Archive for November, 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Oh. THAT’S What You Mean By “Political Convictions”
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 15, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, November 15th, 2010Reviewing a list of American politicians convicted of crimes makes it clear that there’s ONE thing both parties can agree on.
 We all know Washington’s a zoo, so it should be pretty easy to turn it into a jail. |
The other day I was talking to a liberal friend who was railing on me for not voting, saying something to the effect of “because we can’t let these criminals back in power“. This friend makes the mistake of thinking that I’m liberal mostly because I think the Bush administration was a bunch of liars and crooks. To me, this is just an observable fact. My friend got a little feisty when I suggested that Democrats were just as often guilty of crimes as Republicans, so we agreed to trust Wikipedia as a reasonably balanced source, since organizations like Judicial Watch and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington are usually run by rabid astroturfing bastards from one side or the other of the aisle who do the double civic disservice of acting like watchdogs when they’re really lapdogs. An hour later, we had come up with some rough numbers and highlights. The rough numbers? Convicted Republicans since LBJ’s White House: 80-something. Convicted Democrats: 50 something. The numbers are hard to sift through the way they’re presented, but I’d hasten to point out that Nixon and Reagan skewed the totals quite a bit, but with what were essentially only two crimes: Watergate and the Iran Contra scandal. Below are just a few highlights. See the List of American politicians convicted of crimes for yourself for hours of Wikiphilic distraction. Read the rest of this entry »
Science Friction: Why Doesn’t Sci-Fi Find A Larger Market?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 14, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Sunday, November 14th, 2010Part one of our look at why sci-fi gets such a bad rap, with a look at four worthwhile science fiction films from the last few years that you may have passed over or not even heard of.
 Sunshine is just one of many great sci-fi films that get overlooked because of marketing. |
I’ve always been a little befuddled by the average person’s resistance to science fiction as a genre. I can understand why a person would be put off by the schlockier segment of this market, but every genre of fiction has a large quantity of commercial tripe from which you have to pick the better material. I would argue in fact that some of the greatest fiction of the twentieth century would typically be categorized as sci-fi: Arthur C Clarke
The Glass Just Might Be Greener On The Other Side
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 13, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green
Saturday, November 13th, 2010Thanks to recent work at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory, someday soon even your windows may be solar collectors.
We recently touched on a brilliant idea involving turning the world’s highways into solar collectors, but what if you could turn virtually anything into a solar collector, just by covering it with a thin transparent film? That’s just one crazy idea that may soon be possible because of recent research at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Working with a semiconducting polymer spiked with Fullerenes, the scientists were able to create a thin film that is effectively transparent, could efficiently generate charge and charge separation, and is scalable to industrial production levels. Existing transparent photovoltaic materials are either slightly tinted like PVGlaze architectural glass, or only partially transparent like Taiyo See-through Solar. In the latter case because the material is created with laser etching that alternates the photovoltaic material with a truly transparent material. The real innovation with the Los Alamos project lies in the fact that the material is fabricated by creating a micron-sized flow of water droplets across a thin layer of the polymer-fullerene solution, which then evaporates, leaving a nano-scale honeycomb pattern that could efficiently absorb light and facilitate electrical conductivity. A material like this could greatly enhance ideas like this Italian greenhouse project that both grows food and collects solar power. Or imagine if the material evolved to a point where it could be applied to existing buildings without significantly changing their appearance. Although there are already a lot of strategies out there for building-integrated photovoltaics , including the possibility of photovoltaic “paint”, this new technology may make even more crazy ideas possible. Imagine if you could solarize your house just buy spraying it with a transparent film…
Will Facebook E-Mail Be A G-Mail Killer? Who Cares?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 12, 2010 by admin in Technology
Friday, November 12th, 2010Why anyone would use either as their primary e-mail service escapes me. And using a Microsoft Office product through a web browser, via a Facebook account is sort of like pouring gasoline down your horse’s throat, poking his eye with a cattle prod, and yelling at it to get on the freeway
You’ve probably heard by now that Facebook will be announcing a full-fledged web e-mail service with POP access and Microsoft Office Web Apps integration on Monday. Unless – ironically – you’ve been on Facebook all day, because they themselves are saying nothing about it on the site as of this writing. So, with the tech press being as predictable as it is (apologies to Mr. Arrington, at least he breaks the stories), everyone is of course debating whether the new Facebook service is a “Google Killer”. Which is an absurdly framed question, in my opinion. Yes, Facebook and Google are in a battle to dominate the internet in various ways, but I will eat poop on the day that Facebook gets search right or Google gets social networking right. Of course everyone with a Facebook account will activate an available username@facebook.com option. And of course this will siphon in millions in ad revenue and put a big ding in Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google e-mail ad placement dollars. But will that mean that Facebook e-mail will “kill” G-Mail? I personally doubt it, for several reasons. First of all, because I know an astounding number of otherwise intelligent people who still use Hotmail or Yahoo as their primary e-mail accounts. And secondly, of the larger group of people that I know who use G-Mail – especially if they use Google Docs – the last thing in the world they’re going to do is give up the reliable functionality of Google’s cloud services to use a Microsoft Office product through a web browser, via a Facebook account. Forgive me, but in my opinion that’s like pouring gasoline down your horse’s throat, poking his eye with a cattle prod, and yelling at it to get on the freeway. But ultimately, I remain befuddled as to why people would use G-Mail or Facebook as a primary e-mail provider in the first place. Facebook is the company that helps you build a trusted network of friends and then tells you the reason you can’t export their contact info is to protect them from you. Unless THEY are giving them to another service, which then lets you export them. And Google? Aside from the fact that from day one they’ve indexed your e-mails so they can place ads next to them, they are in many ways Facebook’s strongest competitor not so much in terms of services offered, as in the realm of corporate deceipt. In their founding documents they said “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers“. Two years later they introduced advertising to their results, and now derive the vast majority of their revenue from ad services. In terms of how to access e-mail, I still use a mail client and my own mail-server accounts. I guess I have the advantage of owning domains and offering reseller hosting, but this is remarkably easy to set up if you need web-based communication, and your hosting company doesn’t scour your files as a prerequisite to storing them for you. Ah well. To each their own I guess. One thing I must admit I am looking forward to though, is the first friends that get lost in FB’s interface and post an excruciatingly private e-mail on someone’s wall. You know it will be happening in the first week.
Why Can’t This Headline Contain The Word [Expletive Deleted]?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 11, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, November 11th, 2010I thought about doing something special for the one-thousandth article on Dissociated Press, then I said f*ck it.
