Sophont

HobbySpace - The Rocket Company : "The Rocket Company gives a fictional account of the development of a reusable launch vehicle, including a description of a business model that achieves the goal of greatly reducing the cost of space transportation into low Earth orbit. Although a work of fiction, the book follows in the vein of non-fictional accounts of the development of successful technological products and businesses, such as The Soul of a New Machine, and American Steel. The book tells the story of the difficulties faced by a group of seven fictional investors committed to solving the problem of creating an economic engine that will cause the cost of space transportation to spiral rapidly downward as the market for launch services expands. In this context, the marketing, regulatory, and technical problems facing any serious attempt to reduce the cost of space transportation are explored."

Wired 11.11: Hitting the Sweet Spot : "It's got full flavor at one-third the calories. It's safe for teeth and diabetics. And it's all-natural. The long, strange search for the ultimate sugar substitute." jaynote: I've been waiting for this since Dr. Levin mentioned he was working on this after a meeting of the NY chaptor of SFF/SSI/NSS around 1990

CAIB : "Columbia Accident Investigation Board Releases Vols. II-VI of Final Report ARLINGTON, VA - The Columbia Accident Investigation Board today released Vols. II-VI of the CAIB's Final Report. These volumes contain appendices that provide the supporting documentation for the main text of the Final Report contained in Vol. 1, which was released on Aug. 26, 2003. These appendix materials were working documents. They contain a number of conclusions and proposed recommendations, several of which were adopted by the CAIB in Vol. I. The other conclusions and proposed recommendations drawn in Vols. II-VI do not necessarily reflect the views of the CAIB but are included for the record. When there is conflict, Vol. I takes precedence. It alone is the CAIB's official statement. Hard copies of Vols. I-VI are available through the Government Printing Office for a fee. Those copies can be ordered from the GPO's website, www.gpo.gov. There will be no press briefing ab...

Adventures in Troubleshooting: TenCon Session: Deploying and Maintaining Mac OS X in the Enterprise : "TenCon Session: Deploying and Maintaining Mac OS X in the Enterprise Bethany and Gabriel from Pixar are talking about Deploying and Maintaining OS X in the Enterprise this morning. I'm putting all the session notes below the cut for the time being. The Stevens Creek room at the Westin is now quite full, maybe 120 people have gathered here to listen. Gabe and Bethany are both part of the IT culture at Pixar, and together make up most of the design team for their OS X squad. Preparing for the Deployment, 9 to X migration, Maintenance, and Future stuff. Preparing for the Deployment: Infrastructure is predominantly Iniox, 375 Mac Desktops, 100 laptops, and 500 Linux Workstations. Mac OS X provides a lower cost of ownership, allows Users to maintain OS 9 type control."

The Most Unconventional Weapon : "Fetishism can't explain why, according to testimony given to U.N. investigators, M.L.C. troops forced one woman to eat from her husband's corpse. It can't explain why some victims were ordered to swallow their own ears or toes, why Kakule had to eat the less desirable parts of his assistant's body alongside his captors or why, after the butchering of a Protestant priest, others were forced to pay money or eat his flesh -- or be butchered themselves. The inflicting of vengeance and spreading of terror -- aspects of war that are as modern as they are ancient -- have played a part in Congo's cannibalism. A Human Rights Watch report released in July suggests that ''perpetrators have found that fear of cannibalism terrorizes victims more effectively into compliance with their orders than does the simple fear of death, so frequently faced in daily life.'' But to travel on the visa sold in Beni, to travel around the...

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - Schools Riled by Teacher Ranking Site : "WASHINGTON WASHINGTON — A Web site that encourages students to rate their teachers has been banned from hundreds of schools across the nation and administrators are saying it's a distraction and an abomination. One official in Maryland called RateMyTeachers.com "personally and professionally repugnant" and suggested that teachers might have legal recourse against the Internet forum's operators. "It's akin to medieval public flogging," said Brian Porter, spokesman for the Montgomery County Public Schools (search), which said the Web site is filtered out automatically by a central Internet firewall, which blocks student access to anything deemed non-instructional or harmful to children. "It's a gross violation of teachers' privacy," he added. "There is nothing funny about subjecting a teacher to random and caustic remarks by students." "

The Register : "Most of my students are office workers, or writers, or homemakers. Almost all of them run Windows at home and at work, usually ME or XP. They all know how to 'use' their computers, which means that they can write papers, read email, use the Web, and even install software (as long as it's not packaged as a ZIP file: most of them have no idea what a ZIP file is or how to use it). In other words, your typical American computer user. I'm here to tell the security pros reading this that we are in deeeeeep trouble when it comes to securing the computers of these people. Security is just not a concept that 'normal' folks focus on. It's not even on the radar screen. It's just not thought about at all."

