August 2007
July 2007
“When you get down to 22-nanometers, you have 220 Angstroms. If you figure the...”
– Rick Hill, president and CEO of Novellus in a post to Semiconductor International.
The most dangerous metaphor - Moore's Law →
The expectation that technology will push efficiency at double speed gives false hope that it can cure all problems. That hope will be diffcult to sustain when the improvement of micro-processors hits the wall.
Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys →
Our methods of maximizing the yield of goods from natural systems worships the god of efficency at the expense of the resiliance needed to recover from inevitable unexpected disasters like the current collapse of bee colonies.
Rejected!
Maybe I mentioned that I’m going back to grad school this fall. I don’t seek a degree since none of my friends will ever call me “Doctor”. My interest is mainly to explore the world of academia in this modern era. So one of the courses I tried to enroll in was “The Soul of Chaucer”. If you can read Shakespeare, you can almost read Chaucer in Middle English. With...
“Now, dere lady, if thy wille be, I prey yow that ye wol rewe on me.”...”
– Geoffrey Chaucer - The Miller’s Tail
The Singularity Won't Save Your Ass →
A post on IEET by Dale Carrico. He notes that the Singularity is not a Sustainability Strategy. This thought is also explored on a post to Ardvarchealogy by Martin Rundkvist about the Singularity and Free Will where he argues that super intelligent machines might not choose to improve themselves. Or perhaps, he speculates, our decentents will read scraps of singularity arguments not in...
“The prayers of the Saints ascending with you, will Petarr your entrances through...”
– Zackary Coke in his work Logick, 1654. A Petarr (petar, petard) is a small explosive divice used to breach fortifications. The term derives from an Old French word for ”fart”. Shakespeare gives this line to Hamlet: For tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar. Later...
France on Two Joints a Day →
Another reason to hate the French
Out of 4 Million Years of Beastiality
It’s wonderful that expanded knowledge continually puts humans in their proper place. Lately, those who study the past throug genetics at Harvard and MIT have shown evidence that humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor 6.3 million years ago. But that divergence only concluded about 4 million years of interbreeding before one or the other spcies decided to stop fucking the...
“Community power, because of its tendency to arrogance must always be suspect...”
– William Bradford Huie
“As a writer, I’ve hardly piled up any riches. But my interior life, the...”
– Fantastic Voyage by Tom Chaffin in Oxford American magazine issue 57
Checkers 'solved' after years of number crunching →
The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now “solved”.
“The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body.”
– Spinoza - Ethics
“Each of us contains roughly 10 times as many microbial cells as human ones.”
– Our Microbial Menagerie By Emily Singer
The effect of major ice sheet melting
Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University professor of geosciences and international affairs, does make a prediction: He figures that if the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, sea level would rise about 23 feet. If the West Antarctic sheet melts, as well, it would add an additional 17 feet or so. “If either of these ice sheets were to disintegrate, it would destroy coastal civilization as...
“As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
Through ninety dark degrees;...”
– North & South - Elizabeth Bishop (1927-1979)
“The eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be...”
– Martin Bojowald, assistant professor of physics at Penn State, speaking of quantum loop theories showing that there is never a singularity.
Moving Beyond Kyoto - Al Gore →
Op-Ed in the New York Times