File this under "censorship makes you stupid".

Mark Finnern of Future Salon attempts to write of Technorati's Dave Sifry:

I loved his Etech Technorati Hacks session and I wrote about it in the Yahoo Group Description, but they would not let me save my text, because it contained a word that Yahoo perceives as not appropriate. The word is "Hack". Who would have thought?

I wonder if they also ban 'h4ck', because no script-kiddie would spell it 'hack' anyhow.

Once we had hired a VP of Software Engineering at my company, and I tried to educate him on the proper usage of the word 'hack' ...his understanding of the word more matched the definition of 'kludge'. He didn't really get it. We fired him pretty soon after that.

The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project is an international collaboration which has put "a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages" onto a disk which the European Space Agency is set to launch into space in about ten hours. Jim Mason of the Long Now Foundation has filed this (sometimes surreal) on-the-spot report of the pre-launch atmosphere in French Guiana:

though the concentration of linguists in french guiana has proved to be very low, the concentration of rocket scientists is likely the highest i have ever seen. it is very funny to get on a plane in paris and 90% of those on the plane are the proverbial and much referenced rocket scientists. you get on the bus, it is full of rocket scientists. you have dinner, the table is all rocket scientists. you ask a question about the chemical composition of the second stage liquid booster while having a drink at the bar, and most of the bar starts to answer in great detail. they are all very excited.

[...]

then in cayenne it is carnival every night. it is very steamy and thinly clothed. between the parade groups, the boys like to have little brawls in the street, which when they get a little too heated the police throw tear gas bombs into the middle of everything. then everyone runs away about 4 blocks, as that's what it takes to get the sting out of your eyes and throat, then everyone reforms and they start pounding on the 55 gal plastic cleaning drums that form basis of the drum section for the processions, and the rhythmic mob begins to roll again.

Read the full text here.

As we race headlong into this new century the world is a whirlwind of new possibilities, revelations and knowledge, but also of age-old problems, conceits and greed. It can be exhilirating and depressing, almost simultaneously. Today I ran across a nice quote at the foward-thinking site WorldChanging:

It's the widening gap between what's conceivable and what we're doing that's sometimes discouraging. It's the narrowing gap between what's conceivable and what's possible that's sometimes electrifying.

That sums it up nicely. Although I would change the first sentence to "It's the widening gap between what's possible and what we're doing that's sometimes discouraging."

People like to collect things (be the first on your block to collect all seven!). People also like to mark things off lists. I've made lists of things I've already done or obtained, just for the pleasure of crossing them out. A common mix of these two urges is collecting evidence of travel, such as passport stamps; a friend's wife collects kitschy little regional snow globes depicting such plausible scenarios as the Alamo in a snow flurry.

Today a posting at Creative Commons led me to an online site called world66 that lets you check off your travel accomplishements in a web form and obtain an image and the necessary HTML for posting it to your web site. Very nicely executed.

create your own personalized map of the USA

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

The maps are a lead in for an open travel guide, where travlers create and maintain the content themselves. You can add or update any information you like. The site is basically a wiki, like the much acclaimed Wikipedia. All content on the site is under a Creative Commons license which says that anyone can use, redistribute or make derivate works, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, as long as they give attribution and maintain the license terms for their derived works. Bravo.

The Observer (UK) Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war · Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years · Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

I saw this yesterday, and expected it to be top story on CNN et al today ...but then I woke up and remembered that all the mass media news organizations are living in some other reality.

I guess here's some hard evidence of how the Bush administration has been preaching false science to support their agendas.

Update: There is some substance to the report, but the Guardian sensationalized it. I guess I need to beware of that organization as just as hysterical as their Fox "News" counterpart on the other side of the fence. The best analysis I've seen so far is over at BoingBoing.

Here's a cool project I stumbled across today: symbolproject.org.

Symbolproject.org is a multilingual wiki project for collaboratively designing ideographic glyphs, working from our own list of core universalist concepts. The idea, in a nutshell it to borrow heavily from Han Chinese characters, using what is usable, and continually polished each design over time.

If I'm understanding correctly, it's rather like an esperanto-like effort for written script.

Here's some more info from the page where I first found a reference to this:

I thought of this idea while studying Chinese characters -- many are easy to understand like person人, female 女, moon 月, middle 中, sun 日, etc. Simple symbols represent concepts and in combination (like sun+moon 明="brilliant") represent more detailed ideas. In Chinese there arise various distortions, due largely to phonetic uses for characters, like the female+horse 媽="mother" because of the "ma1" (mother) sound of ma3 (horse). There are various other reasons fow why Chinese (as it is) is unsuitable for a universal pictographic language.

Neat!

There's some good comments and criticism of the project here.

This news broke yesterday:

Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts:

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

This seems like important news: not only has the administration lied about WMD, but they're also systematically lying to the American public about scientific information (pertaining to health, environment, etc). Yet 24 hours after I first saw the report (on Canadian newsite Globe and Mail) I still see no mention of it on the front pages of CNN, Washington Post or (of course) Fox "News".

Here's a nice scenario; the U.S. education system has been crippled for decades, mass-media journalism has been replaced by shills for the military-entertainment complex and now we're being fed false science. Reality is being changed before our very eyes. My friend Christopher says that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it jumps out, but if you drop a frog in a pot of cool water then heat it to a boil, the frog sits there complacently until it dies.

Our pot is boiling.