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I’ve been fighting off a not so friendly cold over the last few days and haven’t had much of a chance to check my email, let alone news. However, I did come across a recent Mises post that was odder than usual. The poster wanted to link to an article, including a pdf, but for whatever reason, the “site manager” on which it was listed at states you cannot.

Good grief, do not post something on the Internet if you do not want someone to link to it, or talk about it.

And anything short of a DMCA-laden letter landing on my office desk is not going to stop me from posting the following interview:
Shadowing Reality: Economist Keeps Tabs On Government’s “Creativeâ€? Statistical Reports (pdf)

Two weeks ago I discussed the future of automated stores with a friend of mine, focusing on the Shop24 automated store. It is similar to those automated DVD kiosks you see popping up around town. The widespread adoption of this technology donned on me while I was driving through Taco Bell one night and wondered when someone would eventually automate the entire process of making the food (though I suppose you may need someone for customer service in case an order was improperly made). The process is partially being done with via drive through subcontracted attendants and you can already order online from numerous restaurants (like Freebirds).

While the concept is apparently not new (as seen in these comments), Boing Boing points to a new pilot program that Taco Bell and KFC are testing. It involves self-service ordering via automated touch screens. I can’t wait until someone does the Chinese food version of this.

Or dare we hope, nanotech replicators?

Congressman quizzes Net companies on shame:

Lantos, to Yahoo: Are you ashamed?

Yahoo: We are very distressed about the consequences of having to comply with Chinese law…We are certainly troubled by that and we look forward to working with our peers.

Lantos: Do you think that individuals or families have been negatively impacted by some of the activities we have been told, like being in prison for 10 years? Have any of the companies reached out to these families and asked if you could be of any help to them?

Yahoo: We have expressed our condemnation of the prosecution of this person, expressed our views to the Chinese government…We have approached the Chinese government on these issues.

Lantos: Have you reached out to the family? I can ask it 10 more times if you refuse to answer it. You are under oath.

This same grand standing pompous hypocrite not only voted to invade Iraq, but he also voted for the ratification of the USA PATRIOT Act. Ever heard of secret military tribunals? Warrantless searches and wiretaps? Confiscation of library records and liens on bank accounts? If there was ever a single set of legislation considered to arguably stifle American civil liberties since the Alien and Sedition Acts, the PATRIOT Act does so splendidly. See also the ACLU and EFF.

Note: I am not necessarily excusing the behavior of the Internet firms either. This is merely an illustration of the pot calling the kettle black. Here is Google’s reasoning behind creating a Google.cn domain (Google.com is still accessible in China is entirely unfiltered by Google).

As Mark Twain succinctly put it: “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

I didn’t watch it, not when everyone and their cousin would transcribe it in real-time. For those of you unfamiliar with Bush’s latest State of the Union address, he notes:

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

As one scientist cum pundit has noted, this is just political chicanery shrouded in an emotional appeal against a non-existent Frankenstein.

Oddly enough, the increasingly thought provoking blokes at ‘Damn Interesting‘ recently wrote about a real life, naturally occurring chimera:

Imagine if you discovered one day that two of your three children were genetically not yours. Recriminations, marital troubles, perhaps a divorce, right? Now add a twist. What if you were these children’s mother? Suddenly the question becomes not “Who?â€? but rather “Huh?â€?

Yet that’s what happened to “Janeâ€?. At the age of 52 when her children were full-grown, she and her children underwent genetic testing for a possible kidney transplant. Completely unexpectedly, two of her three children tested as genetically not hers. A mix-up of babies was ruled out, and she and her husband had not undergone in vitro fertilization, so it was absolute that her children were hers.

Should we count the days until this freak of nature is stoned for procreating such an odd hybrid?

Ten more stories that deserve some attention:

Space-elevator tether climbs a mile high – science fiction is becoming science fact with the help of nanotubes and air balloons. Would you ever pay for a 65,000 mile elevator trip into orbit?

