Evidently Disney wants to prevent distribution of Michael Moore's film Farenheit 911, which is about Bush family ties to Saudi families, including, Ooops!, the Bin Ladins.

I expect that as this little imbroglio develops we may see a Sausage Factory story or two from Harold about it. In the meantime, I invite you to contemplate the irony of this film's title — with its echoes of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, about the necessity of government censorship to keep people from being confused by the truth.

Nature magazine has an article on the first secure money transfer using entangled protons for quantum cryptography.

In last week's trial, the entangled photons were created in a branch of the Bank of Austria in Vienna. One was sent to the city hall through a 1,450-metre-long fibreglass cable. The transfer took 90 seconds to complete; the money was then donated to Zeilinger's lab.

That's scary-cool.

I spend a lot of time reading weblogs.

I read TalkingPointsMemo and a dozen other lefty news blogs. I read about Bush and I read about Iraq. And I worry myself sick because just about everything I read tends to confirm my sense that (in the immortal words of an R. Crumb character that I'll track down one of these days) “the whole fucking planet is turning to shit.” But I enjoy those blogs because they have personality.

Over the last few weeks I've checked wetmachine a few times just to see what was up, and nothing much was. And I remember thinking: Damn, what's up with this site? Why is it so dull? Where is wetmachine's personality? [Read More!]

I keep trying to get myself ready for the future, and I keep failing.

On the other hand things like this used to scare me to death, and now they only give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. So I guess that's “progress”?

Or not?

It really isn't. Try it.

''Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.''

Ted Kaczynsky, aka The UnAbomber, who was arrested on this date in 1996.

Happy birthday, Nick.

As fate would have it, another inpsiration had a child exactly two years later: Paris Michael Katherine Jackson

P.J. Harvey is cool.

Hi, it's Gary, the guy who maintains the drunken machinery[1] here at Wetmachine.

John has asked me to install a Soundblox MP3 player on Wetmachine for your listening pleasure (don't panic, it won't start playing automatically, and it's a lot better than those cheesy MIDI tunes of yesteryear).

But we need music to play! [Read More!]

It isn't as scary as Kurt Vonnegut's imaginary ice-9, a form of solid water stable at ambient temperatures, but it's just as wierd. According the the recent edition of Nature Science Updates, a fifth form of carbon has been created. Unlike the known forms - graphite, diamond, buckminsterfullerenes, and nanotubes - the new form is described as a nanofoam. The really interesting thing is that it's magnetic.

I often describe myself as a technoparanoaic, or a technoskeptic, or a neoluddite, or whatever. I've used an excerpt from the Unabomber Manifesto as epigrams to my books, and I've called my Acts of the Apostles “Bill Joy's Why the Future Doesn't Need Us in convenient thriller format, with fewer pictures and more sex and car chases.” But although I might use a Kaczynski quotation in order to be provacative, and although I obsess on dystopian visions of the future, I really don't have a consistent point of view.

To read somebody who does have a consistent point of view, see Netfuture:Technology and Human Responsibility, the occasional newsletter put out by Steve Talbott.

I don't always agree with everything Steve says (although I usually agree with most of it), and once in a while his writing style gets a little floral for my taste. But he is a wise man and a thoughtful writer. I highly recommend him. [Read More!]