1932 - 2006
Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.
Nam June Paik, video art pioneer
Monthly Archive for January, 2006
Here are some photos from my cameraphone taken around Thanksgiving 2005.
A convertable filled with various items; a dessert my sister Natalie made; Ghostface [Killah]; me; Natalie’s doctorfriend Tereza with a knife; Natalie with her doctorfriend Shawn; Simon Fink, Fiancé of my friend Becky; and someone in the UNC Comm Arts department office with impressive dedication to Halloween.
I’m going to be attending SXSW Interactive this year. Lyceum will have been released two or three weeks beforehand, and I’m hoping there will be a bit of Lyceum buzz among a certain geeky, bloggy crowd at the conference.
If any of my thousands of readers are going to be there, let me know.
I’ve put together a guide to Bash config files. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Samuel Alito has been nominated by President Bush to be on the Supreme Court of the United States. This is a Big Deal, because Supreme Court appointments are for the life of the justice (or until they retire).
Samuel Alito has an elaborate record of being far out of the mainstream, even (and especially) on the issue of giving the national government power over the states.
On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to approve Alito’s nomination. Now the vote goes to the Senate, where a majority vote is needed for confirmation. There are 55 republicans in the senate, and it is expected that the vote will fall on a straight party line. The only way for the confirmation to be blocked is for the democrats to filibuster the vote.
Call your Senators NOW and demand they support a filibuster of the Alito confirmation:
1-877-851-6437
That’s the Capitol. They will say “The Capitol, how may I help you” and then you say “Could you please connect me to Mr(s). _____’s office?” It’s awesome.
Then say something like “I am from [city]. I urge you to filibuster the Alito confirmation. Supreme Court Justices serve in lifetime appointments, and the office is too important to risk confirmation of someone who has demonstrated repeatedly that he is far outside the mainstream.”
If no one picks up, leave a message.
Do this TWICE, once for each senator. NOW. 90 seconds each. (Find out who your senators are here)
And forward this page to all of your friends.
If you call I will dance for you like this:
Lots of info on the confirmation process and Alito’s judicial record here.
Info on Alito from Stories in America:
Michael Avery, President of [The Lawyers Guild], declared, “We are particularly concerned that Samuel Alito will not impose necessary limits on presidential power and insist upon the checks and balances required by the Constitution. His long membership in the Federalist Society and his writings demonstrate that he believes in the Imperial Presidency, which is unfortunately what George W. Bush has been trying to create.” Avery noted that, “Appointing such a person to the Supreme Court is a terrible risk at a time when the President is asserting an unprecedented ability to act outside the Constitution and contrary to the wishes of the other branches, as demonstrated by the illegal electronic surveillance he has admitted authorizing.” The Guild noted that, as documented by the Alliance for Justice, Alito has been extraordinarily deferential to the exercise of power by the executive branch and government officials.
update: here is a list of Senators who are against a filibuster (or undecided).
For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.
Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with Pope Benedict and John Paul II, said that he was “perplexed and alarmed . . . This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image.” A pope’s words should be available to all free of charge, he said, and to “cash in in this way surrounds the clergy with the odour of money”.
Publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the cover price of any book or publication “containing the Pope’s words”. Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15 per cent.
I’ve read and enjoyed one of Ray Kurzweil’s books (this one). He is a futurist and often gets a lot of flak about how wild his predictions are. That’s how futurists make money I guess.
I think I am more likely to agree with some of his predictions than the next person though — a lot of his predictions are based on the model that technology creeps up on us very iteratively; one day you are dialing up to a BBS at 1400 baud, and and the next thing you know, a decade later 80% of your social time is on Instant Messenger.
Anyway I was just reading this interview with Kurzweil and thought that this quote was particularly amazing/funny/absurd:
I’m very confident that over the next decade we’ll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We’ve identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we’ll produce a mouse that doesn’t age, and we’ll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that.
95%? 10 years? Come on Ray. Don’t get me wrong, once a few key technologies really get rolling — nanotech, gene therapy, etc — then I think we are going to see some amazing advances. But as far as I can tell, those things will only begin to really get rolling in about 10 years.
On the other hand, Kurzweil spends all of his time researching this stuff so maybe he knows something I don’t. On the other hand, maybe he thinks about it so much that he has an exaggerated sense of how close the technology is to being scalable in a lab/commercial context.
Stopping disease, aging, and, ultimately, death, is something Kurzweil talks about a lot.
Do you think that someday there’ll be legal limits on how long people can live?
Not if I have anything to say about it. But there’s a very powerful “death-ist” need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can’t live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We’ve rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there’s nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it.
I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains.
You look like you’re in good shape.
Well, I take this very seriously. I’m very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I’m 56.
What do you do to slow the aging process?
I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I’m really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it’s good to be natural. I don’t think it’s good because biological evolution is not on our side.
It’s in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn’t changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.” These are all programs that need to be changed. [snip]
Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?
Well, ultimately, there’s going to be very little difference between a guy who’s 120 and a guy who’s 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we’ll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It’s not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we’ll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.
Gov. Jim Doyle signed into law today a bill that will require that touch screen voting machines produce a verifiable paper ballot.
The bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.
“This is important for democracy. Voters have to be able to trust that their votes are counted,” Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, said after the bill signing.
I wonder what other states have such laws?
Trac + RHEL = pain, but this might help.
sudo up2date gcc
sudo up2date gcc-c++
python 2.4.2
./configure
make
make install
swig 1.3.27
./configure --with-python=/usr/local/bin/python
make
sudo make install
sqlite 3.2.8
./configure --disable-tcl
make
sudo make install
sudo /sbin/ldconfig
pysqlite 2.0.5
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
clearsilver 0.9.14
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd python
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install
subversion 1.3.0
./configure PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python(I don’t understand this flag either, but that’s what the docs said to do)
make
sudo make install
make swig-py
sudo make install-swig-py
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