Arthur C. Clarke Died today

Today is a very sad day indeed; Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90. Author of books like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama – Clarke was one of the most influential authors from my early childhood onwards.

Some of my favourite quotes:

• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
• “If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run – and often in the short one – the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”
• “Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy”

And in his famous 10 word story:

“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”

His vision and optimism about the continuance of our species will be sorely missed.

Pioneers of Early Photography

Take a look at the photograph below.

This is the earliest photograph ever taken. Entitled View from the Window at Le Gras, this was taken by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 and had an eight hour exposure time.

What about this one?

Taken in 1904 by Edward Steichen this photograph is of Long Island New York and was sold in 2006 for a cool $2.6 million making it the most expensive photograph ever sold.

From the long exposures to the incredible chemical wizardry and patience of the earliest proponents of the art, this website gives you the tiniest taste of what it took to be a photographer back in days before the magic and convenience of our modern cameras.

Source: more here

Back to the Source of the Legend

I am a recent convert to audible.com.  Having access to good literature to listen to on my morning and evening commute is an absolute joy.  As some readers may be aware I have a love/hate relationship with the movie ‘I am Legend’; loved the portrayal of the loneliness and internal conflict Smith portrayed in Robert Neville’s role; hated the religious overtures and the anticipation [betrayed] that the creatures were something more than mindless automatons.

 

This story dates back to a novel written in 1954 by Richard Matheson and is the inspiration and the source of three movies to date.  I figured that if the story inspired 3 movies and much of the Zombie genre’ then it should at least be a pretty good listen so I downloaded it last night to my iPod.  This morning, on the train on the way to work, I started listening to it.

The early story sees Neville spending much of his day collecting things essential for his survival, repairing the damage of the terrible creatures which visit him in the night and destroying the slumbering undead which he stumbles upon in his foraging.  In the evening he his haunted by memories of a life he once enjoyed, items around the house make him remember his wife for example, while the noises and taunts of the things stalking outside drive him to the brink of madness not even the medicinal effects of alcohol can blunt.

I am still quite early on in the story but so far I am loving it, it is clever and very well written with much of the horror (and the subsequent effects on Neville’s mind) are hinted at which for me builds in a much more effective way than coarse descriptions of  lewd and graphic horror.  We get a deep sense of the man and his mental downward spiral through his internal monologues which replace conversations with people in standard novels.

I really believe Smith had the capabilities to do justice to this great literary character however the actor is only part of the story; perhaps the director felt that great stories are not enough and I feel he subsequently flubbed it badly.

I will revisit this story when I am done with it but in the interim I’d advise you head on over to Audible.com or Amazon and get yourself a version if this is a genre of story you enjoy; damn good stuff in my opinion.

Warning sounded over Zim equity law

A new equity law passed by President Robert Mugabe to ensure the population gets a majority stake in public-owned firms will plunge Zimbabwe into deeper economic woes, analysts predicted on Monday. “It will entail the destruction of the economy,” Harare-based economist Godfrey Kanyenze said.

Warning sounded over Zim equity law
Fanuel Jongwe
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:12:00 GMT

Catholic Church furthers Hypocrisy

[Source: Boing Boing ...]

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory handed down a list of “seven cardinal vices.” Now the Vatican has issued an additional seven “social sins.”

You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord’s name in vain or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by wrecking the environment, carrying out morally debatable experiments that manipulate DNA or harm embryos,” said [Bishop Gianfranco] Girotti, who is responsible for the body that oversees confessions.

The seven social sins are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control

2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

The original deadly sins:

1. Pride

2. Envy

3. Gluttony

4. Lust

5. Anger

6. Greed

7. Sloth

One of the best comments for this posting was by Takuan

AH those crazy kids at the world’s largest real estate operation! How about the child raping huh? Or the targeting of the poor for recruits and the increasing of the ranks of the poor by opposing family planning? All those vatican art treasures gathering dust when they could be sold for food for the hungry. Aboriginal people everywhere still badly wounded from having the native beat out of them. All those nuns,monks and priests with blighted lives from having their natural sexuality crushed in the name of subjugation to church power. Gay people everywhere, murdered by church sanction and still being made to fight for basic human rights. Cultural treasures lost to the bonfires of the church in South America, The Inquisition, the retarding of science, the wilfull delay of medical advances, the overweening hypocrisy , the brutality, the greed, the ignorance……

How dare they show their faces much less preach about “sin”?

Well said!

The Universe Is 13.73 Billion Years Old

CaptainCarrot writes “Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer has summarized for his readers the new results released by NASA from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been surveying the 3K microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. Some of the most interesting results: The age of the universe is now known to unprecedented accuracy: 13.73 billion years old, +/- 120 million. Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin. And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe’s total. Plait’s comment on the age result: ‘Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.‘”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When is enough … well enough?

I was interested to note that RSS aggregator netvibes has gone social with the release of their upgrade codenamed ‘ginger’.  At first glance it appears netvibes is reaching into the social networking space by offering functionality seen in other social networking sites like Facebook.  You still have your back-end reader and widget pages but now you can register your ‘universe’ on netvibes and have a public face with your selection of apps and widgits.

