So apparently Ganesh devotees keep dumping elephants as votive offerings at the door of this temple in India, which has already tried to ban the practice but lost a court battle. So now the city is overrun with nervous, pissed-off, and sometimes homicidal elephants. The solution? A ban on elephants during rush hour. Yeah, that’ll work.
These clever boffins in Japan have done a detailed analysis of the raw material inputs required to make a typical memory chip. It’s pretty ugly stuff. RAM chips’ eco footprints are horrendously large and toxic, much more so than people suspected hithertofore. They make even cars seem relatively benign. Makes a good argument for re-purposing old machines. And then I was thinking of how the Intel mothership in West Dublin consumes such a huge proportion of the city’s water supply, and I found out that Intel in New Mexico was lambasted by local residents for draining their aquifer.
The lower bound of fossil fuel and chemical inputs to produce and use one 2-gram microchip are estimated at 1600 g and 72 g, respectively. Secondary materials used in production total 630 times the mass of the final product, indicating that the environmental weight of semiconductors far exceeds their small size. This intensity of use is orders of magnitude larger than that for “traditional” goods. Taking an automobile as an example, estimates of life cycle production energy for one passenger car range from 63 to 119 GJ (42). This corresponds to 1500-3000 kg of fossil fuel used, thus the ratio of embodied fossil fuels in production to the weight of the final product is around two. (text of article)
So I was curious to find out what these chemicals are used for and I found this:
David sent me this. Its from an ABC affiliate so I trust it a little, but then they GO AND USE ALL CAPS. Anyway, apparently this guy helped the US Army deploy Anthrax bioweapons during the Korean War, then recanted, and was assasinated by the CIA for his defection.
Other CIA Hits and Misses.
So I was checking the Referer logs and noticed the location where these Segway Weenies were getting their spam instructions.
So unlike many of these compulsive logorrheac bloggers who crave personal validation, I don’t check this religiously. It’s more of a diary thing. “Random serialised mentatory excreta” is exactly what you get. Mostly this server exists to stream my MP3s to me and a place where I can store stuff that I like. Everything else is gravy.
I was therefore quite surprised and quite amused when Lisa told me that there seems to be a legion of Segway Weenies wailing on my website. As the leader of the pack Mr Torrone is extremely adamant:
your site with the errors is still not updated, it would seem my next option
is to send a certified letter asking you update your site, and then a lawyer
is the next step after that– which isn’t something i’ve never needed to do
and i really have no desire to spend money on that- i’d much rather give it
a local charity or pay some bills. so i’m hoping you and i can just chat
about this and correct the site and ideally remove the post, i don’t want an
apology, i don’t care about stuff like that.
Nobody’s threatened to sue me because of the Internet since the late 1980s so I find this quite retro and amusing. Mr Torrone is adamant that he does not “work” for Segway. I think he means that he receives no remuneration directly from them or any affiliated Kamen company in the shape of financial recompense. I am satisfied that this is the case based on his testimony and I endorse this fact. In fact, a careful reading of what I originally wrote will reveal that I never stated this.
The Internet is a regulated environment, and one of the regulations is that you furnish a WHOIS record in order to register a DNS domain. Now, when people first encounter the Internet the lack of privacy is often startling. It was so in the initial days, when a simple finger command could reveal more than you wanted to know about certain people. I recommend that the interested reader do a “finger -l mike@maths.tcd.ie” for a glimpse of my 1980s-1990s Internet persona. Again I repeat, one of the facts of choosing voluntarily to register an Internet domain is that your WHOIS record becomes public, regulated information. Get used to it. We live in a post-privacy world, a surveillance society. Foucault was right — Western societies tend towards maximum scrutiny.
There are certain restrictions on the use of this WHOIS information that have been elucidated by case law over the past decade or so: you may not use it to “slam” domain registrations and the database *can* be used by all companies for spamming purposes unless the registrant exercised the “no-spam” option. Since I derived no commercial gain from the use or Mr Torrone’s WHOIS record, I believe there is no case law that would restrict my recent usage of Mr Torrone’s WHOIS record.
However, what I find most amusing, and an interesting and commercially valuable by-product of commodity fetishism, is how gadget evangelists will often sublimate many, many drives in order to pimp a company’s gadgets. Steve Jobs has made a career out of leveraging deranged Macolytes into displays of humiliating public affection and adoration, and it seems like Kamen has taken a leaf out of his book. Cleverly recruiting helpless technophiles as cannon fodder and sending them into the trenches of public ridicule under the artillery of contempt and the labouring of many, many metaphors is undoubtedly one of the countless reasons why Mr Kamen is a zillionaire and I am not.
So, to sum up. It matters not to me whether you are paid cash to pimp a company, or whether you received some preferential treatment or schwag or advance purchase contract from them, or whether some sublimated drives compel you to pimp for them completely gratis. You are still pimping, and in my humble opinion I find that sad. Journalists do that sort of thing for a living, and since they pimp to eat I find that slightly more understandable. But when you devote so much of your time and energy to pimping someone else’s gadget, and hounding those who would cast aspersions on your motives and rationale then, well, that’s just very, very sad. Perhaps Mr Torrone will have time to reflect on this as he Segways his 3.5 miles to work, frightening pedestrians as he goes. I wish him well and urge him to keep up the exercise regimen that he says the Segway has made possible.
And for those various Segway Weenies who have demanded a personal letter, or email, or phone call from me. I am not here to be your friend, and I am not interested in establishing a relationship with you (I have enough of those already). I am not here to reify your fetish, to assuage your cognitive dissonance over paying $5000 for an oddly shaped scooter, or to validate your sense of self through agreement or concordance. Neither am I here to soothe your anxiety by climbing on board your cluetrain, buying into your Umwelt, or taking up a defensive position in your discursive formation. I owe you nothing, I expect nothing from you. To borrow from dear old Bill Burroughs:
I am not paid to listen to this drivel. You are a terminal boob.
Earlier here.
So Daphne Oram finally died. She pioneered electronic music in the 1950s at the BBC, and so made possible the amazingly spooky Tardis sound that terrified legions of your Doctor Who fans. Her Oramics Machine was one of the first mechanised synaesthetic composers.
Actually while reading the Segway story I noticed this Slashdot posting:
This so obviously horseshit that I did some digging…
WHOIS on the obviously bogus-named bookofseg.com:
Organization:
phillip torrone
424 second ave west
seattle, wa 98119
US
Phone: 206-XXX-XXXX
Email: phillip@flashenabled.com
I note from a Google search that this is a Tony neighbourhood of Seattle, with one of “Puget Sound area’s largest advertising agencies” located at 424 second ave west. So this seems like a hotspot for marketing companies.
And then he goes and leaves his regular advertising site URL unmasked in the header: www.flashenabled.com. Where he outs himself as a bigwig with Fallon Worldwide. And spends a lot of time pimping PocketPC gadgets. Which makes sense if you’re in Seattle, that close to Microsoft I guess.
So the article was written in obviously dumb marketing buzzwords futzed around a bit to look “cool” and “hip” and “with it”. The same 206-XXX-XXXX phone number is re-used for the POCKETPCMAGIC.COM website, registered to phillip torrone 627 broadway suite 504 new york, NY 10012. There are other interesting websites operating from this nice Manhattan location.
Apparently, it’s to do with all those hills, and banning the Segway.
A nice Australian article here that examines each of the “reasons” for a war against Iraq put forward by the Western Powers.
