I don't know what Sundays mean to you. For me, they are the days to relax, go to a museum, or sit down and think.

And today, here is a story which made me think about our future.

Our guide for today is J.F. Rischard, the World Bank's vice president for Europe.

Two great forces, one demographic and one economic, will bring dramatic change to every corner of the globe over the next 20 years. The demographic force, as we go from 5 billion people on the planet in 1990 to 8 billion by 2025, will produce an array of environmental and social stresses. And an entirely new world economy -- centered on increasingly inexpensive telecommunication and computer technologies, and a shift to market-type policies by virtually all countries -- will bring unprecedented opportunities and challenges.

These two forces are exponential, not linear. The new world economy reflects exponential plenty, while the demographics reflect exponential scarcity -- scarcity of arable land, of potable water, of individual space. And they therefore overwhelm our linear, evolving, snail-paced human institutions. The resulting governance gap has many manifestations: financial crises, voters who no longer trust their politicians to solve problems, and a kind of bad mood in political life all over the world. But the most calamitous result is the failure to address urgent global problems.

These problems can't be solved within any one nation-state; they call for collaborative action. There are about 20 such global problems, and they fall into three categories: how we share our living space, how we share our rule book, and how we share our humanity. From fishery depletion, to E-commerce rules, to communicable diseases, these problems all need solving in the next 20 years, not the next 30, 40, or 50.

The current international systems simply aren't effective enough, or fast-moving enough, to solve these problems.

The best alternative, it seems to me, is to set up a permanent Global Issues Network for each problem. These GINs would include representatives from governments concerned by the issue at hand, knowledgeable representatives from business--whether business is part of the problem or part of the solution--and representatives from international nongovernmental organizations that know the issue well.

For more details, please read the full list of the "20 Global Problems For The Year 2020."

Source: J.F. Rischard, for Optimize, September 2002, Issue 11

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:22:03 PM -

Tom the Dancing Bug. U.S. to bomb Antarctica! [Salon.com]

» Excellent!  For once U.S. foreign policy makes sense!

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:07:13 PM -

You're typing a story, you push the Publish button, and your story is available worldwide. Or you compose a message, hit the Send key, and your e-mail is going to the other end of the world.

So you think you're mastering your computer? And if it was the other way around? Clive Thompson tells us a strange story in Wired Magazine.

Last year, Yahoo! wanted to block porn spambots from obtaining free email accounts. It created a brilliant but simple reverse Turing test: To get an account, you have to identify a randomly generated word that’s been slightly stretched and distorted. This proves you’re a human, not a robot. Machines are terrible at visual recognition tasks -- sure enough, the "picture test" blocked out the spambots.

Wait, this is not the end yet.

Some purveyors of porn developed a way to fight back. They rewrote the spambot code so that when the bots reach the visual recognition test, a human steps in to help out. The bots route the picture to a person who’s agreed to sit at a computer and identify these images. Often, insiders say, it’s a hormonal teen who’s doing it in exchange for free porn. The kid identifies the picture, the spambot takes the answer, and-- bingo -- it’s able to log in.

Now consider how deeply strange this is. Instead of a machine augmenting human ability, it’s a human augmenting machine ability. In a system like this, humans are valuable for the specific bit of processing power we provide: visual recognition. We are acting as a kind of coprocessor in much the same way a graphics chip works with a main Pentium processor -- it’s a manservant lurking in the background, rendering the pretty pictures onscreen so the Pentium can attend to more pressing tasks.

Clive Thompson also looks at similar situations. For instance, in some call centers, speech recognition systems can handle 95% of the tasks, leaving the last 5% to human operators. And these poor people only deal all day long with the angry or irrational customers that the automated system cannot satisfy.

Here is the conclusion.

Welcome to your future: as a USB plug-in for your computer. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Source: Clive Thompson, Wired 10.10, October 2002

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:18:16 PM -

The Hellatine Dictionary of Bureaucratese

"hellatine;
n., a person who coins or habitually uses words of inappropriately mixed derivation, often Greek and Latin, and usually in an attempt to impress the listener or reader; Also hellatinism, hellatinize.
(Gr. hellen: a Greek + L. latinus : a Latin) " [via blogdriverswaltz.com]

We're going to have great fun with this list at my office. If nothing else, I wonder if I could implement a script to post random definitions on the intranet....

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:25:38 PM -

In what may be the biggest setback for the war on fat since supersize fries, Americans are scarfing down thousands of the gooey, calorie-laden snack cakes at county fairs and restaurants across the country.

