:: The Ruminant ::

The Ruminant's first visitor, amayamaya, left a nice comment requesting more posts. Just as retailers often display their first dollar, I am going to display this first comment for a while. Rest assured, amayamaya, when I get my thirty minutes of fame, you will have your fifteen. I hope I'm not too selfish to keep some of the fame for myself.

:: Saturday, May 24, 2003 ::

Chili Hot Hot

Having become fed up with the record cold temperatures in Edmonton this winter, the atmosphere decided it was time to switch to record hot temperatures. It is in the 90s or so today. The last time it got this hot during May was in 1844.


:: Chris 6:21 PM [+] ::
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ET PC

This guy has stuffed an ET doll with a working PC. I want one for some reason.








:: Chris 3:26 PM [+] ::
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Open Source 2

As it turns out, some people are already thinking about open source science textbooks [link]. The author of this essay notes that not one of his students has ever opted against a printed version. I wonder if this is mostly a function of habit. I have found that as I read more and more papers (hundreds of them) which I need to keep around for references, I am printing fewer of them. This is in part because my printer sucks, and the printer in our lab is hosted on a Windows network that no one can figure out how to use (I can access it from Linux, but the authentication process is a serious hassle; I can't access it from Windows at all, on any of the three Windows machines that I have access to). The new Tablet-PCs are shipped with software that allows highlighting, annotating, and bookmarking of documents (I think -- the demo may have deceived me). To me, these are the essential features of paper documents that computers have lacked. If tablets are the future, then the need for paper books may disappear.

There's also the California Open-Source Textbook Project for K-12 textbooks.


:: Chris 11:40 AM [+] ::
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Open Source

In engineering and science, textbooks and books on specialized technical topics are too expensive. I get the impression that, in many cases, relatively little of this high cost goes to the author. Students are paying through the nose to support the companies that distribute the books. A lot of professors write their own course notes and distribute them to students either electronically or through a campus copy center. This is a much better deal for students. The natural extension of this approach is to distribute the text book as an e-book, freely available online to everyone, perhaps in pdf format. But this lacks the promotional apparatus that exists with major publishing houses, and it also lacks the prestige and credibility that can be derived from editors, reviewers, and a well-known publisher. What if a textbook was written in an open-source format, using Latex, inviting the reviews and contructive participation of many authors. It would only take contributions from a few highly-recognised names before the textbook gained credibility. And with potentially many authors contributing to the text and spreading the message through word-of-mouth, it would be in a sense self-promoting. I suppose that, since everyone has different styles and ideas about formatting, it would only work if some author wrote a complete book and then opened it for modification and addition.
:: Chris 11:14 AM [+] ::
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Exhaustion

When I was driving through Montana, I saw a sign for the "State Korean War Veterans' Memorial." I thought to myself, "are there really that many Koreans in Montana?" Today when I left my office after a leisurely ten-hour day, I went to get my bike and saw that the lock wasn't latched to the frame. "Damn," I thought, "somebody stole my lock." The lock, of course, was in use holding the bike to the bike rack. My brain does strange things when I'm tired.


:: Chris 9:32 PM [+] ::
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Montreal 2

I just took a walk up Saint Catherine street to this internet cafe. Saint Catherine St could be described as the street of churches, cabarets, prostitutes, and Burger Kings, as there seems to be at least one of each on every block. There's a church called "Saint James United Church" across the street from "Super Sexe." Saint James apparently leases its street-front space to various businesses, including two currency exchanges. There's also a large tawdry neon sign out front that says "St James's Church." These factors led me to wonder whether the church had in fact been taken over at some point by subversive ironists looking for a good private joke.

I also went today to see Le Tour Olympique, the world's tallest thing-that-is-about-to-fall-over. It was built for the 1976 Olympics, but was not finished until the mid-eighties (during the Olympics it was just Le Stump Olympique). Vincent (my professor) told me all about the construction project, complete with coerced removal of occupants from a housing area, mafia involvement, mass embezzlement of money and materials from the project, the poor building materials which led to repeated collapse of the roof, and the sudden shift in materials used to construct the tower to keep it from crumbling during construction. And apparently the provincial government was officially Catholic until 1960. They built an average of 1 church per year in Montreal until 1960. Then, separation of church and state was officially revoked. It turned out that people here weren't that religious after all, so they've been tearing down an average of one church per year ever since.

Montreal is pretty damn interesting. In the rest of Canada, all the signs have to be dual-language. Here, most signs are French-only. All businesses must have Frenchified names. And all signs which contain English must contain an equivalent French message printed above the English in letters twice as tall. And sometimes different prices are marked on French signs than on English signs. And apparently the Quebec separatist movement is somehow connected with anti-semitism. It was so huge over the past decade that most of Quebec's Jewish community relocated to Toronto. Concordia University is apparently so pro-Palestenian that they have crossed into blunt anti-semitism and even other Canadian universities are finding it difficult to have any interaction with them. The anti-English sentiments have been so strong that a lot of business and tourism was driven away, leaving Montreal's economy in the toilet. Crazy place.
:: Chris 3:48 PM [+] ::
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Montreal

I'm in Montreal until Thursday. Beautiful city. Limited internet availability. North America could learn a lot from Australia about how to run internet cafes...

Many exciting posts are forthcoming, pending my return.


:: Chris 1:39 PM [+] ::
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Piracy

The rising tyranny of the RIAA and MPAA is a premonition of the coming negative techno-utopia in which media corporations gain total control over the advance of technology and the collective experience. They make up fancy concepts like "signal theft" and "information piracy." They have agents in movie theaters wearing night-vision goggles to guard against piracy. They lobby every nook and cranny of governments at all levels, in all locations. They are the octopus. But their present tactics will seem tame once we all receive our radio ear tags. The timeline will go something like this:

2030 - Scientists at NASA's SETI program announce that they have detected a bonafide signal which originated from intelligent alien beings. The signal had some simple modulation, and they are able to replay it at press conferences and over the internet. The signal, a complex of strange chatter and noise ending with the ominous phrase "klatu barata nikto!" is broadcast all over the world.

2060 - Flying saucers land at the United Nations. An amorphous, many-tentacled creature marches into the chambers and grabs a microphone. "I speak for Klatu!" he says. "30 revolutions ago, you received a transmission from Klatu. It was not intended for you! The broadcast was transmitted toward Blixnar, and for technical reasons the signal was inadvertently detectable here. You received it and retransmitted it many times, in spite of the clear license specified: Klatu barata nikto!"

A delegate poses the question, "What does 'Klatu barata nikto' mean?"

The alien answers: "It means 'this transmission may not be rebroadcast without the express consent of Klatu!' Five revolutions ago, the Xynzytes were awakened from their hibernation cycle. According to our research, all of them were planning to watch our special rebroadcast of the Klatu Bicentenial Academy Awards that evening. But instead they saw your retransmission! You announced the results hours before our scheduled broadcast! We estimate damages in excess of eighty-seven trillion Harxax. In response to this, our government has ruled that Earth will be impounded and its inhabits enslaved to Klatu Broadcasting Corporation for two generations. You have six revolutions to prepare!"

2066 - Humanity enslaved by alien media corporation.


:: Chris 7:44 AM [+] ::
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