the pod bay door

.: Tonight after work, I attended a presentation sponsored by GELA, called The Librarians’ Emerging Technology Survival Guide. The presentation was given by my two friends and colleagues, Geoff Harder and Kenton Good. Geoff and Kenton prepared and delivered a whizbang slide presentation built on a Mac iBook G4, and covered a multitude of cutting edge, state-of-the-art technologies that are changing the way we live, learn, enjoy, and interact with each other. The challenge to those attending was to consider the myriad of ways to implement, exploit, manipulate and apply these technologies to the way we run libraries. They mentioned Web 2.0 a number of times, which helped give a context to their presentation. Web 2.0 is the movement that focuses on the web as platform, and most of the innovative technologies covered in their presentation are ones which fit into this description. I also like the idea of Library 2.0, in which the library considers its patrons as participants rather than customers. It’s all about the collaboration!

Geoff and Kenton presented almost 200 slides in 90 minutes, and worked it as a tag team presentation. It was tight, professional, and not too overpowering. They added appropriate and well-received funny bits, and dazzled us with a virtual light show of a presentation. Great work, guys.

.: BTW, I thought tonight’s episode of Lost redeemed itself somewhat over last week’s rather limp presentation. Now we know why Michelle Rodriguez was so into beating the shyte out of everyone around her. One wonders if any of these plebs is without 16 tons of emotional baggage. I suppose not, otherwise the show would run out of flashbacks. And for those who watched the end of tonight’s episode, will there be love in the stars for Kate and Sawyer, and Jack and Ana Lucia? Someone say soap opera?

The 12th and final episode of Rome was brilliant and maddening. While I’m pleased that the show will be back, having to wait until 2007 is a bit much, HBO! Then again, we haven’t seen The Sopranos since 2004, and they don’t return until March 2006.

..: Like millions of other teevee fans, I’ve been watching Lost with much interest since the opening episode last fall. Last night was the 30th episode, the 7th in Season Two, called The Other 48 Days. This episode crammed into one hour capsulized the 48 days in the lives of the survivors who were in the tail section of the plane, which broke apart in mid-flight, and landed on the other side of the island, away from the first group of survivors we have followed since Episode 1. The show is a non-stop tease, revealing small bits of information about the island and background detail about one or more survivors week after week. But I’m wondering if the show is beginning to jump the shark.

From the outset, the required suspension of disbelief has been exhausting. In the first episode, the show opens with Dr Jack waking up in the jungle, some distance away from the 45+ other survivors, most of whom are on the beach near the fuselage. Later, we learn that the plane had split apart in mid-air…and 45 people survived, most without a scratch. Still later in Ep 1, the pilot gets snatched from the cockpit section of the plane by a “mysterious force” which has never been explained.

in Season One, we met Danielle, a nutcase living on the island for 17-18 years, weary and frightened of “The Others”. A few episodes in, we met Ethan, a resident of the island who kidnaps two of the Lost’ers, only to be killed by a hobbit Charlie a few eps later. No explanation to date of who he was, or if he was part of “The Others”. Season One ended with “The Others” kidnapping young Walt, shooting Josh in the shoulder, and blowing up the raft on which they, along with Jin-Soo and Michael were floating, trying to escape the island ; Jin-Soo dives into the water and disappears, and Michael and Josh are left hanging onto what’s left of the raft.

Season Two took us into the shaft, where it was revealed that someone (Desmond) was living there with supplies, food, electricity, etc., and was resetting a computer with a series of numbers every 108 minutes to “save the world”. The six numbers he entered matched the numbers Hurley had previously chosen in a lottery, which he won to the tune of $156,ooo,ooo. And so it goes…

But Episode 7 of Season 2 had an opening that hit home for me as to why I’m finding it harder and harder to buy the premise of survival after such a horrific event. The opening shot is of a beautiful tropical beach, sand, blue water, sunny blue sky, tranquil…until shards and chunks of the airplane come flying across the landscape at speeds reminiscent of similar scenes in the movie Twister, begging the question: howinhell could anyone survive such a crash, let alone without a scratch on them?

I will continue with Lost, but confess that my interest to know the answers to some of these questions is beginning to wear thin. I really like this show. However, I think J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof are taking too long to reveal enough information critical to allow their viewers to continue watching, remain intrigued, accept the barely-believable premise, and expend enough energy to maintain a continuing suspension of disbelief as more clues are slowly revealed.

Oh, and speaking of sharks, did anyone notice in the second episode that the Dharma logo was on the shark’s tail as it circled the remains of the raft? Suspension of disbelief?