I will play with it a little, tech tinkering for want of a better phrase, but at the end of the day enough is enough which in a way is a pity because I just can’t keep up.

Here is a short list of areas I am plugged into (top items of highest importance) and keeping track of these is fast becoming more hard work than fun.

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce

Blog

• WordPress
• Ipernity

Photo Sharing

• Flickr
• Ipernity
• Redbubble
• iStockPhoto
• Facebook

RSS

• Newsgator
• Google Reader
• Netvibes

Messaging

• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Meebo
• Google Talk

And the list goes on.  So as new companies bring new content to the web I find less time and less inclination to actually go and look at them.  Sure App A may be technically superior or more beautiful than App B but as in the case of Facebook, my network is there, most of my friends are there; I’m not going to persuade them to move to the latest new thing so I will keep using Facebook.  Same thing with Pownce – awesome functionality – nobody there I know yet.

Google’s open social network excites me a little; I believe that opening up the web and providing common bits of code which can run independently across different companies is a way of unlocking us so we aren’t necessarily tied into one application for too long.

The big problem for new startups however is that unless you’re first to market or able to provide a radical new service, something so outrageous as to attract a huge cloud of interest and potential migration up front, breaking in to the existing spaces like social networking  is going to be a hard and unrewarding slog.  So although netvibes has some cool new features and wizzbang widgits I am not likely to change from my existing social platform any time soon.

 

p.s. There are some tools to help manage these various services.  My preference for pulling Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress & del.icio.us under one roof is the Flock browser.  Flock is built on Firefox but has additional hooks into all of the aforesaid applications giving you complete control over all of them right from your browser.

Dungeons & Dragons Creator Gary Gygax Passes Away

 A sad day with my thoughts going to the man who, in my opinion, created the greatest game in the world and filled my developmental years playing in worlds contained wholly in the mind and limited only by the bounds of imagination.  RIP Gary.

I wish more kids would get off the inane World of Warcraft and give Dungeons and Dragons a go, D&D version 4 is soon to be released.

According to a post on Troll Lord Games, the company that had published his most recent work, Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away. In 2003, on the now defunct kcgeek.com, we ran an interview with Gygax. I have republished it over on Gadgets. Tiamat consume you fully, Gary. You brought untold amount of fun and joy into my life. This excerpt tickles me:

Q. As far as you know, what was the basic evolution of polyhedral dice? If they existed prior to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, what were they used for?

To the best of my knowledge I introduced them to gaming, en masse, with D&D in 1974. I found sets of the five platonic solids for sale in a school supply catalog back in 1972, and of course ordered them, used them in creating the D&D game.

Link to interview with discussion [BBG]

London cops declare war on photography

 

Thomas Hawk sez, “In what I can only view as troubling and a move surely to invite more backlash against photographers, London’s Metropolitan police has launched a new counter-terrorism PR campaign complete with anti-photography propaganda. The campaign is meant to encourage people to turn in ‘odd’ seeming people that they see taking photographs.”

“Thousands of people take photos every day,” reads their advertisement being run in London’s major newspapers. “What if one of them seems odd?”

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

Useful Latin Quotes

http://www.dbooth.net/internerd/latin.cfm

I found a great tag-line for the week:

Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.

which translates to:  I’m not interested in your dopey religious cult.

The part of my reptilian brain that still appreciates high school humour enjoyed Estne volumen in toga, an solum tibi libet me videre?

All Men Are Liars – The Peter Pan Syndrome

I know a lot of men who, once they got to their 30s, hit a fog after realising youth was behind them and then mistakenly decided their best years were gone just because they were losing their hair and couldn’t dunk a basketball anymore.Part of this is because many Lost Boys have eschewed what is commonly held to be the path to happiness – settling down and having children – because it often appears a false step that’s bought only intermittent solace to harried and divorced friends and family.

Part of it is also because male role models are so thin on the ground – with society as a whole confusing fame, wealth, self-absorption and perpetual youth for the fountainhead of contentment.After thinking and writing about the problem for years, as well as living through it, I reckon that much of the reason is because there is no clear next step for men aside from marriage and kids, however, I think I may have worked out a healthy alternative …Recently I read an essay by American psychiatrist Allan B. Chinnen titled ‘Men’s Mid-Life Initiation into the Deep Masculine’ and it provided some new pieces to the puzzle for me.

Chinnen argues that modern society has been selective in the male mythology it has chosen to embrace, focusing too much on fairy tales and stories presenting “men battling evil enemies, winning a great victory, and then becoming king.”"The dramas reflect the traditional heroic and patriarchal paradigm of masculinity,” and so “society expects young men in real life to be brave, aggressive and victorious, so young men struggle to fit the heroic and patriarchal image,” writes Chinnen.

The Age Blogs: All Men Are Liars

Richard Dawkins Quotes

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Richard Dawkins Quotes

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV

A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has discovered a gene that is able to block HIV, and in turn prevent the onset of AIDS.Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, says his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus.”When we put this gene in cells, it prevents the assembly of the HIV virus,” said Barr, a postdoctoral fellow. “This means the virus cannot get out of the cells to infect other cells, thereby blocking the spread of the virus.”

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV

Tags: science, medicine, HIV, research, cutting-edge