Gadget deciphers dogspeak “A Japanese toymaker claims to have developed a gadget that translates dog barks into human language.” The version that transalates human speech into something that dogs can understand will take 30 years.
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2003 March
The Gulf War made CNN, it was the cable news covered war. Since that war, the web has emerged: this is the web covered war, from moblogged war protests to webloggers in Iraq, the channels of choice are weblogs. The independant reports: “The internet has democratised everything – including being a war correspondent.” Independant: News agencies lose battle on the internet
I said that I would say when I disagreed with the normally hyper-rational Dawkins. Dawkins writes: “Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.” Oh cummon – Hussein has been trying to get his hands on nuclear weapons for 30 years since he wooed a very naive Chirac into giving him Uranium. Saddam walked around with a copy of Mein Kampf in his pocket and modelled his regime on Stalin’s with the express notion of extending the Ba’athist rule to a pan-Arab nation. The Bush administration may not have gone about diplomacy very well, to say the least, but it is false to say that Hussein’s ambitions don’t extend beyond Iraq’s boundaries. via Jeff Jarvis
“So confident is he that God is all in the mind, or the brain at least, that Dr Persinger claims he can induce mystical feelings in a majority of those willing to don his Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator. So the BBC Science series Horizon took up the challenge by putting his hat to the ultimate test: could he get arch-sceptic and militant atheist Prof Richard Dawkins to start believing in God by electrically massaging his temporal lobes?” Telegraph | Connected | Holy visions elude scientists
Wired reports on a new device to allow the miltary to speak in tongues, ‘send three and fourpence we’re going to a dance’: “Interact lets someone talk into the device in one language — then it spits out an audio translation with just a two-second delay and no need for the speaker to pause.” Wired News: Device: Arabic In, English Out
Technorati just gets better and better. Relating news events to comments being written about them by Bloggers was one of the aims of Newsblogger the joint project between Moreover and Blogger. The interesting thing about this is that aggregated comments are useful to categorize news and add valuable metadata. The end goal is that comments about a story enrich that story and that the process is recursive i.e. comments can be about comments, eventually providing an ecology of news. Technorati: Current Events, with context
Linksys is the Cisco of wireless – and now quite literally. Cisco has acquired Linksys for $500M, a great move. Archives: Linksys the Cisco of wireless
Apply Occam’s Razor to the Saddam has been killed rumor. Which is simpler? That this is a deliberate rumor to destabilize and seed doubt in the minds of the Iraqi’s (a clever tactic) or that after 12 years of trying to get Saddam, this objective is successful within 90 minutes of hostilities. On the other hand, Saddam’s lookalikes are notoriously good, they fooled the odious Haider on his visit to Iraq, when he posed for photos with an imposter. People are easily fooled. Charlie Chaplin famously lost a lookalike competition against an impersonator and as Christopher Hitchens discovered, some of Churchill’s most famous wartime speeches were delivered by a children’s radio presenter with a gift for mimicry. Saddam lookalikes It would be very good news, however, if this rumor were true. VOANews.com
As the war begins, Nick Denton points out that the Reuters online coverage is much better than the Soft-Warnography being pumped out by the cable channels. I am already bored with CNN’s war jargon, sweeping platitudes, vapid pundits and pictures of silhouetted minarettes, but the problem I have with all the online sites is that there is no real sense of breaking news, without constantly hitting refresh like a laboratory animal in a Skinner box. Here’s what I would like: the top 100 online newspapers with dynamic loading of new headlines in near realtime. Amazingly this simple thing does not seem to exist in any of the news aggregator client interfaces.
Increasingly I hear about people who are reading British newspapers because: 1. people can read news online and 2. British newspapers are in English. The Internet has ratcheted English up another notch as a lingua franca. In France, the preposterous Academie Francaise (think of the DMV run by philosophy professors) is fighting a losing battle against the rise of English. It creates mandated alternative words for things like ‘le Walkman’ (‘le Baladeur’), which nobody really uses and enforces laws which dictate that websites in France must not be only in English. Preservation of cultural diversity is a noble cause, but global heterogeneity does not stem from enforced regional homogeneity. i.e. instead of artificially propping up a language, how about promoting French culture and ideas? At this time more than ever it is important that France communicates its views to a wider audience – and on the web that means English…
Martin Amis had a character in a novel who was always smoking. In order to avoid having to write when the character lit a cigarette or drew a puff, he stated that the character was always smoking unless he stated otherwise. In order to avoid me writing or anyone having to read a huge tirade explaining my fickle view on the war, assume that I am in pefect agreement with whatever Richard Dawkins says. I’ll inform if otherwise. Dawkins’ post 911 article News about Dawkins The World of Richard Dawkins
The consumate diplomat, Bill Clinton vicariously supports the war by defending Blair. On the one hand too bad someone with his political skills isn’t in the White House. On the other, remember that operation Desert Fox, which had the undeclared aim of taking out Saddam, failed, leaving Clinton to stall over Iraq as the Lewinsky affair distracted both himself and the US. Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Bill Clinton: Trust Tony’s judgment