Posts from — January 2004

Reuters: Virginia Tech to upgrade supercomputer to Xserve. I don't get it. Why buy millions of dollars of equipment just to use it for a few months? None of the explanations make any sense. [Hack the Planet]

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i wonder why anyone questions this move?

Why so bitter?
Economist Brad DeLong has been a consistent voice of reason as the insanity of Bush administration fiscal policy has mounted. Today he justifiably allows himself to get just a little less reasonable, summing things up in an impassioned, must-read post:

[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

DOD Wargames Abrupt Climate Change. The DOD Wargames Abrupt Climate Change: Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands‰¥äwaves of boat people pose especially grim problems…As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. Wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life. [MetaFilter]

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if you've never heard my 'worst case scenario' of world politics that i occasionally argue, this pretty much sums it up. It isn't pretty, it is a war of attrition over the staples of life itself, and alot of people die…. science fiction becomes science fact…

PROFESSORS ON COKE. Earlier, I noted this post from Brad DeLong about his need to consume 40 ounces of Coke to get through three office hours. I was… [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

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12 oz of good coffee, or 16 oz of regular coffee, early in the morning and i'm set all day.

Eprints Handbook released. Les Carr of Southampton University has written an Eprints Handbook for all users of Erints, the open-source software for building and maintaining open-access OAI-compliant eprint archives. Quoting the press release: “The handbook is desisgned for…the system administrators who set up and maintain the archives, the departments or libraries that manage them, the authors who self-archive their papers in them, and the readers who use their contents.” [Open Access News]

Darwine. Darwine – putting Windows apps on OSX, by porting Wine to Darwin. A whole world of right, yet oh so wrong. (via Brent)… [Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent]

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this could be handy….

Theodore Roszak, “Raging Against the Machine” [Interactivist Info Exchange]

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well worth thinking about, maybe in a sort of third removed way…

List of open/free 'courseware tools' from UNESCO Free Software Portal.

http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/
Software/Courseware_Tools/

Via an email from Jim Sibley came mention of this list of open or free 'courseware tools' – there were a couple of ones new to me (MANIAC and OLAT being examples). But the reference was as useful also for introducing me to the UNESCO Free Software Portal which collects together a large number of resources on the topic. – SWL

[EdTechPost]

grounding cosmopolitan democracy in rights perpetuates a paucity of democracy.

democracy, in any rich sense, any sense beyond mere proceduralism and constructing the populace as machines of the world requires a significant understanding of political enculturation, the creation of the political subject.

it is the acts that construct the culture in which democracy is found, not in any simplicism of rights and protectionism

rights are negative freedoms, they are freedom from others, they are as such antagonistic toward democratic cultures, where it is precisely the others that reconstruct the self in its image, the public and private understandings merge into one and in that one you have a possibility for democracy, a progress, a rousseauean general will of the people not unlike….

democracies are built on positive freedoms, the freedom to do, the freedom to talk, think, move, etc. rights don't preserve that, because culture can squelch them, instead, what one needs is visible actions that promote the positive freedoms of democracy and with that you have a chance for cosmopolitan democracy.

the rubric of this paper is built upon a different sense of cosmopolitan democracy, a democracy of actions, of movement, of transversal communications.

granted, both rights and a progressive democracy can operate in conjunction. however, rights without constructing their active space that territorializes that which is not populated in the negative relations of rights cannot yield a progressive democracy, just a negative space of have nots and do nots.

HR 3261. So. HR 3261. The Anti-Feist, it’s being called. And it’s an utterly horrendous, horrible, viciously wrongheaded idea. Somebody’s gonna be gearing up the ol’ printer to write a few letters to congresscritters, yup yup. Guess whose lobbyists are part of the engine behind this madness. No, go on, guess, it’s… [Caveat Lector]

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I'm against this bill as it stands, some of the principles might be good, but the implementation and the implication is entirely wrong.