"We sold 26,000 Twinkies in 18 days. People drove for hours just to taste our Twinkie," said Rocky Mullen, who sells the deep-fried, cream-filled treats for $3 (U.S.) each at the Payallup Fair, 50 kilometres south of Seattle.

As if Twinkies are not sweet enough already, vendors such as Mr. Mullen add chocolate or berry sauce and sprinkle powdered sugar on top...

Hearing about Mr. Sell's invention, Hostess, the company that makes the 71-year-old snack, started promoting deep-fried Twinkies to state and county fairs, where a captive population of junk-food addicts began gobbling them up between pig races and tractor-pull competitions.

How bad are they for your health? After deep-frying, a Twinkie packs an estimated 400 calories and 28 grams of fat.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:32:04 AM -

Smart Mobs is live!

"Howard Rheingold's new book, "Smart Mobs," is coming out next November. It's a hell of a book, about the ways that technology enable groups of people to spontaneously form and coordinate in response to current events -- from SMS-enabled Filipiino demonstrations over official censorship to ubiquitous Japanese kids who photograph everything with their DoCoMo phones and post them online all the time.

Howard's site, SmartMobs.com, is a blog that talks about technology and events that show smart mobs in action." [Boing Boing Blog]

There's so much about information shifting on the front page alone of Rheingold's blog that I'm automatically adding his book to the Shifted Reading List sight unseen. I really hope Audible can get the audio rights to it. Here's an illustrative excerpt from the book summary:

"The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world."

And that, my friends, is the place from which libraries need to be available - everywhere. The book's introduction is titled How to Recognize the Future When It Lands on You, and the future is certainly hovering inches away from us.

I'll be interested to read the book and see if Rheingold discusses libraries at all, considering how we could play a huge role in the information exchanged between smart mobs. Think of librarians as a force letting authentic and accurate information loose into the wild (one form of reputation).

And in the spirit of smart communication, the book's blog has a RSS feed!

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 6:07:29 PM -

"Our hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide," said MIT's Professor Dick Yue.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:22:18 PM -

The Boston Globe's "Ideas" section has an excellent article by Elaine Scarry, who teaches at Harvard, on why a distributed defense makes sense. Here's the way the headline writer put it:

FAILSAFE
On Sept. 11, passengers armed only with cell phones and courage succeeded where a multibillion-dollar military failed. Does their achievement mean that 50 years of American defense policy is all wrong?

After a careful and persuasive analysis of what worked (bottom-up action coordinated via cellphones and loved ones) and what didn't (centralized defense via scrambling jet fighters) on Sept. 11 after the first planes hit, Scarry enlarges the idea to nuclear policy, concluding that the world will not give up these "monarchic weapons" (because they are to be used without any consent by the citizenry) until the U.S. does.

The Ideas section of the Sunday Globe is only two weeks old, an expansion of the intellectual content of the journal after it constracted its book section a few months ago. Scarry's article is exactly the sort of piece that will make this section work: provocative without extremism, broadening in scope as it moves along rather than narrowing to details, and very nicely written.

Note: The Globe locks up its content after a few days because it would rather make a few bucks than be a continuing presence in the world's global conversation.

In poking around the Web about Scarry, I immediately found an interview with her (by David Bowman) at Salon about the relationship of beauty and justice. What a remarkable thinker. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:41:30 PM -

What he said:

A Simple Sense of Dread I told someone yesterday that I'd been pushing the notion of Bush as Antichrist (defined by my Webster's as "a personage or power expected to corrupt the world but be conquered by Christ's Second Coming") and he surprised me by saying that the comparison wasn't strong enough. . . which pretty much sums up how I feel these days. No outrage, no excess, no lie is too great to utter or execute. Democracy is dead, courtesy of the Supreme Court and the death of the free press. Every chicken coop has got a fox and the hens are all, well, chicken, with not a rooster to be seen (let alone a decent fighting cock). And now we're to be the Bully of the World, a return to barbarism as national policy. What a total perversion of everything I ever learned about America. I am sick to the depths of my red, white, & blue heart. Whatever happened to the notion of the strength of IDEAS? Bully of the World, as if everyone else will just knuckle under, too. Declaring one's intention to lord it over all will only create more enemies. An otherwise extremely intelligent friend of mine who probably watches too much TV is in favor of invading Iraq. He asked me, what did I want us to do, wait until Saddam detonates an atom bomb in downtown L.A.? I told him, "Well yes, frankly!" Never mind that there is no chance in hell a little country like Iraq would ever risk attacking the United States. We can't go around killing everyone who gives us dirty looks. This is like the Lone Ranger riding into town and shooting all the guys with black hats before they're rustled a single steer. It's like love is dead. Can that really be? I feel like God gave us the Big Exam on 9-11 and we totally flunked. The government's reaction to the events of that day filled me with foreboding that has never gone away. . . Is this really going to happen? It'll be like watching Daddy take the deliver boy out back and crush his skull with a cinder block because he didn't show enough respect. God, I feel awful. Quick, turn this into satire. There must be a way. [FarrFeed]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:21:47 PM -

