Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Monday, December 26, 2005 |
Two Christmass gifts for your non-Iranian friends.
I have a suggestion for all Iranians who live abroad and all others who are interested in Iran.
It might be actually a bit late, but I think if you wanted to somehow help undo the damage Ahmadinejad has done to the image of Iran in the past few weeks, there are two books which could make very good Christmas gifts to your non-Iranian friends and relatives:
- Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi: An easy-to-read and interesting graphic novel about a young Iranian girl and how the revolution, war, etc. affected her life and her middle-class family.
- We are Iran, by Nasrin Alavi: An essential read for anyone who is interested to know about the today's Iran and the way the young people think and live. It includes hundreds of blog posts translated into English.
These two books can totally change people's mind about Iran which ultimately, believe it or not, affects the way they see you too.
[Editor: Myself (English)]
New Year's Day gifts, perhaps?
3:21:21 PM 
|
|
Oh Yes, Remember Him?.
Alito Memo in '84 Favored Immunity for Top Officials: "The attorney general should be immune from lawsuits for ordering wiretaps of Americans without permission from a court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote in a memorandum in 1984 as a government lawyer in the Reagan administration.
The memorandum, released yesterday by the National Archives, made recommendations concerning a lawsuit against former Attorney General John N. Mitchell over a wiretap he had authorized without a court's permission in 1970. The government was investigating a plot to destroy underground utility tunnels in Washington and to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser.
The White House said yesterday that the issues discussed in that memorandum were not the same as those posed by President Bush's orders to the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international communications without warrants." (New York Times )...the lady doth protest too much.
[Follow Me Here...]
3:19:00 PM
|
|
Jamais notes that the Pardee Center for Long Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition (of The Rand Coroporation) has a list of the 50 most important books for understanding the future, about which list they say:
The intent of the list is twofold. The first intent is to act as a reading list for someone who wants to understand at a more-than-passing level the factors that we can say seem to be most pertinent today in thinking about the longer-range human condition. I would hope that anyone who had read all 50 of these books would have a good feel for history, for how to think about the future, for the kinds of trends that are likely to have a serious impact on the future, and for the kind of surprises that might befall us as we move into that future.
The second intent is to put a marker on the wall for such a list and to invite many more smart people to think about how we might improve such a list.
Jamais further notes the existence of the WorldChanging Reading List, generated by the readers in the comments to Alex's post back in October, with which there's significant overlap.
I'm fascinated that Rand choose David Brin's The Transparent Society as its one book in the information technology section and intrigued by several of the titles, especially Amish Society, by John A. Hostetler, which raise the issue, If the Amish were a nation would they be considered a developed country or a developing country?
9:54:44 AM
|
|
Smart reagent swapping center.
BioRoot.org provides laboratories with accounts that they control through which they can make it known that they have excess reagents available that other labs can put to use. This free service of a non-profit organization seeks to save time, increase efficiency, and eliminate waste among labs where transient personnel, isolated locations, and disorganization can be costly to progress as well as budgets.
The service networks projects, reagents, batches, and people using principles from information and biological sciences:
BioRoot is smart!: The BioReagent LIMS is being designed and built by molecular biologists and computer scientists. Its principle developer has worked for over 13 years on the bench as a technician, graduate student, and postdoctoral fellow studying mammalian cell biology, yeast genetics, protein biochemistry, and bioinformatics. via World Changing
[Smart Mobs]
9:53:53 AM
|
|
The Ghosts of Internet Time. Xeni Jardin
Snip:
“This is the Ghost of Internet Past,” wrote my mysterious correspondent. “NSA, poppy, Castro. I shall show you the Internet in its glorious early days. Tools were clunky back then, but we all studied a bit and learned to understand the medium we were using; and such a wonderful community we built online!”
I remembered what the ghost was talking about. True, 99% of all newsgroups degenerated into philosophical spats between leftists and libertarians, and three-quarters of all the alerts circulated had been hoaxes, but we still exploited the incredible power of instant worldwide diffusion to carry out some impressive campaigns. Lotus was a pretty big company when an Internet protest made it withdraw its database product on consumer spending.
“Look, Andy, you were more idealistic then too,” admonished the ghost. “It’s been years since you contributed to free software projects. Look at the dates on these files.” A stream of file names, dates, and sizes dribbled down my scream.
I squinted at the vaguely familiar output format. “Yeah, those dates are old. Where did you dig up that list?”
“Archie,” typed the ghost.
Link to "The Ghosts of Internet Time," by Andy Oram, 1999
[Boing Boing]
Wow. More:
“Oh, Ghost,” I hammered out. “What has happened to the flame of Internet community? Why do so few of the new users understand it?”
“What do you expect once ANS took over the backbone?” spat out the ghost. “Canter and Siegel, eye candy, streaming media.”
. . .
“What on earth are they talking about?” I demanded.
“Do you mean: what do they claim to be talking about, or what are they really talking about?”
“Both, I guess,” I answered, non-plussed.
“Well,” explained the ghost, “they think they are talking about which of the old regulatory models to apply to a revolutionary new space.”
“Sounds pretty pointless.”
“And that’s why so few bother to listen. But really what they’re talking about is bandwidth.”
“Yeah, I heard of that—won’t dark fiber solve everything?”
“That’s a 90s panacea,” interrupted the ghost scornfully. “The current fad is packet radio. But I was not talking about physical bandwidth at all. I was referring to control. Who has the power to use the Internet? Will it have job postings for the underprivileged or only stock quotes for the affluent? Can communities grow up spontaneously around great works of creative art or must they pay a middleman? Should taxpayer-funded research be sold for hundreds of dollars a document or made freely available to all? Who can be reached simply by requesting a name—big corporations or small voices?”
“For goodness’s sake,” I exclaimed, “why don’t people talk about the issues that way!”
“A few try,” replied the ghost, “but as soon as you start looking closely at the legal, social, and implementation implications, the answers get so—well, technical.”
. . .
And so I awoke, but I lay with eyes closed and addressed my three Ghosts in my thoughts: “I promise I will learn the lessons you taught tonight!
“Ghost of Internet Past, I promise I will learn about the technologies that affect my life so that I can control them.
“Ghost of Internet Present, I will talk to ordinary people about the everyday issues that are affected by Internet politics. And I’ll use it to fight real problems: racism, the income gap, war, ecological devastation.
“Finally, Ghost of Internet Future, I will always insist that the Internet is more than a means of transmitting data—it is a place for building community.”
9:32:38 AM
|
|
Chinese military hacking versus United States military -- sources:
[thanks, Bruce Schneier!]
12:14:31 AM
|
|
|
