Former Virginia Governor's Comment On Science At Convention Lights Up Twitter
Reposted from Wired
It didn't ignite the crowd at the Pepsi Center in Denver Tuesday night in the same way as Hillary Clinton's speech did, but the 2008 Democratic National Convention keynoter of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner lit up the micro-blogging service Twitter as its geek community celebrated a throwaway line in Warner's speech.
Warner, a former Capitol Hill staffer for senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and telecommunications entrepreneur, focused his speech on creating an environment that keeps America competitive in the global economy.
In a one-liner, he quipped: "Just think about this: In four months, we will have an administration that actually believes in science!"
It was as if Warner were acknowledging a constituency that feels as if the Bush administration had thrown a Harry Potter invisible cloak over it for the past eight years. Many members of that online constituency poked their heads out from under the cloak on Twitter.
"In four months, we'll have an administration that actually believes in science. lol, but YEAH!" tweeted kmcg.
"My fav from 2nite: 'Just think about this: in six months we will have an administration that actually believes in science'-Mark Warner; YES!" agreed tujaded.
Those were just two of a slew of comments on Twitter reacting to Warner's remark. Here's a quick summary:
- jlangenbeck: "Warner's speech was fantastic. We have to fund and tech to save this nation and remain competitive,"
- epolitics: "Diggin' me some Mark Warner. Science! (poetry in motion)"
- dagsalot: "I'm a big fan of former Gov. Mark Warner right now. 'Think, in 4 months, we could have a presidency that believes in science!' It'd be nice!"
- twitterdoug: "Best line of Warner's speech so far -- In four months we will have an administration that believes in science."
During his talk, Warner also pointed to the importance of broadband rollout, education and job training to keep jobs from migrating to India, referring to his own efforts as governor to revive small towns in Virginia.
"We delivered broadband to the most remote areas of our state, because if you can send a job to Bangalore, India, you can sure as heck send one to Danville, Virginia, and to Flint, Michigan, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and to Peoria, Illinois," he said. "In a global economy, you shouldn't have to leave your hometown to find a world-class job."
The Democrats have made broadband rollout part of their party platform, and both Obama and Warner have expressed support for net neutrality.
Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity: Firefox becomes Quicksilver
Lots of talk today across the web about Mozilla Labs' new project, Ubiquity.
If You Want To Create a Mashup, Just Ask Your Browser. Mozilla Labs Launches Ubiquity
Ubiquity prototype lets users take command of Firefox
Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On
This blog has a nice writeup: Ubiquity In Depth
Quoted from Ars Technica:
Mozilla Labs has released the first working prototype of Ubiquity, a natural-language command-based shell for the Firefox web browser. Although the Ubiquity project is still in early stages of development and the software still has some serious bugs, it already offers some useful functionality and exudes an enormous amount of potential.The Ubiquity prototype, which is implemented as a Firefox extension, offers an unobtrusive and extensible command interface that enables users to interact with the browser and a number of remote web services. The user can launch the Ubiquity command interface with a configurable keyboard shortcut and then type in an instruction. The command interface has an autocompletion mechanism which attempts to guess the rest of the user's command string and then displays available results.
The command interface is conceptually similar to desktop launcher tools like Enso, Quicksilver, and GNOME-Do. Unlike those tools, it places a strong emphasis on web content manipulation and web services. In many ways, it's like an interactive mash-up system. Ubiquity can respond to user instructions in several different ways. It can directly alter the contents of a web page, it can manipulate the browser interface, it can load a page in a new tab, and it can display output in a notification pop-up.
New commands can be implemented natively in JavaScript, so it is trivially easy to extend the system and bring it new capabilities. The developers have even created a simple Ubiquity command editor that allows users to input new command implementations directly into the browser. Mozilla provides a detailed tutorial that explains how some of default Ubiquity commands were implemented. It is even possible to use popular third-party JavaScript libraries like JQuery to simplify development of new commands. The Ubiquity developers aim to eventually create a tool that can automatically convert Ubiquity commands into full Firefox extensions.
One of the commands that particularly impressed me performs in-place translation of selected text blocks. The user selects a bit of text, initiates the Ubiquity command system, and then begins typing the word "translate" to select the translation command. Ubiquity will use a remote translation web service to automatically detect the language of the selected text, translate it into English, and display a preview of the English translation in the Ubiquity results listing. When the user hits enter to complete the command, the foreign text in the page itself will be replaced inline with the English translation.
Ubiquity offers some very compelling functionality in its current state, but it still has a lot of limitations. The biggest weakness is its lack of support for pipelines. Modularity and support for combinatorial command chains are the greatest strengths of the conventional Linux command-line shells. Ubiquity would be far more powerful if it provided a way to supply the output of one command as the input to a subsequent command.Ubiquity is largely an experiment in user interaction, but it is likely that some of its functionality will eventually be streamlined directly into the Firefox browser itself. One potential integration vector is the Firefox AwesomeBar, a rich autocompletion system that matches user input against fragments of URLs and page titles and offers the best results based on how frequently a page is visited and how long ago it was last viewed. Many enthusiastic fans of the AwesomeBar have speculated that the system could be expanded to encapsulate more functionality and potentially even a full command system. Perhaps the AwesomeBar could converge with the search box and the Ubiquity command system to form a next-generation Firefox UberBar.
One of the principal developers of the Ubiquity extension is Aza Raskin, the founder of Humanized and son of the celebrated Macintosh luminary Jef Raskin. Aza and several of his colleagues from Humanized were hired by Mozilla earlier this year to work on experimental projects that could shape the future of the web. I've had the pleasure of meeting Aza at several open-source software community events and I've always been immensely impressed by his excellent presentations on software usability. He has bold ideas and very intriguing solutions to seemingly intractable usability problems.