"SUSANNA CORNETT has the solution to Florida's election problems. Sadly, I think this might actually be the way to go...." [InstaPundit]

This was too good to pass up posting. Go ahead - make your day.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:56:46 PM -

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don"t understand your attitude. Even if you plan or releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don"t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about "Warner Brothers"? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor"s eye, and even before there had been other brothers--the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (This was originally "Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?" but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other one, and whittled it down to "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?")

Now Jack, how about you? Do you maintain that yours is an original name? Well it"s not. It was used long before you were born. Offhand, I can think of two Jacks--Jack of "Jack and the Beanstalk," and Jack the Ripper, who cut quite a figure in his day.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:47:23 PM -

I vote for entertainment!

posted by davidfg at September 16 1:08 PM. What are the ethics of forwarding an e-mail you were not mean to receive? What if it is sure to humiliate the sender? What if it ends up entertaining untold numbers of people around the globe? [MetaFilter]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:21:43 PM -

Well said.

posted by crasspastor at September 15 11:15 PM. What's our government doing right now? Nobody cares. (via David Cogswell) "There is this gap, you see, this enormous, gaping separation between what the honest and ardent and yet often shockingly misinformed populace believes drives the heart of this great nation, and what actually drives it." Slap a new adhesive flag over the one bleached by the summer sun and let's get to it. This really has to stop. [MetaFilter]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:20:42 AM -

BIOYIOP, JMHFOOC, and WFHIT.

A friend pointed me to Oliver Clark's Acronym Dictionary.

YMMV

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:09:50 PM -

John D. Erickson took issue with my entry on why being a liberal isn't fun, writing in an email:

Someone in "Slate" posed the same question a week or two ago. I would say it should be fairly obvious why it's no fun being a liberal in a nation in which a fascistic, if not a fascist, government is running the show. ..[L]iberals were the most fun during the Kennedy-Johnson eras.

Say, you don't suppose this has anything to do with being somewhere around 20 years old, do you?

Yeah, I suppose, maybe, mumble mumble. I.e., nail on the head, John. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:06:24 PM -

I confess to being a knee-jerk, pacifist-leaning, NPR-listening, white-wine-swilling, heart-bleeding, Kennedy-voting, cigarette-banning, tie-dye-wearing, Mondale-mourning, Vineyard-vacationing, West-Wing-Tivo-ing, decade-old-spare-joints-in-a-bottom-draw-stashing, male-distrusting, race-apologizing, criminal-coddling Jewish atheist pointy-headed bleeding-heart middle class middle aged Liberal.

So, http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/255/living/Conservatively_sp">Alex Beam's column in the Boston Globe today was thought-provoking. (I usually find his writing just plain old provoking.) He points out that the Conservatives have much more fun than we do. They get to drive in their SUV's, blow up bad guys, and rant on talk shows about how the media don't give conversatives any air time.

There's something to this. They're the Bad Boys/Girls. We're the scolds. It'd be real good to make Liberalism fun again.

Again? Yes, kiddies, there was a time when being a lefty-liberal meant that you were cool and the conservatives were squares. We got to smoke dope while they watched John Wayne movies. We got free sex while they reproduced via the missionary position. We got to rethink the world while they were pledging their allegiance. If nothing else, the left was the happenin' place to be. Now it's as glamorous as sensible shoes.

