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...nor am I out of it. |
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| Jun. 9th, 2009 @ 12:07 pm 451 Error: Unresolved Physical Storage Requirement | |||
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Current Music: Snow Patrol -- Chasing Cars  A recent article on TechCrunch suggested to me that the ability to create a personalised library on Google Books might just allow the burden of a physical library to be lifted at last. And how much better that the library would be fully searchable? Sadly, the product doesn't quite live up to the promise: books I've searched for aren't there; few books other than some ancient public domain material include an electronic, readable copy (fewer still with no pages missing in "preview mode"); when search works at all—I've searched "my library" in vain for phrases in my print copies—the search result text (ie. the context) is very terse, or even absent; and where this text is missing, the page numbers provided are just as likely to be from a different edition of the book. (To really rub it in, different editions of the same book have different levels of "previewable" material available.) So, not a lot of paradigm shifting there, yet. |
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| May. 20th, 2009 @ 11:15 am Monkey Riding? | |||
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| Current Music: Freur -- Doot Doot (12" Mix) OK, so the mind is what the brain does. But how meaningful is it to describe what the mind does in neurological or biochemical terms? Isn't the process by which a thing works in a different domain to the thing itself? The brain is a physical thing, an evolved bio-mechanism, part of a process, billions of years old, by which entropy generates complexity.[*] The brain is part of the universe of atoms and genes. The mind is an ephemeral thing, a lossy information storage, retrieval and recombination engine running on an operating system called "language" (and probably other levels, Wang's Carpets-like, beneath), part of a process, thousands of years old, by which society generates culture. The mind is part of the universe of patterns and memes. Just as software is not hardware and the map is not the territory, the mind is not the brain. I'm a dualist. Why aren't you? [* It's really the tendency of physical interactions to increase entropy—ie. to move towards equilibrium—which generates complexity, but that doesn't sound as good.] |
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| May. 10th, 2009 @ 01:51 pm Channelling the Techno-Zeitgeist | |||
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| Current Music: Silence Dear Lazyweb, The way Apache names its access logs is causing me grief and, because my bashfu is weak, I'm calling on you for assistance. ( Cut to prevent non-technical types encountering the Lovecraftian madness of shell scripting ) [Update: A missing "-" was the problem.] |
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| May. 9th, 2009 @ 11:18 am Bursting in Air | |||
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| Current Music: In the Nursery -- Bombed Obama's defence budget request is up 1.7% on last year in real terms, much of that in wages—plus some extra, extra treasure for his Asian campaigns, which will be funded to the tune of nearly double the rest of the budget. (If it wasn't for Godwin I'd mention Russia in winter.) I notice that even though the total missile defence allocation is down nearly 30%, this budget increases funding for the AEGIS ballistic missile defence system by 60%, and for the high tech THAAD small-to-medium missile defence system by 25% (and the latter's completion date has been brought forward from 2011 to this year). The missile defence allocation also includes a new $119M "Israeli Cooperative" item. It strikes me that if Gazan qassams were no longer any kind of threat (and Iranian Shahab-3s seemed a little less existential), even Bibi might be brought to the table. |
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| Feb. 27th, 2009 @ 11:08 am Practical Eumetics | |||
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| Current Music: Underworld -- Beautiful Burnout So, Sol Trujillo is [Update: I need to parse spin more carefully; that $40M is his total take-home from four years at Telstra.] |
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| Feb. 26th, 2009 @ 06:47 pm Good News from the War on Webs | |||
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| Current Music: Underworld -- JAL to Tokyo Lamer Senator and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's ever-expanding plan to cripple the country's internets (a policy supported by around 6% of Australians) has been blocked in the Senate by the independent Senator for the Murray-Darling, Nick Xenophon. Meanwhile, British Lamer have nicked a policy from the Tories (presumably while their backs were turned) and decided to promote Open Source in the public sector. Finally, the bumbling prosecution have had to amend the charges against those crazy kids from The Pirate Bay yet again, because they don't really understand what it is that torrents actually do. |
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