October 2010 Archives

But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan's crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new economic order in Asia based on the yen. Today, those high-flying ambitions have been shelved, replaced by weariness and fear of the future, and an almost stifling air of resignation. Japan seems to have pulled into a shell, content to accept its slow fade from the global stage.

Carlos Bueno verkar jobba på Facebook, men det hindrar honom inte att skriva ihop en lite guide för hur man bäst bygger sig en egen "tidskapsel". (Att jobba på ett ställe som Facebook måste nog istället framkalla en viss ångest om man är det minsta intresserad av att bevara samtida kultur). 

Syrafritt papper, nånting att bevara (exempelvis källkoden för Linux v. 0.1, som ovan), utskrivet med laserskrivare, lim, balsaträ (för att bygga lådan) och harts (för att så att säga "plasta in" artefakten, så att den håller i en 50 till 500 år). Men det viktigaste när man gräver ner sin tidskapsel är att man tar med information om var någonstans andra kapslar finns att hitta:

Inside each time capsule will be a list of other known capsules. That, I hope, will make the difference between a node in a network and a forgotten box of junk. Dozens or hundreds of people could build full-scale capsules like this and share location data with each other. This prototype and its twin are the only two of their kind so far, so they only link to each other. The larger the network, the greater the chances of recovery.

He found a beetle named Agra vation and another one called Agra phobia. (These are their real scientific names.)

There is a pine tree called Pinus rigidus.

There is a mollusk named Abra cadabra.

He found an extinct rat-kangaroo called Wakiewakie.

There is a spider genus called Orsonwelles...(named, of course for the actor/director) and this little lady you see here is called Orsonwelles falstaffius commemorating a movie Welles made called "Falstaff."

But here's my favorite. It comes from a genus of snails called Bittium.There is a type of Bittium snail that tends to be smaller than the others. We don't have a photo, but I can imagine it well enough and it is called...ah, this is so wonderful.... Ittibittium.

It's as if somebody got into my house, walked right up to a door I'd never noticed, opened it wide and led me through into the corridor beyond. Of course, I'm saying to myself. Why didn't I ever think to look here?

Forget Gattaca; genetic engineering's crazy excesses are going to hit us in the bodega, not the bedroom. And forget Skynet; the real apocalypse starts when all the fish die. 

By now, I hope you'll forgive the ahistorical slip that led me to enlist the iPhone as a way of imagining just how resourceful an early almanac could be. It was so much more than a book. Comparing it to the iPhone helps expand our vision about how an almanac worked and what it could do for its buyers. It wasn't simply a compendium of reading material. Just as an iPhone connects users to an outside world and provides a feast of tools designed to make our lives easier, the almanac held the same promise. More than that, it was central to early American life and culture because it had so little competition. There was nothing at the local book shop that could do all the things the almanac did.

Not surprisingly, Washington turned to the annual edition of The Virginia Almanac for his diary. Aside from assigning a heading for his memoranda pages that read "Where & How my time is Spent," Washington's entries resembled those of most of his contemporaries, especially in the days before the Revolution when he was preoccupied with managing his large Virginia estate. 

In a typical glimpse, Washington recorded the first few days of July 1771 as follows:

July 1. Rid into the Neck to my Harvest People, & back to Dinner. Mr. Robt. Rutherford came in the Afternoon & went away again.

2. Rid to Harvest Field in the Neck & back to Dinner.

3. Rid to the Harvest Field in the Neck by the Ferry & Muddy hole Plantations. In the Afternoon Mr. Jno. Smith of Westmoreland came here.

4. At home all day with Mr. Smith. In the Afternoon Jno. Custis came.

I propose that we dismiss the notion that a National Digital Library of America is far-fetched, and that we concentrate on the general goal of providing the American people with the kind of library they deserve, the kind that meets the needs of the twenty-first century. We can equip the smallest junior college in Alabama and the remotest high school in North Dakota with the greatest library the world has ever known. We can open that library to the rest of the world, exercising a kind of "soft power" that will increase respect for the United States worldwide. By creating a National Digital Library, we can make our fellow citizens active members of an international Republic of Letters, and we can strengthen the bonds of citizenship at home.

In this work we demonstrate how modern-day statistical MT system can be constrained to search for translations obeying particular length, meter, and rhyming constraints, whether a single constraint, or any one of a set. We further demonstrate that the hypothesis space is often rich enough that these constraints can be satisfied. The impact on translation quality, however, is quite profound, as is to be expected. It seems that at the present state of machine translation, one does indeed have to choose betweengetting either the form or the meaning right. In the present form, however, we can already find good translations, as a sort of found poetry, by translating a large quantity of text, whether poetic or not.

I believe that the copy is no longer important, that we can all get the book, the text itself, if we need it. What is valuable and what is core and what we can lend to our friends and pass onto our children is not copies of books but originals of our own experiences, associated with those singular works of art.

A culture's icons are a window onto its soul. Few would disagree that, in the culture of molecular biology that dominated much of the life sciences for the last third of the 20th century, the dominant icon was the double helix.

In the present, post-modern, 'systems biology' era, however, it is, arguably, the hairball.