| Wednesday,
March 2, 2011 Dual Processor, two cameras, thinner, longer
battery life: that's what the Twitterati are saying in live coverage of
Jobs' announcement of the iPad 2.
Meanwhile the world goes on. The Fleet is small and getting smaller,
but the Navy is doing its best to have a presence in the Mediterranean
while carrying on its missions in the rest of the world. Libya is settling
down to a long war that could end in partition of this rather recently
created "nation" of tribal groups in a modern and reasonably wealthy
(compared to Egypt) society. Egypt is showing us rule by Mamelukes. Libya
is testing rule by Janissaries. So far the rebels appear to be winning.
And Wisconsin has lost its Capitol to those who can afford to camp out
and who prevent the janitors from doing their work.
Welcome to the modern world. It's time for my walk.
==========
If you have not seen this, it's longer than it should be,
but it's a pretty good picture of why technology will continue to change the
future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38
In my lifetime TV has gone from something shown as a coming
wonder at a World's Fair to an entitlement. Indeed, the real rights of
Americans (and later Europeans, and others as the wealth spreads) have
increased enormously. Now we have a "right" to a level of health care
that would have been considered miraculous when my children were born. When
I was young, few people maintained teeth into their retirement age. Now
people are beginning to outlive their teeth again, but just barely. Anyone
can travel across the country in hours. Of course what technology gives,
government regulates; you can travel across the land in hours, but you must
make obeisance to the TSA overlords and beg their permission, which they
will graciously grant once you have groveled enough. But that's another
story.
The future is creating more; see what glass can do.
============
And the Mac iPad announcements are over, but real
information on the full specs is sparse. We can wait.
===============
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/
2011/03/harper-lee-to-receive-national-medal
-of-the-arts-honor.html?cid=6a00d8341c630a53e
f014e5f94e3b3970c
Harper Lee, the author of "To Kill a
Mockingbird," will be among 10 artists and authors to recieve the National
Medal of Arts, the White House announced Tuesday. Ten other American icons
will recieve the National Humanities Medal.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall will
also recieve a National Medal of Arts, along with actress Meryl Streep,
musicians Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, James Taylor and Van Cliburn,
painter Mark di Suvero, theater champion Robert Brustein and an
organization, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.
The National Humanities Medal honors both
creativity and scholarship. It will be presented to writers Joyce Carol
Oates and Philip Roth and poet Wendell Berry. Scholars Jacques Barzun,
Bernard Bailyn, Roberto González Echevarria, Arnold Rampersad and Gordon
Wood will also recieve the Humanities medal, as will Stanley Nider Katz,
president of the American Council of Learned Societies, and Daniel Aaron,
founding president of the Library of America.
The National Medals of Arts and National
Humanities Medals will be
awarded together in a White House ceremony Wednesday. Most honorees
are expected to attend, but Lee and Streep have said they will not be able
to make it.
I have met Jacques Barzun and Wendell Berry, and indeed
Berry and I were both conferees at the Library of Congress Symposium on
Science and Science Fiction (along with Sir Fred Hoyle and Gene Roddenberry
among many others.) I have been reading Barzun since I discovered his
Teacher in America in high school. I periodically reread it; if you
haven't read it, you should. Much of it is out of date in the sense that he
speaks of improving far better schools than we have now, but it is well to
understand what is possible when you live in a degenerate age. What man has
done, man can aspire to.
It is long past time that the US recognize Barzun as a
national treasure. Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, and used to grow
tobacco, perhaps still does. He was and is the most effective spokesman I
know for the smaller is more beautiful view, and since he starts from a
profoundly conservative philosophical view, it is worth paying attention to
what he says. Sometimes he catches a truth in his oddly shaped net. We used
to correspond, but that was in the days of paper mail.
==============
NEO News (06/14/10) Hayabusa
Returns!
The Japanese (JAXA) mission to
the sub-km NEA Itokawa made a spectacular return to Earth on Sunday June
13, landing on the desolate Woomera test range in Australia. The night
re-entry was photographed from the ground and from an instrumented NASA/SETI-Institute
plane. The video of this event is well worth watching, showing both the
breakup of the main spacecraft and the survival of the entry probe, which
parachuted safely to the ground. Congratulations to the JAXA team for this
outstanding demonstration of interplanetary navigation on the first
spacecraft to study these small asteroids.
