Flying across America in a small plane is very cool. I spent my time trying to identify all the various things passing below me. You can see highways and railways, fields and subdivisions, schools (identified primarily by the nearby yellow buses), malls, power stations, lakes and forests, marinas and strip mines. All the vast multi-dimensional range of human activity etched onto the 2-dimensional surface of the land.

NPR’s planet money program just had an interesting little discussion about net neutrality . Being interested in both policy issues and being a big geek, I’ve been following this debate for some time. It strikes me that there are some important distinctions that need to be made, and are often confused in the public discourse on this issue.

Net neutrality is often described in the language of equality: all data is created equal is the mantra.  The traditional interpretation of this is that every packet should be treated the same as every other packet. Just because one packet of data is part of a porn video doesn’t mean it should be treated with scorn and derision by routers and made to skulk in the shadowy end of the buffer while all the decent and respectable emails and e-commerce transactions get priority treatment. The fear is that some services (and consequently the people who wish to use them) will be unfairly punished by a biased system. That bias might be introduced because some customers or websites are willing to pay more for priority access. Or it could be because some influential people have decided they don’t like the kind of videos you want to watch. Read more

This is frickin’ hillarious. Serious props to Sash for putting this together. It perfectly congeals the hilarity that was had on a great trip.

Gerhard!!!!

The current situation of the world in relation to the climate problem is that we’re in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog, and the fog is the scientific uncertainty about the details that prevent us from knowing exactly where the cliff is. The climate change sceptics are telling us that the fog is a consolation and that we shouldn’t worry because we’re uncertain about the details, but of course any sane person driving a car toward a cliff in the fog and knowing that the brakes are bad, that it takes the car a long time to stop, will start putting on the brakes, trying to slow the car, without knowing exactly where the cliff is but just in the hope that by putting on the brakes we’ll be in time to keep from going over the cliff. You don’t have to be sure that you can still avoid going over the cliff to put on the brakes, you want to do it in any case. And that’s what the world should be doing with respect to the emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing this climate problem. There’s a chance we’ll go over the cliff anyway but prudence requires that we try to stop the car.

– John Holdren, Feb 2007

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A nice, easy topic for a first post. Maybe it would be safer to characterize this as an essay on the characteristics of life rather than its “meaning”, life is perhaps far too varied and multifaceted to have only one meaning.

The other day I was walking to work across the 7th Street Bridge, and I caught sight of a bit of graffiti which I’d seen many times before. This day, however, it got me thinking about a few ideas which have been rattling about in my brain for a few weeks now. Pursuing the train of thought, I was surprised how far it went.

It Cost to live Free 2 Die

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