NOTE: Also posted to Blogcritics.com.

.: The view from the door to my parents’ place in Winnipeg, 15 November 2005:

View image

.: As mentioned earlier, it was revealed recently that Sony has been embedding rootkit software into some of its new CDs to copy-protect the discs. Sony has shipped >4.7 million CDs containing the software in the past eight months, and >2.1 million have been sold. Now it is backfiring on Sony dramatically. A few days ago, Sony announced suspension of the production of CDs with this technology. Sony is recalling millions of CDs with this software embedded within each disc. It gets worse. Today, Websense, a security company, confirmed it has discovered malicious web sites designed to exploit security flaws in the rootkit uninstaller programmer released by Sony.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose Board Members include Lawrence Lessig, has written an open letter to Sony-BMG protesting this and demanding reparations for customers. Among the EFF’s demands: “Compensate consumers for any damage to their computers caused by the infected products, including the time, effort, and expenditure required to remedy the damage or verify that their computer systems or networks were or were not altered or damaged by XCP or SunnComm MediaMax products.”

One has to wonder what Sony’s engineers and computer whiz kids were thinking when they came up with this gobbler.

.: The USPTO has granted Boris Volfson, an inventor in Huntington IN, US Patent 6,960,975: Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state. According to National Geographic News, the patent is a design for an antigravity space vehicle:

Volfson’s craft is theoretically powered by a superconductor shield that changes the space-time continuum in such a way that it defies gravity. The design effectively creates a perpetual-motion machine, which physicists consider an impossible device.

The “invention” defies the laws of physics (you cannot change the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics). Robert Park tracks scientifically absurd patents for the American Physical Society. Excerpt from an article in 10 November 2005 Nature, discussed in Physics Forums:

This is not the first such patent to be granted, but it shows that patent examiners are being duped by false science, says physicist Robert Park, watchdog of junk science at the American Physical Society in Washington DC. Park tracks US patents on impossible inventions. “The patent office is in deep trouble,” he says.

“If something doesn’t work, it is rejected,” insists Alan Cohan, an adviser at the patent office’s Inventors Assistance Center in Alexandria, Virginia. And when something does slip through, he says, the consequences are not significant: “It doesn’t cause any problems because the patent is useless.”

But Park argues that patenting devices that so blatantly go against scientific understanding could give them undeserved respectability, and undermine the patent office’s reputation. “When a patent is awarded for an idea that doesn’t work, the door is opened for sham.”

Patent 6,960,975 was granted on 1 November to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Indiana. It describes a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield, which alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity. The device builds on a claim by the Russian physicist Eugene Podkletnov that superconductors can shield the effects of gravity. NASA was at one stage investigating the idea, but it has become almost as notorious as cold fusion as an example of fringe science.

On his own site, the inventor notes:

This proposal is for the patented inflationary vacuum spaceship. The implementation of this proposal would take years and billions of dollars. All new spaceships cost billions to develop. However, it would be cheap, quick and easy to build an orange-sized, electrically-powered “breadboard” device of my patent. The device could be gently placed, with the shuttle’s mechanical arm, on the shadow side of the next space shuttle, fired up, and observed whether it moves comparatively to the shuttle.

More details about the Inflationary Vacuum Spaceship are available.

.: Tony made mention of a recent opinion piece in the London Times by William Ress-Mogg, called A pope for our times: why Darwin is back on the agenda at the Vatican. Ress-Mogg reports on a recent press conference by Cardinal Paul Poupard, in which the Cardinal advises the faithful of the Catholic Church to listen to what modern science say. Excerpt:

In The Times Martin Penner reported the cardinal’s argument. He had said that the description in Genesis of the Creation was “perfectly compatible” with Darwin’s theory of evolution, if the Bible were read properly. “Fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim.”

He argued that the real message of Genesis was that the Universe did not make itself, and had a creator. “Science and theology act in different fields, each in its own.” In Rome, the immediate reaction was that this was a Vatican rejection of the fundamentalist American doctrine of “intelligent design”. No doubt the Vatican does want to separate itself from American creationists, but the significance surely goes further than that. This is not another Galileo case; the teachings of the Church have never imposed a literal interpretation of the language of the Bible; that was a Protestant mistake. Nor did the Church condemn the theory of evolution, though it did and does reject neo-Darwinism when that is made specifically atheist.

I was raised Cathlic, and while no longer a church-goer, Catholicism is still a part of me. It is refreshing to read this, especially after the previous note about the continuing idiocy in Kansas, and to know that the Catholic Church is trying to distance itself from fundamentalist nonsense like intelligent design.