided to get serious about livening up my Wetmachine website. Wetmachine had been around since October 1999, but I had only updated it a few times. I wanted to transform it into a site that people would come back to. A blog of some kind was clearly in order.

Knowing that it would be a drag, not to mention probably impossible, to singlehandedly make Wetmachine sufficiently compelling to warrant return visits, I invited some friends to play along. About three months ago we made the switch to blog format. Read on for some brief musings on the experiment so far. [Read More!]

Most folks have yet to hear of RFID, or radio frequency ID tags. As explained in this article in The Nation, RFID opens a host of interesting issues. [Read More!]

An article in the Washington Post provides a general overview of nanotech. The one interesting fact that caught me eye: nanotech companies and researchers are hiring sociologists, philosophers, and ethicists, in attempt to get ahead of the curve on public opinion. [Read More!]

For those of you haven't followed, Bush and the Republican leadership fought off an broad attempt by Congress to roll back the national television ownership cap to 35%. The compromise was to freeze the limit at 39%, which means that Viacom (parent of CBS) and News Corp. (parent of Fox) don't have to sell off any stations. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) says that CBS has paid the administration back for this favor by refusing to sell time to an anti-bush ad on the Superbowl.
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I was touched by this story in today's Boston Globe.

I liked the human crafstmanship in the telling, and deeply moved by the dramatic yet universal tale of the failure to live up to our potential.

So I gave it to my 11 year old daughter to read. I asked her why she thought I wanted her to read it. “So I won't take drugs. Duh.”

I said, “something like that, but there's something else....” But she had already left the room, singing Avril Lavigne.

Fileswapping is in the New York Times today. The RIAA gears up for more lawsuits while some bands try to actually serve their fans and make a buck. Wow! [Read More!]

Or, so says The Onion, in any event.

“The more we thought about it, the less we were able to laugh off the threat of killer machines,” said Dr. Henry K. Arronovski, a leading expert in the field of heuristics classification. “It really started to freak us out. What if, decades from now, humans end up in a virtual-reality construct designed to blind them to their enslavement to the hivemind—all because of the work my colleagues and I started?”


Added Arronovski: “I want no hand in creating a world where only Keanu Reeves can protect my great-grandchildren from a giant drill that plummets through the ceilings of subterranean cave dwellings.”

As a true technoparanoaic, I guess I wish there were more truth to the story. . .

just a brief coda on my predictions for file swapping. According to The Washington Post, fileswapping is up again in October and November after declining steadily from June to September. I note that coincides somewhat with the college year, if new students get oriented in August/Sept., get a taste of broadband, and start fileswapping. that last is just speculatiuon on my part.

Stay tuned . . . .

I’ve heard people wonder about what sort of artificial intelligence or biological system is involved in google. Web searches are really quite mechanical. Here’s an overview of what really goes on within Google.

(If you like this sort of thing, see my backgrounder on Baysian Filtering of Spam. [Read More!]