We should work on changing this. Maybe a new hairstyle or something. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:19:09 PM -

eWeek's Lisa Vaas conjured up this list:

Don't even think about trying to get a job in IT without at least several of the following skills. Based on eWeek Labs analysts' experience and feedback from IT veterans, even IT newbies should strive to have:

• The ability to take apart a computer (and put it back together again)
• Basic skills in Windows 2000, Windows NT and Linux administration
• Familiarity with at least one of the significant databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server)
• Experience in security hardening and knowledge of security issues
• Strong skill in HTML creation and editing
• At least a working ability to create and edit XML, XML Schema and DTDs
• Knowledge of a scripting language
• Working knowledge of at least one significant modern programming language
• Familiarity with router and switch configuration
• Experience with using an SNMP system to track system faults
• Ability to automate desktop management tasks such as disk cloning for new-system setup
• Familiarity with (and frequent visits to) key knowledge bases, including BugTraq, Slashdot and major vendors' Web sites
• People skills, especially the ability to work as part of a team
• A tough skin

Reminds me of this bit from Robert Heinlein's "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long", 1978, aphorisms from Time Enough for Love.

A human being should be able to:

• change a diaper,
• plan an invasion,
• butcher a hog,
• conn a ship,
• design a building,
• write a sonnet,
• balance accounts,
• build a wall,
• set a bone,
• comfort the dying,
• take orders,
• give orders,
• cooperate,
• act alone,
• solve equations,
• analyze a new problem,
• pitch manure,
• program a computer,
• cook a tasty meal,
• fight efficiently,
• die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects. 

I like that weblogs touch on the fullness of life. If only the hiring process did too. The Notebooks at Amazon.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:12:58 PM -

It takes about 25 bored fans in a stadium to start a Mexican wave, reports a study in Nature. The title of the paper "Mexican waves in an excitable medium" brings a new meaning to the usually dry scientific definition of  "excitable medium".

More at Science Nature Update

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:08:22 PM -

Thanks to jenett.radio for pointing to the following article--that of all the articles that I have read about the 9-11 anniversary, speaks to me and helps clarify my feelings.

From the Real to the Unreal.

I don't feel strong enough to stop the militarization and loss of freedom in our society.  But by clinging to the real-- to the small scale true relationships, by building trust with one person at a time, by making some changes at the margin, like electing a few more democrats, perhaps we can create some islands in the storm.  Let's not go from the real to the unreal.  Let's go from the unreal to the real.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:12:49 PM -

The Tuesday Morning Quarterback goes deep!

TMQ Would Meet Susan Sarandon at the Refrigerator Anytime: The 596-page September issue of InStyle, the magazine's annual "What's Sexy Now" cover, recently arrived at TMQ's home via crane. Just seeing the size of the issue was depressing enough. In magazine publishing, high page length means loads of advertising. A glam magazine with 596 pages! In contrast, the September and current weekly issues of The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Harper's and the New Yorker -- the four publications that are the last, shining hope of American thought and culture -- totaled 464 pages. InStyle bested all of them combined, despite the fact that its content is indistinguishable from advertising. Check that -- maybe because its content is indistinguishable from advertising.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:17:52 PM -

Operation Plunging Defense Industry

Operation Nail-biting Dragon

Operation Unpleasant Venom

Operation Expansive Sucker Punch

Operation Steel Oilfield

Operation Underwear-staining Demon

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:12:26 PM -

Take over the controls of the Enterprise!  Beam, Warp, and Open the Door, etc.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:55:19 PM -

"Authorities are investigating a complaint that retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched a man in the face, because he was asked to swear on a Bible that he had been on the moon."

You the man, Buzz.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:24:08 PM -

Rock out!

posted by Reggie452 September 10 12:09 PM | 0 comments. Kittens + The White Stripes = "Punk Kittens" I know it's not Friday yet, but I thought this was too good to wait. [MetaFilter]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:27:53 PM -

It would be easy to dismiss the harm that has been done to our civil liberties in the past year. Most of us do not know anyone whose rights have been seriously curtailed. The 1,200 detainees rounded up after Sept. 11 and held in secret were mainly Muslim men with immigration problems. So were the people the government tried to deport in closed hearings. The two Americans who were labeled "enemy combatants," hustled off to military brigs and denied the right even to meet with a lawyer, are a Saudi-American man captured in Afghanistan and a onetime Chicago gang member.

There is also no denying that the need for effective law enforcement is greater than ever. The Constitution, Justice Arthur Goldberg once noted, is not a suicide pact.

And yet to curtail individual rights, as the Bush administration has done, is to draw exactly the wrong lessons from history. Every time the country has felt threatened and tightened the screws on civil liberties, it later wished it had not done so. In each case -- whether the barring of government criticism under the Sedition Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1918, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II or the McCarthyite witch hunts of the cold war -- profound regrets set in later.