The Flying Luxury Hotel – this is not your grandpa’s blimp. This bad boy is on steroids, a cruise ship floating in the air. And it moves a helluva lot quicker, 174 mph with a capacity crowd of 250. Not too shabby.

Ad-Supported Free Books Arrive – apparently the mega-publisher HarperCollins (you probably used their text books growing up) is now experimenting with offering books online for free, albeit supported by ad revenue. Welcome to the 21st century (see the Digital Library section as Macmillan is doing something similar).

Opening up iTunes U – so despite the hoopla surrounding free educational podcasts from Apple, they are making it very difficult to virally promote individual lectures (no copy/paste function). Can someone else capitalize off of this short-sightedness?

Time Right for Gaming Journal? – why was this not around when I was a kid? First GuildHall, now an actual journal. Next you’ll be telling me thousands of people make a career of playing games online. Craziness.

Since higher education is my pet project of late: Credentialism. Rejoinder. Left-field thoughts.

If Robots Ever Get Too Smart, He’ll Know How to Stop Them – I wrote about this book at the end of last year and this is an interesting follow-up interview with the author.

Intel wants super 3G in every PC – there are a lot of news releases lately (including a super spiffy IBM wireless chip) but this one is in the here-and-now, hence my enthusiasm towards its uses.

639-Year Concert Lets Loose 2nd Chord – post modern music still sucks. So its new allure is extreme elongation. Perhaps they will be splattering paint on house-size canvases to make up for their lack of skill. Or maybe they can get some real training.

“The most toxic place on earthâ€? – not quite, but pretty close. Similar to Thomas DiLorenzo’s “Why Socialism Causes Pollution,” apparently the Aral Sea suffered much of the same fate at the hands of a militaristic Statists.

Ironic quote of the day: Congressman: Yahoo, Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft are “agents of repression” — cause you know, these firms bombed and invaded China.

And more importantly, support UMA natively.

Behold, the Nokia 6136.

For those of you who haven’t seen the data, be sure to comb through David Sifry’s latest “State of the Blogosphere” report. Unlike the political counterparts to its namesake, he actually publishes zeitgeist-like trends a couple times each year and always unearths interesting factoids (such as the title of this post).

One nugget in particular that rings home to me is his mentioning of “splogs” or spam blogs. I hate them. I wish providers of “free blog service” would somehow rework their system to remove these from their databases and [temporarily] ban the creators IP address (similar to Wikipedia abusers). I know they have tried extra super-duper hard since Mark Cuban’s outcry months ago, but what do you say when almost 90% of the sites that link to your piece are automated bots adding no original content — just using you for a pagerank? Comment spam is also frustrating, but is more manageable from my end allowing bloggers to kill the devil before it spreads (i.e. I filter out what I want commented on and WordPress, among others, has an easy-to-use function for this capacity).

The only thing Sifry touts that I really don’t buy into the “tagging” system. I like it in theory, but I see it as too broad and too easily abused — just as meta-html-description-tags of yore. Adding the tag “Google,” “Microsoft” or “Apple” to a post does very little in telling potential readers what your story is about. Why? Because there is so much involving these companies, from lawsuits to innovations, that one word conveys little. I think it is perhaps the most overhyped feature of “Web 2.0” (aside from the very concept of “Web 2.0″ itself). For to-the-point people like myself, it does not help me locate the pithy thesis quickly or succinctly.

Anyone want to buy the domain pund.it from me?

Big mail on campus:

San José City College (SJCC) has embarked on a technology improvement program, and for the first time will be offering student email accounts. That’s where we come in. We’re testing a new service with the school by hosting Gmail accounts with SJCC domain addresses (like student@jaguars.sjcc.edu), plus admin tools for efficient account management. Massive storage and features that tame the most unruly inboxes, like powerful mail search, conversation view for messages, and a fast interface, make Gmail very handy for students. Together, we’re pleased to provide this channel for better communications and a stronger community for all 10,000 SJCC students.

