Friday, October 31, 2003

Scientists Find Lemmings Die as Dinners, Not Suicides. The sharp decline in lemming populations has nothing to do with self-annihilation and everything to do with hungry predators. By Carol Kaesuk Yoon. [New York Times: Science] 8:47:26 PM    comment []

New Stem Cell Lines Developed. A Harvard biology professor has created 17 new stem cell lines to share with other scientists. He hopes to encourage stem cell research in the face of U.S. legislation that restricted work on stem cells to a small number of cell lines. [Wired News] 8:37:38 PM    comment []

The Mobile Web as The Third Place. Millions of people already telecommute from home. But if the gm of WiFi Metro, Inc. has his way, they soon can telecommute -- or do homework, chat online, send e-mail, or about anything else you can do on a computer -- not just from home but everywhere they go. They'll be able to take advantage of what Ray Oldenburg once described as "a Third Place" -- not the home or office, but a place that combines the best features and the familiarity of both locations, and allows anyone with a properly equipped laptop to have a portable office, complete with high-speed Internet access. full story in TCS Tech Central Station [Smart Mobs] 4:46:21 PM    comment []

New worm poses DoS attack threat. Security experts sound the alarm about a new mass-mailing worm that attempts to launch a denial-of-service attack. [CNET News.com - Front Door] 4:43:38 PM    comment []

Defend the Net from the UN (Christian Science Monitor editorial on the WSIS -- World Summit on the Information Society). One beauty of the Internet is the freedom to access, read, and publish information. But an upcoming UN conference could see a move by authoritarian governments to justify restrictions on that freedom. . . . [L]ike past UN conferences on global issues, there's a risk that countries such as China and Cuba may co-opt the final document if the US and its friends aren't careful. Some 60 percent of countries participating in the WSIS don't have freedom of the press but do have equal votes at the meeting. . . . The WSIS should uphold Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. 11:43:08 AM    comment []

I'm still working on Quicksilver. (I'd like to hide away for a weekend and polish it off, but that is just not going to happen. I figure I have until the next volume (April 13!) to finish it, and that looks to be about the right pace now!) I've seen the criticisms about it being too big, too wordy, sometimes impressed with how much its author learned in order to produce. There's something to them, but not a lot. The book is not only deep (y'know, heavy, man), but also wide (touches on a whole host of things that are likely to interest clever readers). Some themes running through the first third of the book or thereabouts: fluidity and flow force and forces tradition and experience competing traditions the false These get cashed out in quite varied forms. Money and gravity, for example, are two highly abstract "things" that figure prominently. Both can bring about motion in other things. Information figures prominently (there's still a cyberpunk lurking beneath all the history). The flow of information brings about changes, too. And there are elaborate dances being done with deceptions -- both deceptions that everyone is in on, such as acting, and "true" deceptions -- that I can start to see being something that stitches a lot of this together. I'm enjoying its unfolding, anyway, and wanted to check in to remark about it here, however briefly. 10:42:44 AM    comment []

Happy Halloween, all! 10:42:39 AM    comment []