The obliviation of antediluvian excrescences postulates a didactic promorphistic inclusionary ascensional sine qua non, perhaps rectifying the recidivisual deconcurrence of reductive influences, remaining not ineffectual per se though expressing a certain contradissonance trending towards mass disembarkation. We seek to reconfirm the aforementioned while attaining a hitherto unforeseen unknowability.
I know those guys; they really do trend toward a mass disembarkation.
I wonder how this stacks up in the evidentiary world and where it fits into Google’s policy of “Do no evil.”
“Introducing Gmail Custom Time. Be on time. Every time. Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.”
As someone who must deal with too much information that exists only in email, I can say this feature will not help me.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his long-awaited film critical of the Koran on LiveLeak. The 15-minute film — titled “Fitna,” Arabic for civil strife — features graphic news images of terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid, beheadings, violence against women in the Islamic world, anti-Semitic tirades by imams, and death threats against Jews by Muslim extremists along with verses of the Muslim holy book.
The quote below is from a colleague at a recent SPIE event in San Diego, CA. The event, SPIE Smart Structures/NDE, features an annual EAP-in-Action session with demonstrations of electro-active polymer applications & devices.
Monday continued into the evening’s EAP session, where 8 different groups from New Zealand, Italy, China, Australia, Switzerland, and the US each demonstrate their applications of EAP technology – everything from a flower that opens and closes in response to temperature, to an EAP-propelled and steered ‘fish’, which even had a ‘fish cam’ transmitting wireless to a monitor to give everyone a fish-eye’s view of its aquarium environment.
Electro-active polymers are plastics that can change shape and motion. I can imagine many applications of EAP devices, including micro & nano size medical & surveillance devices.
Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.
[…]
“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”
Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.
“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”
Read the whole article. He’s a facinating man whose influential career is woven with the ’60s counterculture, the birth of the environmental movement, and the internet revolution.
I find the possibility especially intriguing because I work for SPIE. Technologies like chemical lasers and adaptive optics are researched, developed, and applied to real world problems by members of the society.
What’s needed is a way to reform our organs of sight and escape from a world where practically every terrorist attack is prefaced with a denial that a particular community is a threat; or that taxes can be cut and spending upped without consequences.
Isn’t that process already underway? Perhaps it’s not an obvious and deliberate procedure, as we desire. But, I would suggest there is already an evolutionary process at work. It’s the various social networks and online communities developing around the framework of the Internet.
I’m not speaking strictly of the blogosphere, but also of Wikipedia, Friendster, Napster, MySpace, and Yahoo Groups. These are all organic, self-selected networks of individuals exchanging information. Each of them have potential adaptations as sensory organs in the information age.
I, however, don’t think the greatest challenge is updating our sensory organs. I have a nasty, nagging feeling in my gut that many people just don’t have much desire to actually get the facts necessary to make informed decisions about public policy. Soundbite entertainment, news, and politics is just good ‘nuf, thank ya.
