Monthly Archives: May 2005

Which side are you on?

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Seth sees a new Digital Divide opening up, this one, though, based on choice rather than privilege. Hundreds of millions of people have Internet access now, and a growing majority of them even have broadband access. A smaller but rapidly increasing subset of the connected belong to what Seth (following others) labels the “digerati”:

…the digerati are using the learning tools built into the Net to get smarter, faster. A new Net tool can propogate to millions in just a week or two. Unlike the old digital divide, this means that the divide between the digerati and the rest of the world is accelerating.

So, it’s choice time.

Because, as Seth demonstrates, it is a matter of choice. There’s a learning curve involved in joining the digerati; Seth defines a number of features that distinguish the group, and those to whom the resulting table is meaningless, or who find themselves unmistakably in the “Left Behind” column, will have to scramble to catch up. But the results are worth it. It’s a heady group, the digerati, in every sense of that word: a fun conversation to participate in, an enlightened body of masters to follow, a generally fulfilling experience, richly rewarding the time and mental energy invested in the process of getting it.

So, for those of you still using Internet Explorer, procrastinating on the installation of an RSS reader, wasting your time with Peter Jennings or staying up late with the Tonight Show rather than getting up early with Boing Boing and Google News, I urge you: take the plunge! The icy waters will shock your awareness to new heights of sensitivity, and the first breath of air you gulp when you emerge will be intensely liberating.

The New Colossus

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The Statue of Liberty

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus, 1883
The poem is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

In his Random Thoughts, Nicholas Weaver reports today on what he found when he dug a little more deeply into a rule change proposed by the Commerce Department.

The Commerce Department, in the Federal Register, has proposed some significant changes to the Export Control Rules. The changes seem subtle and arcane (a change of ‘and’ to ‘or’, changing country of citizenship to country of birth OR citizenship (whichever is more restrictive), and a couple of “clarifications”). But the implications appear huge, especially the ‘and’ to ‘or’ change. Assuming I’m reading this correctly, it sounds like whoever allows a foreign citizen to use a supercomputer (or other export controlled device) has to get an export license and approval from the federal government. And just about every remotely decent cluster qualifies. Will universities be forced to deny access to Chinese graduate students? What if someone had the misfortune to be born in Iran? Or Cuba? It’s not too late to submit comments (mail to scook@bis.doc.gov, with “RIN 0694-AD29″ in the subject line), as the comment period extends until May 27th.

Note that this is not a major news item; Nick can’t even remember where he read about the rule change. But the implications are startling, and scary. How much of this is going on, just slipping by in the flurry of bureaucratic actions coming hourly out of Washington?

Chapter Two

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Tao

When everyone under heaven sees what’s beautiful in what’s beautiful,
then ugliness becomes apparent.
When they understand what’s good in what’s good,
then what’s not good reveals itself.

The mutually dependent existence of something and nothing;
The mutually dependent judging of difficult and easy;
The mutually dependent measurement of long and short;
The mutually dependent elevation of high and low;
The mutually dependent harmony of voice and instrument;
The mutually dependent sequence of before and after:
All this is given.

So, the Sage manages the affairs of office without meddling,
Teaches without lecturing.
The ten thousand things unfold without his seal;
It all happens, and he owns none of it.
He acts without expecting results,
Gets results without expecting credit.
Because he expects no credit,
All credit comes to him.

Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 2
Translated by Richard Blumberg

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The cricket and the midga

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Rebecca’s pocket serves up a nice story this morning—a post on Roger Ebert’s site reviewing an email exchange that Ebert had with dwarf actor Danny Woodburn concerning the word “midget”, which is as offensive to Little People as the n-word is to African-Americans. The neat thing about the post is that it’s a demonstration of the way things should work; a civil exchange, illuminating both to the individuals engaging in the dialogue and to those of us fortunate enough to be listening in from the sidelines. Thank you, Mr. Ebert; thank you, Mr. Woodburn; and thank you, Rebecca Blood, for finding this and exposing me to it.

(BTW, “cricket” is the term my friend Hans uses to refer to critics, and “midga” is the word that Danny Woodburn has taken to using in his comedy act to, in his words, “defeat the hate” that lingers in the m-word.)

Chicken and Egg, burnt and scrambled

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Over at Whiskey Bar, the smart and tireless billmon has posted the first in what promises to be a series exploring the coming global economic crisis. In the first of the series, he reviews an article from Nouriel Roubini’s Global Economic Blog that discusses the Rashomon-like nature of our current situation; what’s happening is so complicated, so wide-ranging in its implications and diverse in its causes, that every economist who tells the story gives it a different plot, different heros and villains, and a different moral.

But, as billmon argues persuasively and knowledgably, it doesn’t matter who’s exactly right here; everything points to a coming crash, of massive proportions:

American consumers and the red-state yahoos currently running the U.S. government will almost certainly outborrow and outspend whatever line of credit our Asian financiers see fit to offer. You know we’ll keep pushing the outside of the envelope until we tear a great big hole in it – it’s the American way….

