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Wascals!

Ha ha... Populist tripe or not, sometimes you gotta love the New York Post.

Thanks for the pic, Deborah!

Home computer 2004

And then the ever-lovely Hannah sent me this bit, which I've been meaning to put up for a week now. Dig this- it's a shot from a 1954 issue of Scientific American which shows what the RAND Corporation thought a home computer might look like in 2004. (click to enlarge -- you've got to read the text at the bottom of the pic!)

This is the reason I hope the geneticists will come up with some kind of crazy aging therapy so I can live for another hundred years. I can't wait to see what's coming, and whatever's coming isn't going to be anything we can anticipate or even imagine. When they were designing supersonic airliners and spaceships in the 1950s and 60s, could they have imagined the kind of future we'd really have, this dense digital connection we all have now?

I think if our species can figure out a way to survive the climate change, energy transition crisis and population crunch that are going to hit us over the next 50 years, the new technologies that are going to come online may help us make the world into much more interesting place a hundred years from now.

Golden Gate

I still have flashbacks from San Francisco sometimes. Lately, the life I was leading there seems more and more surreal, like it wasn't really me that did all those things but just a character in a weird movie I might have watched once. But sometimes when a good song comes on, or I read about some startup that's taking on the world with some crazy futuristic idea, or see a girl on the Metro with "that" look, it feels like I just left the city yesterday. Strange world.

Anyway, I just got this shot from the Golden Gate from Marton (click to enlarge), who's been living in town for a few years now and working on some very serious and interesting biz. In his email he told me "weather's incredible right now. not too warm, but that crisp sun you only get in california.... i'll miss it if i ever leave."

Yeah, I remember that too, the crisp air off the Pacific, and the way the fog used to roll over the hills in the afternoon like a tsunami in slow motion, so you could only see the top of Sutro Tower sticking up from the mist.

Thanks for the pic, Marton!

Cheney's Got a Gun

I just gotta get in on this one before it drops completely off the radar....

We've got religious wars, people getting blown up over cartoons now (A headline I saw yesterday on a major news source said "Cartoon Violence Kills Three"... making me think of a really vicious episode of Tom & Jerry, or that Coyote finally just losing it and going on a killing spree across six counties of Arizona). And then just when I thought the world couldn't get any more surreal, the Vice President of the United States just capped somebody.

I read that it was late afternoon and the light was dim. Perhaps in a fit of worry over the Plame investigation, Cheney mistook his luckless hunting buddy for Scooter Libby and decided to take matters into his own hands?

And then I heard that Scott McClellan, the White House Press Secretary, has taken to wearing bright orange clothing just in case Cheney drops by to visit his boss?

Some days I love the news.

An Obligation to Insult?

This latest political row in Denmark is so stupid and just so boring it makes me want to cry. In September, Jyllands Posten, a mainstream rightward-leaning newspaper here, published a series of hand-drawn caricatures of the prophet Mohammad, some of which were really insulting. (One picture depicted the Prophet with a time bomb in his turban.) Now of course the whole Middle East is furious about it and there have been riots in major cities with crowds burning the Danish flag and chanting "Denmark go to hell."

Great. Thanks a lot, Jyllands Posten.

Supposedly the newspaper published the pictures as a reaction against the political correctness that is coming to be expected when referring to Denmark's substantial Muslim minority. Danes generally have a very dry and ironic sense of humor, and political correctness pisses a lot of people off here. Still, either the editors of Jyllands Posten threw this firecraker on purpose, or they're unbelievably stupid.

I don't understand how anyone could not anticipate a strong response from the Muslim community if you directly insult the Prophet. It's just asking for trouble. Of course we have freedom of expression in Denmark, and of course anyone has the legal right to say anything they want, no matter how offensive. But with freedom of expression comes a measure of responsibility. If I was invited to a dinner party and made blatantly racist or sexist remarks over dessert, I would expect that I wouldn't be invited back. If I went up to someone on the street and insulted their mother, it shouldn't surprise me if they gave me a busted nose.

Now the US State Department has wagged its finger at Denmark and called the drawings "offensive." And the British Foreign Office has said that freedom of the press did not imply "an obligation to insult." Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, has had to appear on al Jazeera and explain, basically, "Guys, lighten up, it was just a joke!"

It's good advice, but Danish flags are still burning across the Middle East. And for what?