David Morrison
For the entry video, see [
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1402 ]
===============
The Supreme Court has ruled that a bunch of weird people who
parade outside military funerals proclaiming that God hates the American
military, and displaying signs saying "Thank God for dead soldiers" have the
right to do that, and the news media have the right to cover it. There is a
pretty good summary here:
http://www.aolnews.com/
2011/03/02/westboro-court-decision
-pits-free-speech-against-common-decency/
The decision was 8-1, Alito dissenting, and the Chief
Justice exercised his prerogative to write the decision. That pretty well
settles the matter: you have the right not only to say infuriating things,
but also to say them in the most sensitive of places, so long as you are not
disruptive: and you cannot be sued in civil courts for offending the parents
of a war hero merely because you are being offensive.
This should have considerable impact on hate speech laws; it
also ought to have some effect on the suppression of majority opinion
because it offends a particular minority. If the Westbro Baptist Church has
the right to say "Thank God for dead soldiers" at a funeral for a dead
soldier, it should be difficult to defend suppressing displays "offensive"
to Muslims outside their mosques. I haven't read the decision yet, but it
certainly implies that non-disruptive speech knows no bounds of context and
place.
To summarize: The Westbro Baptist Church prophecies the
utter destruction of the United States because it tolerates homosexuality in
the military. It does so by picketing the funerals of dead soldiers. It is
difficult to imagine speech more offensive.
===========
An alleged Moslem shouting "Allah Akbar!" shot US Airmen in
Germany today, but there is controversy over whether this is a terrorist
action, according to White House spokesmen. The perpetrator was captured and
is from Kosovo. You may or may not recall that NATO essentially took Kosovo
from the Serbs and handed it to the Moslem Albanians, after which the
Albanians conducted a fairly thorough ethnic cleansing of what had been a
Serbian majority territory after World War I and which, prior to NATO's
intervention, had never had a legal Albanian immigrant. Over time the ethnic
majority in Kosovo went from Serb to Albanian. Ethnically based civil war
resulted until NATO intervened.
How many White House advisors do you need to determine when
a shooting is a terrorist act?
We have sown the wind.
================
Jane Russell, RIP
I first heard of Jane Russell in high school in about 1946
when The Outlaw was going around the theaters. Memphis Tennessee in
those days had cultural censorship: The Binford Commission declared it was
too lewd to be shown in our theaters. Immediately we got up a party to go
see it in West Memphis, Arkansas. That required about a dollar's worth of
gasoline from everyone but Freddie who had a driver's license and could
borrow the family car provided that someone paid for the gasoline; another
dollar each (except for Freddie) for the movie house and popcorn, and a $5
bill for the Arkansas State Trooper whose job it was to catch Tennessee
teenagers coming across the Harahan Bridge and extract a $5 bill for not
giving them a ticket. Sometimes you might luck out (i.e. if the cop was
dealing with another traffic stop) but it was best to be prepared. I was the
youngest of those asked, but it was known that I usually had a couple of
bucks, and besides, my father was the manager of WHBQ and I could often get
concert and movie tickets.
We went on a Friday night, got stopped just after we crossed
the bridge, paid our bribe, and went to downtown West Memphis to enjoy the
movie. We didn't have a beer until after we got back to Memphis, since we
really didn't want a legitimate traffic stop: the toll we'd paid was more
like for permission to drive young in Arkansas with a Tennessee license.
We were fairly naive -- there was no Playboy magazine
in those days, and girly magazines were expensive and hard to come by -- but
we had been to girly shows during the Cotton Carnival in Memphis. Binford
didn't like carnivals, but Ed Crump who was city boss was either fond of
them or had friends who were -- there was always a Cotton Carnival every
spring and if you were smart you could figure out how to get into the adult
strip tease tent show. We'd already seen Gypsy Rose Lee live by the time we
saw Jane Russell in The Outlaw, but we didn't regret going to the
movie. I actually remember her movies with Bob Hope better than The
Outlaw, which is probably just as well.
<http://www.nytimes.com/
2011/03/01/movies/01russell.html>
===========
Warning
Daring Fireball posted a link
about malware at the android app store:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/03/01/
the-mother-of-all-android-malware-has-
arrived-stolen-apps-released-to-the-market
-that-root-your-phone-steal-your-
data-and-open-backdoor/
be careful out there,
Tim Harness.
Wednesday TOP
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