And when the dollar bubble finally bursts . . oh man. If you’ve ever heard the joke about the pig, the monkey and the cork, you have some idea what to expect. Which is why hopeful talk about a “soft landing� or a “smooth adjustment� makes me laugh. By now it should be obvious: We’re not going to stop until somebody or something makes us stop – just as a jumbo jet in vertical descent doesn’t stop until the ground makes it stop.

In concluding this first article, billmon says that “when this thing finally blows up, the yolk will definitely be on us – even if it’s the boys and girls at the Fed who end up wearing it all over their faces.” That raised, for me, a spectre that’s been haunting my dreams for some time now. In my comment to billmon’s article, I wrote:

In my most paranoid moments, I look at the guys in charge (well, not really, but they think they’re in charge, and they are in position to be blamed), and they’re overwhelmingly Jewish – Greenspan, Wolfowitz. And I remember what happened last time, and I look at the unconscionable willingness of the people in power now to set up scapegoats, and I see a wave of anti-semitism thundering upon us that will be a hell of a lot worse than the economic hardships attendent upon even a massive crash.

I hope I’m wrong.

If you could teach the world one thing

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spiked is an online publication with the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it. spiked stands for liberty, enlightenment, experimentation and excellence.

spiked—science celebrated the centenary of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (e=mc2) by asking 250 widely regarded scientists, science journalists, and educators, including 11 Nobel laureates, to say what they would teach the world about science, if they could just teach one thing. The results are fascinating, if not exactly surprising. Very many of the responses made statements about the method of science—the provisional nature of hypotheses, the necessity of open discussion, the propriety of skepticism and the need to distinguish that, and the critical analysis on which it relies, from subjectivism and relativism: there is objective truth, and the business of science is to come as close as we can to that, and the fact that we can never know precisely how close we’ve come or how much we have left to learn does not detract from or subvert the objective nature of what we approach.

What we have learned, from several thousand years of thinking about it, is that the only road to truth and understanding – in any sphere – is based upon doubt, questioning, discussion and experiment. This is the basis of what we now call the scientific method, but it should actually be called something much more general – like ‘The Method of Reaching Fundamental Understanding of the Physical World, the Natural World and the Mind of Man’.

A consequence of the global nature of this method is that questions that are not susceptible to this approach are at one and the same time essentially unanswerable, fundamentally flawed and intrinsically meaningless. After all, if there is no universal bedrock of global truth upon which to base an answer, then the question is not conceptually valid. Thus, those who purport to have answers have only parochial belief to rely upon. As a result, a plethora of personal mystical philosophies stalk the world, propagated by purveyors who have a vested interest – in characterising doubt as dangerous, in misrepresenting science, and in misrepresenting results of science that undermine mystical philosophies.

The methods of science are manifestly effective, having made massive humanitarian contributions to society. It is this very effectiveness which the purveyors of mystical philosophies attack, because they recognise in it the chief threat to the belief-based source of their power and financial reward.

Nobel Laureate Sir Harold Kroto

The single specific topic that received most attention was biological evolution. A number of respondents saw the most important teaching to be the fact that evolution has occured, it has proceeded by entirely natural and explicable pathways, and if there are disagreements about the details of what has happened or the precise dynamics that have driven evolution, that does not call the fact of evolution into question or require a supernatural explanation.

I should teach the world about evolution – as truth, insofar as we can comprehend it at the moment; as a realistic assessment of our position in the universe; and as a joyous celebration of our potential future. The catch is that we have to accept responsibility for the survival of the human race, instead of praying about it. The prize, if we can embrace this humanist philosophy, is an infinite and unimaginably exciting journey ahead of us.
Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston

All of the responses are online; they vary in length from the gnomic to the discursive, but they are all thoughtful and well-said. It’s worth taking some time to browse. If you want an overview (which will not satisfy you but might give you incentive to dig deeper), spiked editor Sandy Starr has done a very credible job of pulling a summary together from a diverse set of statements.

Hard drive upgrade

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Hard DriveIf you have a 12″ or 14″ PowerBook with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive (or less), and if you use your computer intensively, the chances are that you’re struggling with drive space. What with photos, mp3 files, movies, and increasingly gigundous apps, the 40 Gig that seemed so roomy 18 months ago is starting to feel pretty tight in the crotch.

I feel your pain. And in this page, I’m going to tell you what I did when I had the same pain, in the hopes that it might help you relieve yours.

The overall steps are pretty simple:

  1. Get a new drive, 60 or 80 Gig.
  2. Get a firewire enclosure.
  3. Install the new drive in your machine.
  4. Install your old drive in your new exterior case.
  5. Boot from your old drive.
  6. Transfer your old system from the firewire drive to the new internal drive.

Now, not only do you have much expanded breathing room on your old drive, but you have a tiny little firewire exterior drive that you can use for backup or as an emergency boot disk.

In the rest of the article, I’ll provide detailed notes regarding how I did all that.
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