Category — General

LYNCH A.A.R.. Donald Sensing links a WaTi report that the Army's CID is investigating the circumstances of the ambush in which PFC Jessica Lynch was initially captured…. [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

watch that 'wag the dog' action, isn't it pretty.

EINSTEIN SYNDROME. Thomas Sowell has an interesting column on a syndrome with which I had been largely unfamiliar: geniuses who are labeled autistic or mentally retarded because… [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

This is an interesting phenomena, but i wonder how many of those who develop language later are geniuses….

Second Lowest Form of Wit.

Jean Baudrillard (Apologetic): I’m sorry I’m so late for dinner, dear, I got stuck at the office. Have I missed everything?

Mrs Baudrillard (Annoyed): Welcome to the dessert of the meal.

I know there’s a genre of these jokes waiting to be born.

[Kieran Healy's Weblog]

but there is no mrs. baudrillard, which makes this even funnier.

Bursty Community Formation in Blogspace. Absolutely fascinating paper on community formation in blogspace, by Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Jasmine Novak, and Andrew Tomkins, called On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace. (Free ACM account required — it's so worth it, just for this article.) [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

This is an itneresting read, but i'm wondering why this is different from say the irc community around certain events, etc. i don't think blogging is anymore bursty or really that bursty at all in comparison..

Now that's small.

No that's not dust they're prototype RDIF tags from Hitachi

[Micah's Weblog]

Wow – that is small. About 10 years ago I met with the head of strategic planning at Loblaws, Rob Almeida, who then went on to set up President's Choice Banking. We were talking about the future of supermarkets. At the time, he forecast two things: that supermarkets would scale up to 80,000 square feet. Which they have done. And then, that a maximum size would be reached and the strategy of bigger is better would have to be rethought.  His other big idea was that, at some point, inventory management technology may advance to the point where it would be possible to go the other way. To have a small mart that would have everything you needed because it would be able  to track everything so well that it would only carry what we wanted. I wonder are we in sight of Rob's second prediction?

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

These are going to change a lot of things. If items, or people, can be tracked by specks almost too small to see, what will happen to our expectation of privacy? WHat will happen to our constitutional rights against search and seizure when we can really have no reasonable expectation of privacy? But then, we could use the same technology and follow politicians everywhere. Oh, this is going to be a fine kettle of fish. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

These are small enough to inhale, spread across clothes, etc. with powerful enough transceivers you could very much track a person doing just about anything with the proper application of these. In short, this needs regulated.

my proposition is that any device that can be used to identify and track human beings, being intended for that or not, should be labelled as such with a warning label that is readable to the unaided human eye.

in short, that would prevent rfid dusting. i mean these things can be inhaled or theoretically injected in a wide variety of ways.

Dream Tournament: Annika vs. Vijay. Sid Meier designed a virtual golf course that pits Vijay Singh against Annika Sorenstam. By Sid Meier. [New York Times: Technology]

Simulations are fine, but lets put some tournaments together with mixed membership. Since I worked on a golf course as a kid, I've seen that the equality in this sport is quite easy to see, it is all about the set-up of the holes.

Probe into 'happy pill' after suicides. Government bows to pressure over Prozac and Seroxat. [Guardian Unlimited]

It's about time.

Directory of Open Access Journals under Creative Commons. Lund University in Sweden has recently launched the Directory of Open Access Journals featuring hundreds of peer-reviewed, scholarly journals from scientific and cultural communities. Their principal aim is to secure the right of “users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles.” Along with the searchable directory, they also provide a metadata model based on RDF and license all their data under an Attribution-Sharealike license. [Creative Commons: weblog]

this is great! wish I'd gotten it together first of course, but congrats on it.

Help wanted
Since I'm lucky enough that this blog is read by a decent number of talented software developers and technology managers, it seems like a good place to point to this job posting. Salon is in the market for a VP/technology. If you're interested or you know someone who might be, read the posting and see if it sounds like a good fit. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

I hope they hire someone that can secure their premium content a bit better, cause 2600 has a nice article on bypassing their cookie based security system this month. i use all server side sessions myself keyed to a uid cookie that has no content other than identifying the server side session. I dunno if that's common, but it's common sense.

Army and M.I.T. Unveil Futuristic Soldier Center. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a $50 million Army contract to form a center that develops combat gear using materials the size of atoms. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]

yes remember this is the group that swiped someones comic and used it for their proposal, never giving credit, until a fuss was thrown…..

choose your own ethics, but i don't think they should be rewarded given such things.