Doomsday Seed Vault a Cocaine Warehouse?

It seems that there is often troubling news mixed into otherwise promising stories. For example, I just read Biodiversity 'doomsday vault' comes to life in Arctic. It's nice to know that some of our planet's biodiversity is being backed up like we back up our harddrives. It's always good to have a back-up copy, right? I'm not troubled much by the thought that we might actually need such a vault. As a child of the Cold War, I came to terms with mass catastrophe, apocalypse, armageddon, and all that years ago. As someone who lives along the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico, I know first-hand what regional devastation looks and feels like.

What troubled me in this article was this paragraph:

Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the "doomsday vault" collection, but some of the world's biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.

How odd that there were gene vaults in Iraq and Afghanistan, two major places of violent American meddling. I wonder how many countries have gene vaults.

Another troubling bit of info in the article:

...samples sent from Colombia have been closely scrutinised by police to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.

WTF!? I hope to God that petty moralities aren't interfering in an important scientific/historical endeavor. We're talking about the future of life on this planet and some jackasses are worried that the vault's going to become a cocaine distribution warehouse? Seriously?

There are a lot of powerful people on this planet who need to grow up.

Support Wikileaks

A post at Slashdot tipped me off to this awesome article from The Guardian, Whistle while you work.

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week. Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents, found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

You don't think the US censors the internet? Think again. We're on lockdown every bit as much as supposedly repressive countries like China and Iran.

Since wikileaks.org doesn't work in the US at this time, The Guardian was kind enough to provide us with the IP number of the site so you can bypass the hamstrung nameservers, Wikileaks. The concept behind Wikileaks gives me shivers in a good way...

an open-source, democratic intelligence agency

DiCaprio to produce live-action Akira

E! Online has reported that Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions will be producing a live-action version of the popular Japanese animated movie Akira. It's due to be released sometime in 2009.

Google Becoming the World's Computer

Oh what a wonderful web article I've found, Google and the Wisdom of Clouds.

What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

The Machine Is Coming To Life!!!

It gets even better!

In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer.

See, more and more people and companies and any other number of legal fictions are turning to Google to process the brunt of their data. Whether you're simply a Gmail user or the administrator of a large university's network who turns to Google for help crunching numbers for the Physics Dept's mad nuclear experiments, you're entrusting important digital data on computer(s) other than your own. People trust Google. So do companies. So do universities. Kinda scary, doncha think? Kinda awe-inspiring, too...IMHO.

I could quote all sorts of lines from that BusinessWeek Google article. The article is cyberpunk-come-true.

We All Love Snuppy

I see articles such as the following as signs that cyberpunk is upon us.

A South Korean company says it has taken its first order for the cloning of a pet dog.

Craziness...

Speaking of cyberpunk, peep this:

Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users' "neural networks" to navigate a mobile phone interface "using touch and pre-touch input."

And how trippy is this:

The dilemma, left unsolved by the panelists, was how to squeeze the user through that window, past the cashier, to sample all the things in the store, without guilt, while still feeling grateful to the cashier who seemed, all along, to be standing in the way.

All this cyberpunk and psychonautical literature from an article about a panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which I think has a stupid and misleading headline.

Speaking of psychonauts, take a gander at this firsttime salvia user's experience: The World as a Pop-up book.

The rippling turned into an intense electric rolling, i began to sweat profusely and the world changed fast. Apparently I held my hands out in front of me for a while, like I was trying to tilt reality. I don’t know when it happened, but I realized this unbelievable truth. I finally learned that the world, existence, all of it doesn’t actually exist…its all a big joke, a conspiracy against me, and my friends were in on it.

Going back to the cloning thing. You know what makes that whole article hilarious? It's got this fairly scientific or serious tone and then near its final lines we find:

But the team did succeed in creating the world's first cloned dog two years ago - an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

YouTube's Bubbly Video Discovery Device

Genocide ringtone? That was one of the AdSense ads which appeared last time I looked at my blog. For all I know it'll be there when you view this. Anyway, that cracks me up bigtime. It just seems so shameless and almost offensive. How'd it get there? Well, there are/were a bunch of Darfur-related ads popping up because of my Sudan reference:

Iraq gettin to be old news? Afghanistan and Pakistan are played out? Iran's repetitive? North Korea not all that interesting? Want to branch out from the only African country you care about, Sudan? How about Chad as your next Big Cause?

As you can see, mention Sudan and AdSense will serve up an ad for Genocide Ringtones. Amazing.

My original intent when creating this post was to share this awesome video of Mad Season playing November Hotel:

As I was sitting here soaking in the greatness of their performance, I decided to expand the video to a full screen. Then I could soak it in even more. While floating on the waves of the glorious music and watching the musicians as if they were angels come to transport me to a holy place, I noticed a button along the bottom-left of the screen.

I clicked it.

The music stopped and the video-still shrunk to a little bubble in the center of a black screen. When I hovered the mouse over the bubble, a window popped up giving the title and band. OK. Then a bubble appeared above it. I couldn't quite tell who was in it so I hovered over it and found that it was a link to a video for Kiss's Detroit Rock City. As I hovered over it, a bazillion more bubbles popped up linking to other videos.

It's an interesting interface and discovery device. I'd never seen it before. Anyone know more about YouTube's bubbly video discovery device?

Verizon courts privacy advocates

I'm a customer of AT&T and while I can't really complain about my personal experience with them, I can't really say much that's positive, either. AT&T has participated in some customer surveillance shenanigans, though, and they seem to be willing to be compliant with government efforts to snoop on people.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed legal briefs and evidence against AT&T, claiming they are diverting Internet traffic to the NSA for widespread secret surveillance and possibly breaking federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment. [SecurityFocus]

It's not just AT&T, though. It seems that most companies involved with data flow are looking at ways to snoop on their customer's activities. Well, Thomas J. Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs at Verizon, is breathing some refreshing ideas into the discussion:

“We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content,” he said.

Amen, brother!

Preach on!

“We don’t want to solve any network congestion issues by restricting the flow of certain kinds of traffic,” he said.

Read the complete article from the New York Times: Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight. [by way of Gizmodo]

something to keep an eye on

Iraq gettin to be old news? Afghanistan and Pakistan are played out? Iran's repetitive? North Korea not all that interesting? Want to branch out from the only African country you care about, Sudan? How about Chad as your next Big Cause?

Set yer eyes on this article: France in warning to Chad rebels.

If that was interesting, Reuters has a more in-depth article: France backs Chad's Deby, ready to intervene.

We could go into Chad's colonial history but we're students of the hear-and-now. France is militarily backing a government in a foreign country against local armed rebels. Idriss Deby received military training in France. He came to power by coup.

So Chad's being torn up in violence between locals and Europeans/European-backed locals. Why would a bunch of rich white guys care so much about some random African country named after a guy I went to school with?

Chad is rich in gold and uranium and stands to benefit from its recently-acquired status as an oil-exporting state. [...]

Who stands to benefit? That's the question.