All messages, he demonstrated, could be broken down into bits, or binary digits. His theory explained how much information each character in a message conveyed and showed how to make the characters easier to send or to interpret.
“We are not allowed to talk while we are working,” says 19-year-old Wang Cui, whose name was changed for this story. She has prominent eyes and dark skin, and wears a blue vest with the Foxconn logo over her white plastic jacket. Her long fingernails are well cared-for. She does not work on the production line, but instead performs quality control on iPad housings.
When the Buddhist goes shopping he feels like we all do: unified, in control, and unchanged from moment to moment. The way things feel becomes suspect.
As a science reporter I love the metric system, but I do wonder if the public can easily understand that a change in radiation from 5 millisieverts per hour to 1,000 microsieverts per hour is actually a five-fold decrease in exposure rates?
What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history.
I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
It is indeed a pity that several aspects of debate in this country on genetically modified (GM) crops and foods have adopted the adversarial approach rather than a consensual one.
Most of the under-developed world has no access to hearty seeds, advanced farming and equipment, irrigation technology or the ability to rotate crops or keep land fallow.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
How did [Aaron] Barr, a man with long experience in security and intelligence, come to spend his days as a CEO e-stalking clients and their wives on Facebook? Why did he start performing “reconnaissance” on the largest nuclear power company in the US? Why did he suggest pressuring corporate critics to shut up, even as he privately insisted that corporations “suck the lifeblood out of humanity”? And why did he launch his ill-fated investigation into Anonymous, one which may well have destroyed his company and damaged his career?
Thanks to his leaked e-mails, the downward spiral is easy enough to retrace. Barr was under tremendous pressure to bring in cash, pressure which began on November 23, 2009.
That’s when Barr started the CEO job at HBGary Federal. Its parent company, the security firm HBGary, wanted a separate firm to handle government work and the clearances that went with it, and Barr was brought in from Northrup Grumman to launch the operation.
In an e-mail announcing Barr’s move, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told his company that “these two are A+ players in the DoD contracting space and are able to ‘walk the halls’ in customer spaces. Some very big players made offers to Ted and Aaron last week, and instead they chose HBGary. This reflects extremely well on our company. ‘A’ players attract ‘A’ players.”
Barr at first loved the job. In December, he sent an e-mail at 1:30am; it was the “3rd night in a row I have woken up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep because my mind is racing. It’s nice to be excited about work, but I need some sleep.”
Thursday, 3 February 2011
The main thing that I am not happy about is that I don’t see how we have the remotest idea what would happen in a world where the constants of nature were different because we know the life we know. And there could be life of a completely utterly different kind that we have no conception of.
Saturday, 29 January 2011
In its normal occurrence, the Facebook encounter is still an encounter — however attenuated — between real people. But increasingly, the screen is taking over — ceasing to be a medium of communication between real people who exist elsewhere, and becoming the place where people finally achieve reality, the only place where they relate in any coherent way to others.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Roger Berkowitz: Sherry Turkle’s incisive and provocative new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, vividly articulates the ways that our embrace of technology evidences our discomfort and dissatisfaction with our human selves.
Aronowitz and Ross had every reason to feel badly stung, no question.
Thursday, 9 December 2010
John Derbyshire: Down in the subatomic realm, each of the particles that constitute matter is smeared out over a volume of space in a manner described mathematically by a “wave function.” When an observer interacts with this wave function by taking a measurement, the wave function suddenly manifests as a particle with a position and speed to which numbers can be assigned. It ceases to be a quantum-mechanical phenomenon and becomes a “classical” one.
Nick O’Hear: It would be good to live more frugally and that taxation should be aimed at making this more desirable. We need energy, particularly to help development in Africa, South America and parts of Asia. Oil and gas will eventually run out and coal is a dirty fuel. Nuclear energy, however unpopular, has been a total success in France and we should follow the French lead.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