House Science Committee Subcommittee on Environment, Technology and Standards Hearing Charter: What is Space Weather and Who Should Forecast It? | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference : "The first recorded evidence of space weather effects on technology was in 1859, when a major failure of telegraph systems in New England and Europe coincided with a large solar flare. More recently, on March 13, 1989, geomagnetically induced currents in Canadian transmission lines set off a cascade of broken circuits, causing loss of power for the entire Hydro-Quebec power grid. The blackout affected six million customers and cost Hydro-Quebec more than $10 million. In 1998, a similar geomagnetic storm was headed for Earth. This time, thanks to data from new sensors and improved forecast models, NOAA's SEC forecasters were able to alert electric power customers 40 minutes before the storm hit the Earth. In response, electric power utilities diverted power and increased safety margins on certain ...

Hollywood wants in on the act - OCT 27, 2003 : "JERUSALEM - Where presidents and prime ministers have failed, Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt and wife Jennifer Anniston hope their star power will work wonders in new roles as Middle East peace envoys. Tinseltown to give a try, led by Brad Bitt (left) and his wife Jennifer Anniston. They will team up with other actors such as Edward Norton, Jason Alexander and Danny DeVito on a private mission to help resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict. 'The past few years of conflict mean that yet another generation of Israelis and Palestinians will grow up in hatred,' said a statement from Pitt and Aniston. 'We cannot allow that to happen.' London's Sunday Telegraph said it was not clear how the stars intended to stop the escalating violence but their strategy was to appeal to the man in the street."

Games * Design * Art * Culture : "Since the digital games revolution began, starry-eyed twits have been going on and on about how games will change education and lead us all down a future glorious path in which everyone learns everything because it's fun to do so. This is, of course, nonsense, and always will be, since creating something interactive =and fun= is bloody hard enough, and insisting that the result should also cram some facts into people's heads is enough to turn 'bloody hard' into 'well nigh impossible.' (And.... Have you noticed that every school computer lab in the country has Oregon Trail and SimCity installed--and few if any other games--and that this has been true for twenty years?) If I Ran the Z/o/o Con doesn't have to be a one-off, either. The same technique is usable for other subjects. If there's a body of knowledge that can be encapsulated in anecdotes, and a process that moves through time, you could do a game along the ...

allnurses.com - What freaks you out? - allnurses.com - Nursing Discussion Board for Nurses : "Okay, people. It's time for a nice, fun, light-hearted discussion to blow off some steam. WHAT FREAKS YOU OUT? What bodily fluid can't you STAND? What wound gives you the absolute WILLIES? It doesn't matter if you're an ADN, BSN, LPN, CNA, PQRST, ABCDEFG...every body gets the heebie jeebies over SOMETHING...even you stomach-of-steel ER nurses! Mine is eyeball injuries/surgery...aaaaaaaaaackkkkkkk!! Gross! Makes my skin absolutely CRAWL. Or when someone gets a little cut on their finger/toe/whatever and then squeezes it to make it bleed!! Bleah!! Then there's the ever-popular RESPIRATORY SECRETIONS. I can handle poop, pee, amniotic fluid, lanced boils, pus, whatever...but give me a nasty snot-filled trach, and I'm OUTTA THERE. Share, share, share people!"

Naked Protesters & Nude Activists : "Hello everyone, and welcome to Naked Protesters! All over the world, people are getting naked to get attention and to promote their causes. The purpose of this blog is to give them a little bit more of the attention they so obviously crave. We here at Naked Protesters don't propose to judge the causes being promoted; rather, we see it as our job to celebrate the flesh that gets exposed in the process. Nudity is beautiful, folks, and these activists are freely baring and sharing it with us all. Here's to them!"

