The Big Necessity

This is an important book describing what the catastrophic lack of simple tech means to 2.6 billion people.

"The disease toll of this is stunning. Eighty percent of the world's illness is caused by fecal matter. A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. Bacteria can be beneficial: the human body needs bacteria to function, and only 10 percent of cells in our body are actually human. Plenty are not. Small fecal particles can then contaminate water, food, cutlery, and shoes—and be ingested, drunk, or unwittingly eaten. One sanitation specialist has estimated that people who live in areas with inadequate sanitation ingest 10 grams of fecal matter every day.

Diarrhea—usually caused by feces-contaminated food or water—kills a child every fifteen seconds. That means more people dead of diarrhea than all the people killed in conflict since the Second World War. Diarrhea, says the UN children's agency UNICEF, is the largest hurdle a small child in a developing country has to overcome. Larger than AIDS, or TB, or malaria. 2.2 million people—mostly children—die from an affliction that to most westerners is the result of bad takeout. Public health professionals talk about water-related diseases, but that is a euphemism for the truth. These are shit-related diseases."

The world should not be this way.

The Memex

"The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

Sounds like the web doesn't it? Taken from the seminal article As We May Think, Vannevar Bush created the notion of hypertext and connectivity 50 years before the web was invented.

IMHO, Einstein's peer in every sense of the word.

Head Bangers Unite

"The authors found that there is an increasing risk of neck injury beginning at tempos of 130 beats per minute related to the range of motion in the head banging style.

The average head banging song has a tempo of about 146 beats per minute. The authors suggest that at this tempo head banging may cause headaches and dizziness if the range of movement of the head and neck is more than 75º. They report that at higher tempos and greater ranges of motion there is an additional risk of neck injury.

So could someone render themselves unconscious while head banging? Unlikely, say the authors, unless they are banging their head on the stage or connect with someone else's head.

And what of two of the most famous head bangers, Beavis and Butt-head? When head banging at a tempo of 164 beats per minute to "I Wanna be Sedated" the range of motion of Beavis' head and neck is about 45º, say the authors, so he would be unlikely to sustain any injury. But the news for Butt-head may not be so rosy. Preferring to head bang at a range of motion of 75º, he may well experience symptoms of headaches and dizziness."

For your listening pleasure, here is I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones.

Don't Get Spore! :)

Don't get Spore, it's a time killer to the max. I NEVER play video games but Spore is different. The hard part is impressing other species to gain allies in order to advance. Very tricky stuff here to be sure. The cute little darling above is Leopardswarm, a fast, strong predator with smarts. He "aint" too pretty or smart, for that matter, but he does survive.

Addendum: Leopardswarm has advanced to tribal status :)

ED & Then Some

"The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills."

You CANNOT make this up. :)

Chaos Incarnate

Absolutely terrific post from the NY Times on Chaos & Cancer...

"A striking feature of many cancer cells is that the DNA in their chromosomes is all jumbled up. Chunks of DNA containing one or more genes have been ripped out of their chromosome and reinserted in a different place. Other lengths of DNA have been transferred to a different chromosome altogether."

"One of the rearrangements disrupts a gene called RAD51C which is involved in mending serious chromosome breaks, those in which both strands in the DNA are disrupted. The impairment of double strand break repair could be a major cause of all the other rearrangements, the researchers suggest."

Smoke & Mirrors

When I look at this Dilbert, I realized this one, in a very indirect but telling way, shows how profound the disconnect is when people try to explain just what money is and how it's used in today's world. Like the disjointed conversation in this Dilbert, the cognitive dissonance on this fascinating subject resembles the one on obscenity whereby the definition never seems to fit but the old "I know it when I see it." rant applies whenever a politician tries to invoke censorship to gain more political power by "protecting the innocent" from this most dreadful plague on society. As per obscenity, the slipperiness of definition applies to money as well because what it is (and how it's used) depends on the party or parties who interact with this most mysterious of items.

"Money is anything which is accepted as a medium of exchange and it can be classified into the following terms:

1. Barter (Pre-Money)
2. Commodity Money (medium of exchange/food/metal et. al. )
   'Metal is a storehouse and a measure of value.'
   
3. Receipt Money (forerunner of checks - a written receipt that enables the owner of deposited coins in a vault to withdraw the coins at any time.)
   
4. Fiat Money (paper money decreed legal tender, not backed by gold or silver. 'US money is fiat money')
   
5. Fractional Money...is paper money which is backed by up to only a portion of the face amount. (see fractional investment banking to learn more.)
   LAW: Fractional money will always degenerate into fiat money. It is but fiat money in transition."
   

To learn more, read The Creature from Jekyll Island or view the author's interview below.



To get more information about $, type Fed in the BRT search box and hit Search. The end result will amaze you.

Addendum: "While technically and legally the Federal Reserve note is an obligation of the United States Government, in reality it is an obligation, the sole actual responsibility for which rests on the reserve banks...The government could only be called upon to take them up after the reserve banks had failed." - Paul Warburg (A Founding father of the Fed)

In other words: The Federal Resrve notes constitute privately issued money with the taxpayers standing by to cover the potential losses of the banks which issue it.

Quality

I was helping out a good friend in setting up his brand new iMac, a process I have done several times before for Apple systems I have had over the years and noticed, once again, what attention to detail really means. From carrying the box to configuring the system, I was continually struck by how nuanced the Apple product truly is. The box opened with ease, the protective plastic bag, designed to keep scratches at bay, had a nice feel and the tape holding the keyboard and mouse together during it's trip to the customer released it's grip without the need of scissors. The machine itself had enough heft to it that bespoke of good materials used in the building of the product and when booted up and linked to the web, it simply worked.

The guts of the machine are the same as any decent Windows box (I use Windows as well as Macs in my real job.) but the experience of setting up an Apple computer always strikes me as being different, which translates to quality, a concept well addressed by Robert M. Pirsig, a writer I have long admired as being one of the few who really knows how do this most difficult craft with elegance and grace.


His first book, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, instructs one to see quality as an undefinable essence that just "is" as life is just "is" when viewed through the prism of Zen.

In Lila, this attempt to define quality (and to experience it) becomes the central locus of the book because wasting one's time on anything less is not acceptable as one moves toward old age.

"And what is good, Phædrus,
And what is not good...
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

Polysyllabic

IMHO, Orwell would have loved Dilbert...

"5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. "

Or to quote Catbert... "Does any of that mean the same as firing idiots and cutting the budget?"

I can hear George laughing at this one. I know I am.

Visualization 101

Seeing how the quantum world works is the ultimate in frustration as subatomic particles do things that "don't make sense" in relation to the "calm" classic world in which we live, until now.

"For the first time, a detailed description on the making of Sanders’ animation—Solid State Quantum Computer in Silicon—was published this month in the New Journal of Physics. This issue is devoted to the leading uses of visualization in astrophysics, biophysics, geophysics, medical physics and quantum physics and Sanders is one the guest editors for this issue."

To see the clips, click here. (Note, These are Quicktime files. To download the Apple free QT player, click here.

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.” - Sir Arthur Eddington

To see more of the great invisible, click here.

See what I mean?