Musings from Bill
Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between May 5th and May 10th:
Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between March 18th and May 3rd:
The Higgs field is what gives particles their mass. Go into orbit and try to push a 1 tonne satellite – you can’t. It weighs nothing but its mass is unchanged by being in free fall or even in deep space, and so the force needed to change its momentum is still too great for a mere astronaut.
Without the Higgs field there would be no mass and no matter, because mass is what distorts space-time and creates the effects we interpret as the ‘force’ of gravity. Without the Higgs field there would none of this world, none of us, nothing to be conscious or conscious of.
One way of imagining what the Higgs field does it that it makes space-time exert a drag on objects, like walking through water. It’s a tiny effect, which is one reason why gravity is so weak compared to electromagnetism or the strong and weak nuclear forces, but it adds up. With enough particles you can build atoms and planets and stars and galaxies. A whole observable universe, even.
And Twitter is doing something similar in the virtual world.
Continue reading “Twitter is the Higgs Boson of the Internet”
[This is also on the WattWatt site, an online community for anyone concerned with energy efficiency]
Like every other product of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of a long-industrialised society the computers that surround us – and, for the pacemaker wearers among us, that we have taken into our bodies – carry an environmental cost.
Silicon may be cheap, but turning it into processors requires vast amounts of energy, clean water and many potentially toxic chemicals.
Some of the raw materials used elsewhere, like the coltan in our mobile phones, are extracted at great human and environmental cost.
Displays and casings may contain heavy metals and damaging chemicals, while the disposal of old computers is becoming a significant issue.
And the billions of processors, hard drives, screens and network devices that we increasingly rely upon consume more and more electrical energy, much of it wastefully generated from non-renewable sources that release carbon into the atmosphere.
It’s fifteen years since CERN announced that web code was in the public domain
Tim Berners-Lee has talked on the BBC news site about the way things could go in future, and I managed 4 mins on BBC Radio 5 Live talking about why the Web matters…
[audio:https://thebillblog.com/ext/bill/bill5live.mp3][As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
I used to be a professional computer programmer, writing in the C language on the Unix operating system back in the 1980’s when half a megabyte of memory was enough to support a sixteen-user system.
These days I’m only really up to hacking other people’s code to meet my needs, although I do occasionally find myself messing around with languages like PHP and JavaScript and I’m tempted to learn Python.
But I’m still enough of a coder to share the excitement that has been rippling through the IT security community recently after the publication of a paper from Mark Dowd, X-Force Researcher at IBM Internet Security Systems.
This is my desk at the moment – haven’t quite migrated off the old Vaio desktop onto the new iMac, and apart from picking up the wrong mouse from time to time I’m managing the keyboard switching ok.
Should really have put the Asus EEE PC in there too, I suppose…
It’s late on Sunday evening and I’ve just finished writing a column for Ariel, the BBC’s inhouse newspaper. I’m tired, but thought I’d spend five minutes installing Growl, the fabulous tool that tells you about what your Mac’s up to, on my new iMac.
And I came across a discussion thread on the Growl google group that included this fabulous aside from Brian Ganninger
Meta: Each discussion should be unto itself, bringing baggage in only leads to additional problems. We are in a neutral medium that doesn’t provide implicit contexts – your emotions, your tenses or speaking patterns, your anything else – and lends itself to exactly what is in front of the viewer.
Which is, of course, true. And is also what we want our social networks to make untrue.
Oh – and here’s my Seesmic video to show just how tired I am!
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News Website. It was inspired by a debate at the ICA which I chaired, and has attracted some comment online from Tara, Jordan, and Clare, among others]
Much as I adore my MacBook I have no desire to form a life-long union with it or attempt to interface in any way that doesn’t involve keys, trackpad and my fingers.
Others seem to feel differently about the matter, like David Levy, who reckons that by the middle of the century our relationships with the machines that currently service our social lives will have grown significantly, and that intelligent robots will be sexual partners too.
My friend Giles at Proboscis kindly invited me to suggest the material for one of their really cool eBooks, and being that kind of hack I chose three essays by Johnson, the man to whom all journalists are beholden.
The eBooks are part of their Diffusion project to create a platform for public authoring and cultures of listening by creating and sharing knowledge, stories, ideas and information. As they put it:
The Diffusion Shareables (eBooks & StoryCubes) are playful hybrid digital/material publications combining the tactile pleasures of tangible objects with the ease of sharing via digital media.
And they are also fun. You can get mine from their website – it’s a PDF which you print, fold and cut into a very nice little book/booklet.