Pat Freestone : After six hours of slogging through the mountain of links my Google search yielded, I finally came across the perfect therapist. I feel like I just got picked up hitch-hiking on the road to recovery. Dr Amy Zimmerman is a Harvard-educated psychologist who has been practicing for sixteen years. She specializes in self-esteem and intimacy issues, and has helped thousands of people move out of dysfunctional relationships and into healthy, caring ones. After speaking to Dr. Amy on the phone for a mere three minutes, I was ready to give her all my money and confide in her in great detail about how I sometimes like to touch myself while I’m watching documentaries about penguins. She’s that good. The only problem is, her office is in Pasadena, California. I figure if I leave my apartment by 8 am every Tuesday and Thursday, I can make my 1 pm sessions and still have time for a nice hamburger before catching the 3:30 flight back to New York. I’ll start working weeken...

Grand Illusions : "Welcome to Grand Illusions, the site for the enquiring mind. With optical illusions, scientific toys, visual effects, and even a little magic."

Math Trek : Tricky Dice Revisited, Science News Online, April 20, 2002 : "The game involves a set of four cubic dice, each one numbered differently. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more turns, you will nearly always have more wins. After the first session, you can invite your opponent to pick a different die, perhaps even the one that worked so well for you. You select one of the remaining dice. Again, in a game of at least 10 throws, you're very likely to come out the winner. Indeed, it doesn't matter which die your opponent picks. You can always choose another die that will practically guarantee your triumph in a game of 10 or more turns."

General in '68 Vietnam execution dies : "On Feb. 1, 1968, Loan was director of South Vietnam's national police and the North Vietnamese had just begun the Tet Offensive, their huge military push southward. Firefights had broken out all over Saigon, and Loan's police were trying to rid the South Vietnamese capital of Viet Cong guerrillas. Loan led the prisoner, his hands bound, onto a street corner and in front of a group of journalists pulled his pistol and shot the prisoner point-blank in the head. The general told the newsmen that the prisoner was a known Viet Cong captain. Eddie Adams' photo of the execution won a Pulitzer Prize for The Associated Press. NBC also showed film of the execution. Adams said yesterday that Gen. Loan's actions were misinterpreted because of the picture. 'The guy was a hero. America should be crying,' said Adams, now a free-lance photographer. 'I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything a...

Videography - The Daily Video Resource : "For $3,995, users get the JY-HD10 digital HD video camera and nonlinear editing software that allows them to edit their HD video on a well-equipped Windows XP computer. And, get this, another company is offering software to edit HD on a laptop computer! ..... JVC's JY-HD10 is based on a new format that employs MPEG-2 technology to record and play back HD video on a standard MiniDV tape. This technology, developed by JVC, will soon be employed by JVC's competitors-Sony, Canon, and Sharp-but for now is offered exclusively by JVC."

Telegraph | News | Farmer in marmalade rebellion against EU : "Johann Thiery was fined and threatened with jail after trading standards inspectors found him selling apricot marmalade using his grandmother's recipe. According to a European Union ruling, marmalade can contain only citrus fruits such as lemons, limes and oranges and not apricots or other soft fruits. Such mixtures have to be labelled as jam."

TCS: Tech Central Station - Nonlinear Thinking : "The term 'nonlinear' has been misused and abused by pundits, to the point where it has degenerated into a fuzzy, feel-good (or feel-cool) expression. I want to use it here in a more well-defined sense. .....Points, Lines, and Curves..... Try this brain teaser: suppose that we have a petri dish with some bacteria. The amount of bacteria doubles every minute. After exactly one hour, the petri dish is full of bacteria. When was the petri dish half full?"

FT.com Home Europe : "However, investment bankers warned that a pure online auction would risk setting an unrealistically high price for Google's shares, since there would not be enough stock available to meet the massive demand from private investors captivated by the prospect of a new dotcom gold-rush. 'They could get a $100bn' stock market value, said one person involved. 'However, all the shares would end up with Aunt Agatha in Des Moines and Uncle Milt in Pittsburgh and there would be no real public market at all.'" jaynote: Huh??? isn't this exactly what a public market is?