Category Archives: Technology

Watch Astounding Deepwater Submersible Work to Fix Gulf Oil Gusher

by Editor

Update June 4 10:00 am: The BP robot operators are trying to close the valves on the gusher cap they installed last night.  Meanwhile, oil blasts out through those valves while some channels up to a surface ship.  It remains to be seen if by closing the valves BP can stop the uncontrolled gusher and channel all of the oil to their ships.

Update June 3 10:00 pm: It does not appear to be working.  I think BP keeps insisting on using rather narrow pipes to handle this gusher which is putting out enormous loads of pressure.  Why don’t they fit a large sewer pipe around this blowout preventer?  A large diameter sewer pipe could simply hang around the gusher without even making a tight fit.  Then the gushing oil would be gradually corralled into a somewhat narrower pipe leading to the surface.  Blockages of frozen matter seen in the original effort to put a big box around the gusher must be a product primarily of using too narrow gauge a pipe for this job.  You can’t try to push all this high-pressure oil into a narrow pipe leading to the surface.  You have to gradually ease it up into a very wide pipe.

The cap BP is trying to fit on the gusher simply doesn’t have enough weight to press its rubber gasket tight enough to the pipe, so too much oil is leaking around it.  BP’s robot operators are wonderful, but I’m having very serious doubts about the competence of its engineers.  Very serious.  It may be well past time for President Obama to get NASA involved.  There’s no way that a good engineer is going to be trying to fit a narrow pipe over a high-pressure volcano.  It’s silly.

By the way, this planetary level disaster is quite likely to wipe out most of the coast of the United States.  The greatest superpower nation on earth is about to lose most of its coastline from the south all the way up the eastern seaboard to New York.  A single company with a single 24-inch hole in the ground has done this.  It is this event, not 9/11, that is the turning point.  We have reached the end of the era of global corporations.  They are too dangerous.  Governments must retool and rethink.  Companies like BP must be destroyed, either financially or legislatively.

Original post below:

If you want a few heroes out of this horrendous Gulf Oil Disaster, you should start by watching the work of whoever is controlling the deep water submersible arms. It’s fascinating and highly educational to observe the careful thought process that goes on in advance of every single minute movement made by this machine. Remote control at 5000 feet of depth is a rare skill indeed. BP is attempting to place a cap and pipe onto the cutoff top end of the pipe that is spewing oil into the Gulf waters. So the robots will need to be carefully controlled to aim this device and place it right into the center of the gusher.

This approach has a high probability of success. But if they miss the hole and bend something, they will need to try again. This could well be one of the great feats of engineering in modern times. Well worth watching patiently.

Artificial Life Created for the First Time

by Editor

Scientists announced today that they have created the first artificial life form in human history.

The J. Craig Venter Institute has informed the White House of the incredible achievement and the possible environmental and military repercussions are already being debated.

Researchers used computers to create an artificial sequence of DNA.  Then they inserted that DNA into hollowed-out cells which began to grow and replicate.

That’s a new form of life created by human beings.  This may be a far more important development than going to the moon.

Delete Your Facebook Account

by Editor | 2 Comments

See the insipid goober just to the left.  That’s Mark Zuckerberg.  He runs Facebook, the site that gathers tons of your personal and public information to form what he hopes will be an all-pervasive social network.  Being young is no excuse for this guy.  A young a-hole grows into an old a-hole very quickly.  This is what the Web’s leading a-hole said recently:

And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Do you learn to talk like a corporate dick by accident or is it something they teach in business school?

In other words: Facebook thinks making your information public is the new default norm.  Private information is a thing of the past.  They’ve basically just taken away users’ ability to keep their information private.  Public is Facebook’s new ‘norm.’

So let’s show this pre-pubescent nincompoop that we like our privacy.  Delete your Facebook account.  I did.  Start a blog.  It’s much more fun than struggling through a crappy interface just to tell people about your latest haircut.

Some students at New York University have funding and are working on a new open-source social network with freely distributed code.  You know, like the Firefox browser.  Their service is called Diaspora.  That’s the best idea I’ve heard about in years.  Open source social networking… with privacy.

Here’s the WikiHow article on how to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Here’s an update: The students working on Diaspora have raised over $115,000 via online donations.  This is a great start for their development project and means they don’t have to answer to a corporate investor.

Another open-source effort at social networking is OneSocialWeb which actually has working open-source code.  Their software works sort of like the open-source blogging software, WordPress.  You can install your own version of it on a web server if you want.

Here’s an excellent Wired article on the up and coming alternatives to Facebook.

CellStories Brings Short Fiction to Your Phone

by Editor

CellStories is a ridiculously simple service that brings you a little story each day.  You just open up the link to the CellStories.net site in your cell phone browser and the story shows up, well-formatted and easy to read.  The site was started by former magazine editor Daniel Sinker, who has used his many contacts in the publishing field to acquire a continuing stream of worthwhile and entertaining stories.

The main problem for me that this service solves is my inability to remember to keep reading long-form works on a cell phone.  I just can’t remember to keep going, no matter what the book.  It’s something to do with the small screen and my feeling that all handheld units are for very temporary work and pleasure.  When I read long works I use a book or a Kindle e-reader.  I have no problems with continuity there.  But CellStories only offers short fiction.  It’s the perfect little pocket literature gizmo.  I actually feel a tiny sense of accomplishment when I finish a short story on my Droid phone.  I feel that I have filled some time well that might otherwise have been spent checking my hair.

So if you want some grown-up short fiction, try CellStories.

Obama and FCC Give Full Remote Control of Your TV Hardware to Corporations

by Editor

U.S. President Barack Obama and his Federal Communications Commission have given media corporations the legal power to remotely disable functions and outputs in your television, DVD players, and content receivers. This decision means that when you buy equipment it will have a shut-off and control mechanism built into it allowing Warner Brothers or Disney to flip a switch that will turn off various parts of your equipment so that you cannot do certain things with what you are watching. A lot of equipment currently sitting in American households already has this circuitry built in and now it can be activated by the entertainment companies.  The Obama administration is going after more than television equipment though.  It’s putting this control stuff into computers and operating systems.

This is a new form of fascism.  Corporate fascism.  When the government allows total control of what the population is allowed to do with its own media equipment and content you have in place all the machinery of totalitarian control of expression, both artistic and journalistic.

Smash your TV and throw it over the fence onto the White House lawn.  Better yet, open Obama’s mouth up wide and shove your TV down his throat.  I’ve had just about enough of this corporate-owned jerk in the White House who is more concerned about finding his cigarettes than saving the Gulf of Mexico from an outrageous act of ‘accidental’ terrorism by British Petroleum.  Obama should have a swim in the new Gulf.  The man who vowed to stop all the secret torture and military clown tribunals and needless wars has inflicted more grotesque harm in these areas than his monkey-brained predecessor.  Obama’s teeth drip baby blood.  He’s a human predator drone.  And now he’s disabling our televisions sets.

No media company is going to shut off part of my television, I can tell you that now.  I don’t give a damn what President O says.  He’s done in 2012.  It doesn’t matter who runs against this nitwit in 2012.  I’m voting for them.  I’m too angry to give a crap anymore.  Let’s give Hillary a shot.

See, you don’t need a tea party to be angry about a guy who steals for Wall Street.  You can do it all by yourself.

Alice In Wonderland For iPad

by Editor

I’ve got lots of grumps against Apple’s iPad, like the lack of support for Flash, one of the greatest web technologies in existence. But this Alice in Wonderland eBook looks fantastic. I’d love to make all the pictures move around and I think kids will too. This must be right because when I was a kid I fervently wished for every illustration to wake up and start moving.