When we are afraid, as we have all been this year, civil liberties can seem abstract. But they are at the core of what separates this country from nearly all others; they are what we are defending when we go to war. To slash away at liberty in order to defend it is not only illogical, it has proved to be a failure. Yet that is what has been happening.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:20:13 PM -

JOHO points to two of Dan Gilmor's columns.

Ten Decisions that Shaped the Net Dan G .... Ten Decisions that Shaped the Net

Dan Gillmor writes up the presentation Scott Bradner — one of the people who has shaped the Internet from the beginning — gave at the stealth conference I was at. Scott's presentation was brilliant and Dan synthesizes it perfectly. If you care about what really made the Internet into what it is, this is must reading.

Dan also points to some pretty durn funny UI humor. [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:42:16 PM -

More goodness from Dan Gillmor. In a column about what we can do to make our homeland more secure, he says that broadband is central to securing our information infrastructure since it allows data to be distributed rather than clustered in cities. (He also comes up with some crackpot ideas about using renewable energy, conserving, etc. Those West Coasters are just so nutty! ) [JOHO the Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:39:23 PM -

Good question.

Why is Newsday.com the only place I'm seeing this list (from A.P.) being published? [Steven's Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:37:22 PM -

Yin/Yang, Black/White, 0/1.

Nerdiest theology ever. Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, is being interviewed on Slashdot. One of the questions from the peanut gallery asked him if he really believed in God, and how he reconciled faith and science. His answer is the nerdiest expression of theology I've ever encountered -- and I mean that in a good way.

You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:

A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.

Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average, if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shoedinger's Cat. You're the observer there, not me--unless of course you're dead. :-)

A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.

Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.

And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:19:41 PM -

Sports Injury Clinic is a nice website wit good useful patienet-orieted info on sports injuries.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:00:06 AM -

Amen!

posted by donkeyschlong September 8 5:33 PM | 46 comments. So it's come to this. I don't know about you, but in the midst of various orgies (911, West Nile and kindernappings, to name but a few), I've never hated our media more. [MetaFilter]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:45:49 AM -

I keep seeing the movie Groundhog Day.

In reruns.

Over and over.

I can't help it.

Every time I see it I learn something new.

And I am changed by it.

I hope to grow up enough to get out of this cycle.

And figure out what that means.

imdb.

Plumbing the Depths of Groundhog Day.

[aka life]

[a klog apart]

» I've always loved this movie and when I saw the IMDB link I wanted to go see what other people said about it.  I'm glad I did because I read this:

"The other thing I noticed, while reflecting on this movie, is how uncertainty can keep us from charitable acts. We use our ignorance like a crutch: we don't give to charity because it may be a scam, we don't offer to help someone because they may not need help anyway, and so on. But Phil doesn't have the luxury of ignorance. He knows...he knows with absolute certainty that if he doesn't buy the old man a bowl of soup, that man will die in the streets within a few hours. He knows that if he isn't on hand at the right time, a boy will fall from a tree and break his neck. Faced with such knowledge, even Phil, self-absorbed as he is, cannot stand by idly. Nor could we, in his position. This is a powerful argument for knowledge as the most reliable foundation for generous behavior. What other movie can offer an insight half so profound?"

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:15:44 AM -

Fly virtually anywhere in the US.  This is incredible.  [source Jon Callas' Eristocracy mailing list]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:27:31 PM -

Found by my wife:

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:03:45 PM -

BTW, here are two services I found to be new:  Google University search and Google Catalogue search (looks like they are doing some fancy optical character recognition on physical catalogues -- I bet textbooks are next). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:32:33 AM -

Geek Beauty & everyone else's poetry and eye candy, except for the porno-lovers of course.  I just love this stuff.  How much disk space do pictures take up on servers?  The equivalent of 1 k words I suspect.  Here is a site with art collage inspired by the X-Files, and since this site identifies picture of self, it probably has a human helper, because where is a keyboard paws-friendly?

That reminds me of some humor about our furry friends.

Cat Physics

Presented at the Institute of Theoretical & Applied Cat Physics, forwarded to Al by iVillager Graceanne and Gary.Holliday

1. Law of Cat Inertia

A cat at rest will tend to remain at rest, unless acted upon by some outside force, such as the opening of cat food, or a nearby scurrying mouse.

2. Law of Cat Motion

A cat will move in a straight line, unless there is a really good reason to change direction.

3. Law of Cat Magnetism

All blue blazers and black sweaters attract cat hair in direct proportion to the darkness of the fabric.

4. Law of Cat Thermodynamics

Heat flows from a warmer to a cooler body, except in the case of a cat, all heat flows to the cat.