I literally was discussing this topic with a friend of mine last week. Texas A&M has an internal team developing webmail and the user interface looks and feels like it was created in 1994. Webmail from commercial providers such as MSN, Yahoo and others has steadily advanced over the years, integrating must-have features such as spam blocking and address books. And of late, I’ve wondered why none of the big web players have teamed up with Universities or large Corporations to provide customized solutions on this matter.

This internal development of software is yet another example of how the University is superfluously involving itself in activities it is not efficient at doing. Universities by-in-large do not make their own computer chips, monitors or printers, so why do they create their own e-mail packages? Hopefully firms like Google will be able to combine the webmail service of Gmail with the college-specific features required by administrators, such as class rosters, effectively.

Update: Now Google is offering a streamlined method for hosting email services for your domain. Note: several months ago I mentioned the future direction of Google hosting services; keep in mind that their new Desktop version 3 also expands into this market by remotely hosting your files on their servers.

Update 2: Paul Kedrosky has some interesting thoughts of the privacy and legal issues surrounding off-site hosting from Google.

Scientists are split on the different ways men and women think

Peter Lawrence, a biologist and fellow of the Royal Society, accused Science of being “gutless” after it explained that its decision was because the piece did not offer “a strategy on how to deal with the gender issue”.
[...]
But Mr Lawrence dismissed “the cult of political correctness” that insists men and women are “equivalent, identical even” and argued that “men and women are born different”.
[...]
Mr Lawrence, a developmental biologist who works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said: “It was a lame excuse. I could not get it published for reasons that I think were political.”

Mr Lawrence’s piece – Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science – has since been published online by the Public Library of Science Biology and has become one of the most popular articles over the past few days, attracting about 60 e-mails, almost all from women.

I mentioned the PLoS in the article on the University as an alternative method for researchers to publish in. As an aside, anyone else surprised that men and women are wired differently?

Via Lew Rockwell.

Again, more tabs than I have time to talk about:

- NASA Public-Affairs Appointee Resigns in Disgrace – So this guy named George C. Deutsch apparently used to attend Texas A&M as a journalist of some repute and left in 2004 to work on the Bush reelection campaign. Several moons ago he somehow got a job at NASA, a position he is seen as largely abusing. Turns out not only was he trying to “silence” various scientific opinions, but that he never graduated from A&M in the first place — despite explicitly saying so on his resume. Oops. And no, even though we are the same age, I don’t recall ever meeting him on campus.

- The two black holes in Intelligent Design – Speaking of newspaper journalism, this is a concise critique of “intelligent design” in editorial form from our friends in Austin.

- Supply Without Demand – Is there really a shortage of mathematicians or scientists? The senior editors of Science – you know, that fairly reputable peer-reviewed journal – suggest no. As does Lew Rockwell.

- Job hunting online gets trickier – So administrative agencies like the EEOC are purportedly legislated “to help” egalitarianize the field of hiring. However, just as “minimum wage” laws have the reverse effects (by creating an artificial price floor, this removes individuals whose productivity levels do not meet this “minimum” standard from the labor market), so to does these new federal rules for job candidates. It is going to be more difficult for people such as myself to rely on simply making a generic resume, as I know must specifically cater a resume to each firm I apply to. This is just one big hassle and helps no one but employees of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission keep their jobs.

- Why Colleges Think They’re Better Than AP – Although a couple years old, it’s still good as it notes the elitist attitude many institutions of higher education try to engender themselves. Fact: very few freshman courses across the country are identical. Yet somehow numerous professors at these dissimilar institutions criticize the AP test which is well, standardized and universal — designed by a group of college instructors and open to changes. This goes hand-in-hand with what the critique of the US News & World Reports methodology of heterogeneous programs being compared — it’s not only futile but impossible to do.

- Calculating Beyond Their Years – Check out the quote from Alfred S. Posamentier. The educator complains about gifted and talented students racing through their mathematical courses to calculus and beyond. He suggests that they miss out on Algebra and Geometry. Guess what math subjects he is an author of? Qui bono anyone?