Tales of a vagrant ant

Feeling a bit random right now… brain’s a bit zonkified from being at home for too long, i think… I’ve been in my PJs all day, even though i woke up “early”, at 9am… It gets a bit crazy when your mom is going through menopause, and is relatively irritable.

I keep collecting all these interesting and weird articles on the net, but i forget to actually post them… so here goes nothing:

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time before they did this… hehehe

But I didn’t think that musical breast implants were just a matter of time, but apparently they are.

And lastly, a website documenting bad scrabble hands that people have gotten. How silly is that.

That is all.

Ohh, I’ve probably plugged this to death, but if you want to look at pictures i’ve taken, come visit my site on flickr. There’s a little doodad on the sidebar (under the calendar) to see some thumbnails of recent photos. I know it works on my computer… does it work for everybody else?

This is why the internet is so scary these days… I’ve always been sketched out by the power of google, in its overreaching access to personal information:
During each visit to Google or any other Internet site, a visitor’s computer reveals a numerical address assigned by the user’s Internet provider. The site can store that information, along with the date and time of the visit. This information can be used by researchers, marketers, or investigators to trace the visitor’s identity.
So anything you search on google, emails you send in gmail or directions you look up on google maps, can theoretically be traced back to your computer. Then there’s Google Print, Google video, Google Talk and Google Desktop toolbar, and they also own Blogger. I can’t even begin to fathom how much information they possess right now… And google keeps much of this information… but for what purpose? They haven’t been really nefarious yet, but I think that under its colourful rainbow-lettered facade lies something ominous. And now that the US government is subpoenaing Google to provide 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. They say they want “the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.”, but who knows how else they might try to use that information.
So if you looked up “what to do about my itchy scalp”, they could know that it was you who had an itchy scalp…. okay, bad examples, but you see the implications of this subpoena…

All that said, I am still using google (ugh), partly because there isn’t really any other comparable competitor, in terms of

It’s a little heartening to hear that Google is refusing to comply to the demands by the US government, but with Google stocks taking a beating on the market, who knows what may happen…

Something else scary to think about: The conservatives taking to power in Canada, and acting in tandem of U.S gov’t policies, on things like the Kyoto protocol, abortion rights, marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and just being flung into the far right depths of conservatism…
Blargh….

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Knowing Nature Through Technology, Part II

The idea of wiring the planet offends some people’s sensibilities. To some, it betokens a lack of reverance for wild nature. Some even seem to think that knowing more about nature is somehow transgressive. It seems to me that the opposite is true, that destroying things in ignorance is profoundly worse, and that anyone whose sympathy with nature is based on nature’s unknowable-ness has housed their faith in a home of straw, and the wind is picking up.

But will we know what to listen for? That strikes me as a whole different question. Science, despite its aspirations to the contrary, is a cultural endeavor. Data are never value-free. How might we develop a culture of planetary science that is most inclined to make wise choices, choices which can then best inform our societal choices about how to best act to preserve, protect, restore and recreate natural systems?

Basically, these people want to hook up real life places with sensors to monitor the environment,so that they’ll be able to better manage and monitor it.
In a way, this technology scares me quite a bit, in terms of what it’s capable of, and to a certain extent, I DO feel like humans are acting irreverently, as if they own the planet. But at the same time, humans have SUCH an impact on the world, and really, they do need to act as stewards of this place we call Earth…