putative.com

Battle bugs: cyborg beetles, robotic "entomopters," and more

The future may be horrifying, but it is also hella interesting. I mean, "[T]he HI-MEMS program seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable." Wow!

Honestly, though (and maybe I'm being a callous and/or naive American), the weaponizing doesn't scare me as much as the surveillance-izing. This is, um, an understatement: "CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window.... Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn't necessarily be good for our mental health."

And I always love the titles of technical papers, just their reserve and comprehensiveness and cadence, but I'm afraid this one has gone a little Hollywood:

Fantastic tilt-shift photos of Seattle

Monorail! Browse the whole set (incl. a great Capitol Hill shot), found via the Metblogs flickr pool. Don't miss the ones of the ferries and the port, which you clearly need to save hi-res versions of to use as your desktop.

The Reagan legacy

I just saw this letter to the editor in the latest New Yorker, responding to an article about carbon footprints. (Feetprints? Feetsprint?) Anyway: Why is that with almost all politicians, no matter how widely revered, you always find out later that they were pretty much pricks? I mean, the budget changes, even the Christmas Eve thing, that could be chalked up to just policy and fiscal-year coincidence. But removing the solar panels? Wow, what a prick:

It's so rare these days to see Jimmy Carter praised for anything he did as President that it was startling to see him called "prescient" in Michael Specter's article about assessing carbon emissions ("Big Foot," Febryary 25th).

But not only did Carter see the conflict between our energy demand and the resources to satisfy it, he acted on it. To reduce our dependence on imported oil, in 1977 a national goal was set (with bipartisan support) to to derive twenty per cent of our energy from renewable source and conservation by the year 2000. Toward that end the Solar Energy Research Institute was established, in Colorado, along with four regional centers (I worked at one of them) to help foster the commercialization and adoption of alternate energy technologies and practices.

When Ronald Reagan took office, he slashed the institute's budget, ordered the four centers shut (on Christmas Eve), allowed tax incentives for renewables to lapse, and, for good measure, removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. So here we are, over a quarter of a century later, more dependent than ever on foreign oil, and barely at square one in dealing with the problem.

Steve Nelson
Washington, Mass.

Best use of Word ever maybe

I'm realizing that the real reason I hate Word so much is that it's not really designed for me to get my work done. It's designed for creating documents like this one, which I found on the community bulletin board at my building and which is maybe my Favorite Document of the Year:

Liveblogging the Gettysburg Address

I think the practice of liveblogging is, generally, an abomination. It's like somebody went, "Hmmm, how I can take the technology of the Internet and somehow make it worse than TV?" So of course I thought this was really funny. E.g.:

"...a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Ahhh...now he slips it to us! 'Fourscore and seven,' indeed! He's bringing us back to the Marxist rant of 1776, completely ignoring the Constitution of 1787 in rhetoric as he has in practice. I'll believe we're all equal when I'm as tall as Lincoln, or as ugly. And the slaves he's so fond of may be his equals, but I'm damned if they're mine.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Right. As if Mr. Lincoln's victory over his sectional enemies on behalf of his black friends were the same as the survival of the nation. It all comes back to the cult of personality.

"Wikihistory": time-traveling Wikipedia-comment parody

I thought this was hilarious. Very short and funny, and it starts like this (and only gets better):

International Association of Time Travelers: Members' Forum Subforum: Europe –Twentieth Century – Second World War Page 263

11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you've never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I've got nothing better to do?

Obama's speech on race

I meant to post this yesterday and just forgot: I easily spend more than 38 minutes a day reading about politics, on a dozen different blogs. But I'm always trying to "optimize" that attention, taking in as much as I can, trying to get the most up-to-the-second information that I can—which I often realize in retrospect is kind of a retarded, Sisyphean waste of time most days, given how quickly things change.

Anyway, I was reading commentary on Obama's speech on race yesterday morning in between work, figuring that how the speech was received was more important than the speech itself. While that's arguably true, I realized I was robbing myself of my own reaction, and just the satisfaction of consuming some rare (for me) non-meta content.

So I did the unthinkable and set aside *38 whole minutes* at lunch to watch the entire speech. When I watched it, it had only 700 views on YouTube—so I'm sure many, many commenters, pro and con, hadn't even watched it then—but I'm glad to see that it's gotten over 1.2 million views now.

If you haven't watched it, treat yourself, no matter who you're supporting. It's honest, articulate, and substantive, difficult to reduce to soundbites—and if that's the kind of politics you say you want, you should prove it by watching the speech and judging Obama's response for yourself:

Switching from grass lawns to food lawns

Check out this short article/slideshow from the NYT Magazine about Edible Estates, a book and movement about switching from grass lawns to food lawns. (Michael "Omnivore's Dilemma" Pollan is also involved.)

Before and after:

This is even more important in lieu of the Big Shitpile! (Or yes, Chris, "Alan Greenspan's Salty Chocolate Balls.") As much as I don't want a yard myself, I would gladly come sharecrop on the Tweet or Dawson estates. We can barely grow appetizers out of planter boxes on the balcony.

60-mile wifi!

I know, I know, we'll all have bigger things to worry about as we're enveloped by the Big Shitpile. But wow: wifi with a 60-mile range!

Intel has announced plans to sell a specialized Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough--up to about 6.5 megabits per second--that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine, he says.

Why *only* 60 miles? "Any farther away, and the system encounters problems due to the curvature of the earth."

"Paste as plain text" in Word 2008 with a keyboard shortcut

Joe Kissell from TidBITS created an easy-to-incorporate script that lets you "paste as plain text" in Word 2008 with a simple command-shift-v. If you're not religious about using styles, Word is painfully obtuse about following formatting, so I do this dozens of times a day—so thanks, Joe! You've made me hate Word 2008 just a little bit less.