It might help curb your concerns about terrorist attacks channeled through nature to learn that some of God’s creatures are fighting on the side of righteousness: the US Navy has a Marine Mammals unit that trains sea lions and dolphins to detect and apprehend terrorists trying to sabotage or disrupt coastal infrastructure [via SlashDot].
Apparently the unit has existed since the Vietnam War… how in hell did they not get their own TV show?
After Alba the fluorescent art rabbit was artificially engineered, and genetically modified zebra fish were cleared for sale to the general public, I began imagining various ways in which playing Frankenstein could bite us all in the collective ass. Vivid as it may be, my layman’s imagination has been no match for the professional efforts taking place inside globally dispersed laboratories; strategically located to best align with antiquated laws, corrupt government officials and/or an oblivious local population.
As a consequence, I … we … have been repeatedly blindsided by some exasperating headlines: the Ruakura “sane cow” vaccination backfire in Australia, the Black Gull 17 contagion in Europe, and the Three Pig Inc virus in North America come immediately to mind. However, I can only take so much bad news. Continue reading The Lighter Side of Genetic Manipulation Nightmares
There are lots of interesting new business models for musicians in our new digital world, because music is a performance art – if you can’t sell the sounds, you can potentially sell the experience of seeing (and hearing) the sounds being made. Writers – acolytes of that traditionally most solitary of arts – don’t really have that opportunity.
Well, perhaps they have… Booknewser mentions one Matt Bell, who is guesting at the Everyday Genius blog for a week, where he will write and edit a story in full view of the public…
… or at least in the view of those members of the public who are actually interested in the creation of fiction rather than just the consumption of it, or who fancy a shot at the novelty of being allowed to contribute to the writing and editing process. And I suspect that, much as with many genre fiction short story venues, most of the interested parties will themselves be writers (aspiring or otherwise).
So don’t give up the ukelele lessons just yet, eh?
Every time I see someone ask the (usually rhetorical) question “why don’t we have the world full of robots that science fiction promised us?“, I’m always tempted to reply with a swing of the clue-by-four: “because anyone with any sense can see that a human worker is always going to be cheaper and more useful“.
Cheap and useful are two watchwords for companies that employ telecommuters, too. So why in hell’s name would a company of that ilk decide to invest in something that looks like a vaguely anthropomorphic floor-polisher to “to be the eyes and ears of telecommuters, workers in branch offices, and others who collaborate with people in an office when they aren’t in the office”?
If you really need that worker in the office, pay them to come in; it’ll be cheaper than ol’ QB here, and you’ll get all the real benefits of having a meatperson in the room, rather than a suite of functions that, if you really needed them, could be adequately provided by a mid-powered laptop and some audio-visual gear mounted on one of the old trolleys from the postroom that never gets used any more because everyone sends stuff in by email. Any CEO who thinks that he needs to spend thousands of dollars on “enterprise-class telepresence equipment” should probably give his IT geek a payrise and start listening to him once in a while.
I don’t know what’s more disappointing; that there could be even so much as a potential market for this tackily kitsch little technofetish, or that so many supposedly tech-savvy journalistic outlets could have written such uncritical puffpieces about it.
[ I fully blame the curmudgeonly tone of this post on having encountered the word “webinar” twice within the space of one morning. Writing this was a better option than killing puppies and kittens. ]
… is that a lot of the people growing weed are suddenly finding they can’t sell it, even at bargain-basement bulk rates, thanks to the easing of access provided by medical marijuana laws in the state [via MetaFilter].
“Outdoor growers are having a hard time unloading their fall harvest,” Custer says. “And this is six months later and when some people do move it, they don’t get nearly the price they were hoping for.”
That goes for both legal growers who cultivate limited quantities of pot under the medical marijuana laws and illegal operators who often grow larger amounts.
Prices are now much less than $2,000 a pound, according to interviews with more than a dozen growers and dealers. Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman says some growers can’t get rid of their processed pot at any price.
“We arrested a man who had … 800 pounds of processed,” Allman says. “Eight hundred pounds of processed. And we asked him: ‘What are you going to do with 800 pounds of processed?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.'”
Who’d have imagined that opening up a quasi-legal channel for supply would have driven prices down hugely, eh? I wonder what on earth they’ll manage to spend all the drug war money on if the state votes to legalise… there’s plenty to choose from, after all.