Aza advocates creating software that conforms to the Taoist notion of Wu Wei, which is to "act without doing." The Ubiquity extension, which clearly builds on the experiences that the Humanized developers cultivated while creating Enso, is a profoundly elegant articulation of that Taoist concept.
MobileMe gets new leadership, Jobs admits Apple made a big mistake
Apple's MobileMe service has proven to be a horror It's been a curious thing to watch: Apple makes mistakes all the time, but they are usually small mistakes, easily swept aside in the tide of their own user's enthusiasm. But MobileMe wasn't just a cool service with some flaws: it ripped itself out of Apple's usually fertile loins like some Belial-esque monstrosity and immediately went for the throat of those who had expected to love it most.
The good news is that Steve Jobs is pissed. In an internal email to Apple employees yesterday evening, Jobs admitted that MobileMe was "not up to Apple's standards" and should have been rolled out in small chunks rather than as a "monolithic service."
"It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," Jobs said. "We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence." No kidding.
The bad news: Apple still doesn't think MobileMe is up to snuff. Jobs says that Apple will "press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year." Pessimistically, that means beleaguered MobileMe users could have four months of teeth gritting ahead of them.
It also looks like the MobileMe team has been reorganized. The group will now report to iTunes honcho Eddy Cue, who also heads up the Apple Store. Cue will report directly to Jobs. There's no word on what happened to MobileMe's previous department head: fired out of a cannon into an industrial shredder is my bet.
Steve Jobs: MobileMe "not up to Apple standards" [Ars Technica]
Do they really think the earth is flat?
Article via BBC News by By Brendan O'Neill
In the 21st Century, the term "flat-earther" is used to describe someone who is spectacularly - and seemingly wilfully - ignorant. But there is a group of people who claim they believe the planet really is flat. Are they really out there or is it all an elaborate prank?
Nasa is celebrating its 50th birthday with much fanfare and pictures of past glories. But in half a century of extraordinary images of space, one stands out.
On 24 December 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 mission took a photo now known as Earthrise. To many, this beautiful blue sphere viewed from the moon's orbit is a perfect visual summary of why it is right to strive to go into space.
Not to everybody though. There are people who say they think this image is fake - part of a worldwide conspiracy by space agencies, governments and scientists.
Welcome to the world of the flat-earther.
Our attitude towards those who once upon a time believed in the flatness of the earth is apparent in a new Microsoft advert.
Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the "edge of the world", the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.
Satellite era
But are there any genuine flat-earthers left? Surely in our era of space exploration - where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars - no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?
Wrong.
Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the "conspiracy" that the Earth is round.
"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers," says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial.
"Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism."
Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after "coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago".
"I came to realise how much we take at face value," he says. "We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses."
Mr Davis now believes "the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite - it stretches horizontally forever".
"And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep", he adds.
James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a discussion website theflatearthsociety.org, has a slightly different take. "The Earth is, more or less, a disc," he states. "Obviously it isn't perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter."
Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been "raised a globularist in the British state school system", says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from "sheer incredulity to the conviction that it's all just an elaborate joke".
So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say.
Disappearing ships
Mr McIntyre estimates "there are thousands", but "without a platform for communication, a head-count is almost impossible", he says. Mr Davis says he is currently creating an "online information repository" to help to bring together local Flat Earth communities into a "global community".
"If you will forgive my use of the term 'global'", he says.
And for the casual observer, it is hard to accept that all of this is not some bizarre 21st Century jape. After all, most schoolchildren know that ships can disappear over the horizon, that satellites orbit the earth and that if you head along the equator you will eventually come back on yourself.
What about all the photos from space that show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the Earth is round? "The space agencies of the world are involved in an international conspiracy to dupe the public for vast profit," says Mr McIntyre.
John Davis also says "these photos are fake".
And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our supposedly disc-shaped world?
Mr McIntyre laughs. "This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked questions," he says. "A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well explains the reason - the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth."
Ultimate conspiracy
Mr Davis says that being a flat-earther doesn't have an impact on how one lives every day. "As a rule of thumb, we don't have any fears of aircraft or other modes of transportation," he says.
Christine Garwood, author of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, is not surprised that flat-earthers simply write off the evidence that our planet is globular.
"Flat earth theory is one of the ultimate conspiracy theories," she says.
"Naturally, flat earth believers think that the moon landings were faked, as were the photographs of earth from space."
Perhaps one of the most surprising things in Garwood's book is her revelation that flat earth theory is a relatively modern phenomenon.
Ms Garwood says it is an "historic fallacy" that everyone from ancient times to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of this "mad idea" once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America without "falling off the edge of the world".
In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc didn't emerge until Victorian times.
Theories about the earth being flat really came to the fore in 19th Century England. With the rise and rise of scientific rationalism, which seemed to undermine Biblical authority, some Christian thinkers decided to launch an attack on established science.
Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884) assumed the pseudonym of "Parallax" and founded a new school of "Zetetic astronomy". He toured England arguing that the Earth was a stationary disc and the Sun was only 400 miles away.
In the 1870s, Christian polemicist John Hampden wrote numerous works about the Earth being flat, and described Isaac Newton as "in liquor or insane".
And the spirit of these attacks lives on to the present day. The flat-earth myth remains the outlandish king in the realm of the conspiracy theorist.
And while we all respect a degree of scepticism towards the authorities, says Ms Garwood, the flat-earthers show things can go too far.
"It is always good to question 'how we know what we know', but it is also good to have the ability to accept compelling evidence - such as the photographs of Earth from space."