5. Law of Cat Stretching

A cat will stretch to a distance proportional to the length of the nap just taken. 

6. Law of Cat Sleeping

All cats must sleep with people whenever possible, in a position as uncomfortable for the people involved as is possible for the cat.

7. Law of Cat Elongation

A cat can make her body long enough to reach just about any countertop that has anything remotely interesting on it.

8. Law of Cat Acceleration

A cat will accelerate at a constant speed, until he gets good and ready to stop.

9. Law of Dinner Table Attendance

Cats must attend all meals when anything good is served.

10. Law of Rug Configuration

No rug may remain in its naturally flat state for very long.

11. Law of Obedience Resistance

A cat's resistance varies in inverse proportion to a human's desire for her to do something.

12. First Law of Energy Conservation

Cats know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and will therefore use as little energy as possible.

13. Second Law of Energy Conservation

Cats also know that energy can only be stored by a lot of napping.

14. Law of Refrigerator Observation

If a cat watches a refrigerator long enough, someone will come along and take out something good to eat.

15. Law of Electric Blanket Attraction

Turn on an electric blanket and a cat will jump into bed at the speed of light.

16. Law of Random Comfort Seeking

A cat will always seek, and usually take over, the most comfortable spot in any given room.

17. Law of Bag / Box Occupancy

All bags and boxes in a given room must contain a cat within the earliest possible nanosecond.

18. Law of Cat Embarrassment

A cat's irritation rises in direct proportion to her embarrassment times the amount of human laughter. 

19. Law of Milk Consumption

A cat will drink his weight in milk, squared, just to show you he can.

20. Law of Furniture Replacement

A cats desire to scratch furniture is directly proportional to the cost of the furniture.

21. Law of Cat Landing

A cat will always land in the softest place possible.

22. Law of Fluid Displacement

A cat immersed in milk will displace her own volume, minus the amount of milk consumed.

23. Law of Cat Disinterest

A cat's interest level will vary in inverse proportion to the amount of effort a human expends in trying to interest him.

24. Law of Pill Rejection

Any pill given to a cat has the potential energy to reach escape velocity.

25. Law of Cat Composition

A cat is composed of Matter + Anti-Matter + It Doesn't Matter.

26. Law of Selective Listening

Although a cat can hear a can of tuna being opened a mile away, she can't hear a simple command three feet away.

27. Law of Equidistant Separation

All cats in a given room will locate at points equidistant from each other, and equidistant from the center of the room.

28. Law of Cat Invisibility

Cats think that if they can't see you, then you can't see them.

29. Law of Space-Time Continuum

Given enough time, a cat will land in just about any space.

30. Law of Concentration of Mass

A cat's mass increases in direct proportion to the comfort of the lap she occupies.

31. Law of Cat Probability (Uncertainty Principle)

It is not possible to predict where a cat actually is, only the probability of where she "might" be.

32. Law of Cat Obedience

As yet undiscovered.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:03:25 AM -

Four MILLION people?! How do they compile these statistics? A census question? <<The Psychology and Neuroscience of Alien Abduction. If the figures are to be believed, up to 4 million people have been abducted by aliens in the US... Although the existence of human hungry aliens might be impossible to disprove per se, it is unlikely that extra-terrestrials could manage such mass kidnappings without being commonly noticed. This suggests that there are many people who falsely believe they have been seized by creatures from outer-space, perhaps after experiencing unusual and bizarre phenomena.  [kuro5hin.org]>>

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:05:29 AM -

Freeman Dyson... no man's Hermeneuticist:

"Most religion in the world doesn't have theology. Theology is something very peculiar to Christianity. It didn't even come from Jesus. It was an accident. The Greek world was heavily philosophical at the time Christianity was developing, and so the Christians adopted all this jargon from Greek philosophy and incorporated it into their religion; that became theology. I've never found it essential to my religion or to other religions. Judaism has practically no theology, and Islam has very little - Buddhism, even less. It's given rise to this profession of theologians who would like to make the subject into a science..."

"...balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for."

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:31:07 PM -

A memetics experiment — pass it along.

Life in the Aggregator. An Experiment: Life in the Aggregator. How far can it travel?  Please play by passing it along, including all source links... [jenett.radio]

I'm willing to play [McGee's Musings]

There we go. [via Seb's Open Research]

(via both2and) [Radio Free Blogistan]

Yeah
[Stuff from Wozz]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:37:15 PM -