Water and science

Water is reality. H2O is a model.

Ships sailing around

All sorts of critically important things go on, out of sight of most of us: dredging operations on the Mississippi; rail freight operations; undersea cable maintenance. Here’s a mostly-live map that tells where ships are all over the world. Seen here.

Drone as metaphor

Michael Chertoff says Google Glass is like a drone:

“Now imagine that millions of Americans walk around each day wearing the equivalent of a drone on their head: a device capable of capturing video and audio recordings of everything that happens around them.”

Google Glass is a drone on your head. A security camera is a stationary drone. Conventional aircraft are drones with an on-board operators. Cameras are personally operated drones. Heck, an AR-15 is a personally operated drone. That makes as much sense as anything else pundits say about the AR-15. In fact, a pundit is basically a talking drone, apparently self-operated.

Website security

Roger Pearse put up a group of pages on the Roman cult of Mithras. Someone has been trying to hack the site by SQL injection, apparently to place spam links.

Technological defeatism

Kevin Kelly (of, among other things, Cool Tools, which I read regularly) said “we can choose to modify our legal and political and economic assumptions to meet the ordained [technological] trajectories ahead. But we cannot escape from them.” This “technological defeatism”

“…downplays the utility of resistance and conceals the avenues for seeking reform and change. As a result of technological defeatism, concerns and anxieties about various technologies are recast as reactive fears and phobias, as irrelevant moral panics that will quickly fade away once users develop the appropriate coping strategies and upgrade their norms.”

The claim that resistance is futile is simply false. People say it to reduce others’ resistance, and believe it to justify their own acquiescence. It’s not that we should resist all change. Air bags, for example, are mostly good; but they need a mechanism to disable them when the owner sees they would be a liability, when the seat’s occupant is very small. PowerPoint is mostly bad. It can be useful and informative in some circumstances, though an example escapes me.

Write it in stone

“I guess there is not much in Science that is fixed in stone.

“Except the temperature. The only thing that Science knows for sure is that the temperature was exactly right about 100 years ago. Now of course, the temperature is almost a little hotter and we’re all going to die. But thank goodness civilization lived long enough to find that one exactly right temperature. I hope Mr Obama chisels the number into some sort of monument so that, should humans evolve again from the wreckage, they won’t have to waste their energy determining The Proper Temperature and they can get right down to blaming each other about just who is responsible for ruining everything this time.” — Science!

There’s a fair chance such a monument will be built. President Obama is, after all, the man who hoped we’d tell our children that his inauguration “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Three links

• Some people say the devil looks like Barak Obama in The History Channel’s Bible series. I don’t quite see it, but then I never got the Bush/Chimpanzee thing either. It seems to me how a man acts is more important than how he looks. Make of that what you will.
• A customer suspects her new Logitech mouse “Liked” Logitech on her Facebook account, by itself. I wouldn’t put it past a company to include some kind of script with their product, but Logitech says it didn’t do it.
• Methodists have open communion. Catholics have closed communion. The difference is greater in theory than in practice.

Asteroids!

Something must be done

“Remember that big asteroid that could hit Earth in 2036? Astronomers say never mind.” A smaller, but still potentially destructive object will pass near Earth this coming Friday. I’m afraid that’s just not acceptable. Something must be done to protect people. We should make our Earth-Moon system an asteroid-free zone right now, or at least ban asteroids more than 10 meters in diameter. Of course that would do no good, but it would be something.

Score one for the public sector

The Weather Channel website hasn’t been working lately, and Weather Underground, which used to be great, has become clogged with all kinds of junk. The National Weather Service site is pretty good, so that’s my new weather link.

Newspeak, and safety

It’s surprising that the word “hormesis” is even legal to say. In fact it may be banned in Manhattan. Like “jury nullification,” it’s going to be trouble if the common people find out about it. But really, the common people already know about the concept, even if they don’t know the word.

Not related in any obvious way is this safety video about electrostatic discharge.