Pauls musings and tidbits

An Earth Without People — [ environment ]: Scientific American: “It%u2019s a common fantasy to imagine that you%u2019re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.

According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky recently interviewed Weisman to find out why he wrote the book and what lessons can be drawn from his research. Some excerpts from that interview appear on the following pages.”

(Read Original Article - Via Scientific American .)

Behind the iPhone Frenzy: “

Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The iPhone might turn out to be insanely great. It might become the best-selling mobile phone ever. Or it might not.

Either way, the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

Only a company with marketing muscle, design mojo, and a world-historic Reality Distortion Field could provide the needed bump. Apple decided to try, in the hope of selling zillions of the new, more capable devices. The real significance of the iPhone, whether it succeeds or fails in the market, is that it will trigger the transition to more open networks. Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.

Whether or not the Jesus Phone achieves worldly success, it will succeed in its own way by convincing people that the world can be different.

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(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Digital Da Vinci Codes: Thousands of Leonardo’s Papers Go Online: “A small library in Leonardo Da Vinci’s hometown uploads a large portion of the Renaissance man’s notes into a searchable digital archive, free for all the world to pick through.

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Sunlight Foundation Lets You Visualize Federal Earmarks: “

The Sunlight Foundation, a D.C.-based group that uses information technology to educate the public about the political process, has been turning earmarks into art. The group has mapped federal disbursements by state and agency, creating spangled almost Miro-esque charts of where the money (er, pork) winds up. No surprise, the Defense Department crushes all other agencies with $9.319 billion in 2005 earmarks. The Department of Transportation is a distant second with $3.174 billion.

More intriguing is the chart that maps to which states the money flows. Although California and Pennsylvania get the most total money from 2005 earmarks with $1.634 billion and $1.08 billion, respectively, Alaska is the per capita king with $1,053 dollars coming in from earmarks for each resident. Well done Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska). Well done, indeed.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

Ancient Rome rebuilt, virtually: “Blog: A team has just unveiled a sprawling 3D digital simulation of the ancient city as it appeared at the height of its development as the capital of the Roman Empire.”

[…]

Not only was Rome not built in a day, but a digital model took 10 years to construct. A team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany has just unveiled a sprawling 3D digital simulation of the ancient city as it appeared at the height of its development as the capital of the Roman Empire.

They are calling it the largest, most comprehensive simulation of a historic city ever created.

“Rome Reborn 1.0,” based at the University of Virginia, shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls in 320 A.D., when Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world. Visitors can navigate through key sites such as the interiors of the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city’s largest place of worship.

The $2 million simulation, which is aimed at students, scholars, travelers and anyone else interested in history and urban planning, can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the project will include other phases in the evolution of the city, from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D.

(Read Original Article - Via CNET News.com - Business Tech.)

VideoJug and Expert Village | “How To” Video Sites with Differing Models For Content Producers.: “

I have previously outlined 3 video sites that specialize in ‘How-To’ type educational videos. Of these 3 there are two which stand out as the 2 main competitors in this niche. These are VideoJug and ExpertVillage.

The two companies are very similar providing education how-to videos on everything you can think of from Gardening Videos to Earthquake Survival.

Continue Reading…

(Read Original Article - Via Web TV Wire.)

CDT Urges Congress to Make CRS Reports Available: “CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris today urged lawmakers to make the unclassified, taxpayer-funded reports produced by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) available to the public over the Internet. Harris joined other open-government advocates at an event on Capitol Hill to unveil the recommendations of the Open House Project, a collaborative effort launched earlier this year by the Sunlight Foundation to make the House of Representatives more readily accessible to ordinary citizens on the Web. CDT created OpenCRS.com in 2005 to increase the public availability of CRS reports and has long advocated for Congress to make the reports fully available to the public online.”

(Read Original Article - Via Center for Democracy and Technology.)

Liquid Lens Can Magnify at the Flick of a Switch: “An anonymous reader writes ‘German engineers have designed the first liquid camera lens with no moving parts that provides two levels of zoom. ‘Liquid lenses bend light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids. When the two liquids are held in the right container, the boundary between them can be made to curve in a way that focuses light simply by applying a voltage. Liquid lenses have attracted much attention because they are potentially smaller than conventional optics and cheaper to build. Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

Apple - Mac - QuickTime - WWDC 2007 Keynote: “Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil and demo Leopard features in his World Wide Developer Conference keynote address from San Francisco’s Moscone West. See the video-on-demand (VOD) event right here, exclusively in QuickTime and MPEG-4.”

(Read Original Article .)

Puncturing the “PCs Are Cheaper Than Macs” Myth: “jcatcw writes ‘The recently converted Scot Finnie went notebook shopping. At the high end of the notebook spectrum, in order to get comparable power and features, a Dell machine comes in $650 over the Apple, and it was clunkier and weighed more. Sony couldn’t beat the Apple either. Midrange and low-end machines, though, turn out to be pretty comparable, with more choices in the PC arena but some good values if you happen to want what Apple has decided you need. So, if you’re talking name-brand hardware, it’s just no longer the case that PCs are cheaper than Macs.’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)