There’s a good article in today’s NYTimes about Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita’s work in remapping human sensation — allowing the blind to “see” via tactile feedback on the tongue for example. Sounds like there have been some breakthroughs recently in terms of miniaturization and wearability (no surprise there), plus some good results in allowing people with damaged vestibular systems to regain normal balance unaided.
Remapping human sensation Read More »
Amtrack is now starting to perform random ID checks on their trains, “as part of a broader program to improve security.” As Bruce Schneier points out, “this works because, somehow, terrorists don’t have IDs.”
From the article: The security program is the result of a federal directive, issued in May, to protect rail passengers from terrorism. I wonder if this is an expansion of the same secret, need-to-know-basis directives that John Gilmore is suing over.
Papers please… part, oh, 52 Read More »
Maybe I just think in audio, but there’s something about poetry being read aloud that I’ve never gotten from text. I especially love the way former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Colins reads his work — take this audio of his reading of his poem Litany.
Litany (Billy Colins) Read More »
For locals, Doug Englebart is speaking tomorrow at the Bay Area Future Salon at SAP in Palo Alto. (Thanks Perlick!)
Doug Englebart talk tomorrow in Palo Alto Read More »
It’s 2008, a constitutional amendment has been passed to allow immigrants who have been US citiziens for more than 20 years to run for president, and in a surprise move Rupert Murdoch beats Arnold Schwarzenegger in the primaries and at age 77 becomes the nation’s oldest president.
I gotta stop eating rich foods right before bed…
(As a side note, that constitutional amendment makes a lot of sense to me in this day and age. I’ve been pretty impressed with Schwartzenegger this past year too, for that matter…)
Google’s got a new service for searching journals, conference proceedings and other scholarly writings called (appropriately enough) Google Scholar. Nice clean interface, and like Citeseer they’re pointing not just to the official pay-for-download sites like the ACM and IEEE portal sites but also the free-for-download versions that authors usually put on their own sites (often in violation of copyright, but the last thing professional orgs want to do is piss of their own community).
NPR just did a 5-month investigative report on how Homeland Security is jailing non-citiziens without trial for up to two years, where they’re being threatened or attacked & bitten by guard-dogs, beaten by guards and then eventually deported.
Guantanimo? No, New Jersey. It’s all in response to a Clinton-era law calling for the deportation of non-citiziens who have ever in the past been convicted of a crime — even people like Hemnauth Mohabir who had been fined $250 for carrying about $5 worth of drugs, had a steady honest job, is married to a US citizien and has a child with her.
Guantanimo in New Jersey? Read More »
Cuddos to Representative Christopher Shays (R-CT) for speaking out against the Republican repeal of their own Gingrich-Revolution-era rule that would require Tom DeLay to step down as Speaker if he’s indicted for violating state campaign finance laws.
“This is a mistake,” said Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut.
When the Republicans gained control of the House in the elections of 1994, “we were going to be different,” Mr. Shays said.
But “every time we start to water down what we did in ’94,” he said, “we are basically saying the revolution is losing its character.”
Salute to the Honorable Republican Of The Day Read More »
For you locals, there’s a potentially interesting talk tonight at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco: U.S. Health Care in Crisis, by the two Time Magazine investigative journalists who just wrote Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business — And Bad Medicine. The interview on KQED’s Forum was good — if I can somehow make it to The City in time I’ll probably attend…
Talk on health care tonight in SF Read More »
Seen at the DEAF’04 festival: Very Slow-Scan Television. Gebhard Sengmüller builds on Slow-Scan TV, a video-transmission system developed to send TV over Ham Radio at around 8 frames per second. Then he hooks it up to a large robotic ink-jet printer that injects cyan, yellow and magenta ink into bubblewrap, producing one frame in about 10 hours.
Very Slow Scan Television Read More »