Katrina In Action
Steven Taylor found this outstanding satellite image of Katrina. It looks like the eye is just making landfall.
Anyone have links to any satellite images of the gulf coast from today?
Monthly Archives: August 2005
Access Problems Today
FYI, Modulator’s hosting service was hit by a major denial of service attack this afternoon and problems in the AT&T and TWTelecom networks caused problems earlier this morning.
Of course, I know you were more worried about getting here than to all the to be unnamed heavy hitters who were also impacted.
You can read all about it here.
Texas Tops The Nation
Yep, they are tops:
Texas has retained the dubious distinction of having the highest proportion of people without health insurance coverage, according to figures released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
In a comparison of states using a three-year average for 2002-2004, 25.1 percent of Texans didn
Tomorrow is Arriving Quickly
Susan Crawford already has a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s new book The Singularity is Near. I’m a bit jealous.
Readers of science fiction and tech geeks are already familiar with the concept of the singularity. The rest of you may want to catch up a bit by taking a quick read of this Wikipedia article.
Luckily, it looks like Crawford will be posting a bit as she reads and it looks like there will be plenty to contemplate and discuss:
Kurzweil focuses on complexity, noting that evolution produces increasing order, and that technology can extend evolution by building ever-more-efficiently on this order. Very quick feedback loops are all around us, pushing the rate of technological change along and producing faster and smaller devices. Meanwhile, biological evolution continues, but at such a slow rate that it hardly matters.
He boldly predicts that computers as we know them will disappear by the end of this decade, to be replaced by virtual reality environments. No more offices by 2020. He suggests it’s time to invest in tiny sensors and natural language search engines that can topple Google.
As with all such futuristic discussions things are never quite as predicted however as Crawford notes:
Even if he’s only half right (or even less than half right), Kurzweil’s work suggests that it’s a good time to be alive and interested in the effect of technology on human beings.
Which is one good reason I’d like to see this program be dramatically successful. It really is fun to be alive!
Sadly, those of us not getting review copies will not get to see this book until after it’s September 22 release date.
Cloeaning House in Arizona
The Arizona Daily Star is doing a tiny bit of housecleaning:
Finally, we’ve decided that syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has worn out her welcome. Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives.
They aren’t going to over do it though. There is a replacement:
Taking her place on Saturdays will be Tony Snow, host of “The Tony Snow Show,” syndicated nationally on Fox News Radio, and “Weekend Live with Tony Snow” on Fox News Channel. He has worked at a number of daily newspapers and is a former speechwriter for former President George H.W. Bush.
I’ve listened to him briefly a few times and he seems to be a Hannity lite. Some folks are excited to see Coulter get the deserved boot but Snow will get more respect and tend to solidify the rank and file. Coulter could nauseate folks enough that a few of them might have been driven to see the bushies as no friends of freedom and liberty.