Missing Mary Road

On the chilly Isle of Thanet in Kent, England, farmers are placing 220 acres of land under glass so they can grow vegetables all year round. The greenhouse, when completed, will house 1.3 million plants and increase the UK’s crop of green vegetables by 15%. Called Thanet Earth, the project will be a series of 7 connected grenhouses with a relatively small carbon footprint. And nothing grown inside Thanet Earth will ever touch soil.

i guess this means we can have tomatoes again.

I’m reading SpyCraft: The Secret History of the CIA ‘s Spytechs From Communism to Al Qaeda right now. I can’t put it down. I highly recommend you read it. Will review it when I complete it.

Spymasters have long sought special technology to enhance security of agents risking their lives to steal and communicate secrets. Application of advanced U.S. technology to espionage focused by America’s entrance into the “spy game” during World War II, transformed intelligence operations forever. Unfettered by clandestine tradition, the boundless wartime ingenuity of American engineers and scientists launched a technological revolution in espionage.

No technology has played a larger part in the way digital media – including games – is distributed and consumed than the Internet, and its effect on piracy and the efforts to counteract it has been profound. In its earliest days, ‘Net connectivity allowed those who knew how to use it to connect via BBS, putting hackers and crackers in touch with each other and allowing them to share ideas. Now, of course, most PC owners have some form of Internet connection, many at speeds that would have been ludicrous even as recently as the mid-’90s, giving them access to entire copies of cracked games that have been made available via IRC or peer-to-peer network.

The industry is certainly facing its most serious challenge in its long fight against piracy, and it’s been interesting to see what stances have been taken in the past few years. EA’s efforts with Mass Effect and Spore are not all we’ve heard of server-side copy protection; Valve links copies of its games – store-bought or downloaded – to its Steam service, while massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require unique product keys for login. And it’s certainly not going to be the last we’ll hear of it, either, as more and more users acquire faster Internet connectivity and more and more games make use of downloadable content and other online-specific features.

Read more here about the history of Copyright Protection.

articles about the the big black can never get boring. the new york times does a fairly good job of explaining more about the universe.

Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air.

They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand.

That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus.

A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

so the sci-fi channel as you can tell lately plays some terrible programming lately. the same can be said for it’s canadian cousin space. so this guy decided since the sci-fi channel isn’t going to play anything half decent, he’s going to find links to all the classic sci-fi he can and provide links to it. it’s all legal and legit and it’s awesome.

Until recently I was able to ignore the abortion that called itself ‘The SciFi Channel’. At least they were using the less respectable ‘Skiffy’ abbreviation to identify themselves (no insult intended at all towards Mr. Ackerman who coined the phrase: maybe they ought to put him in charge…). But no longer. A few short weeks ago the Suits-In-Charge (SIC) decided that their channel needed to reach an audience wider than the ‘geeky young guys’ that science fiction appeals to (their definition of the market, not mine) and so they’ve unilaterally decided to expand the definition. Now, according to these self-proclaimed scions of the genre, the defintion of SF has been reduced to the all encompassing “What If?”

And somehow, ‘What If?’ includes professional wrestling and paranormal reality shows. (Paranormal reality!? Shoot me now, please!) (What if idiots from another galaxy traveled through a wormhole and seized control of all of our television programming?)

Not that I haven’t given SFC a shot. I’ve dutifully tuned in for almost every new series and have at least started to watch their ‘made-for-television’ in-house fare. To tell the truth, sometimes the stories themselves haven’t been all that bad, but SFC seems to be plagued by the curse of the B-Actors. (I’d rather they went the original Doctor Who route – good actors, minimal budget for effects. See, science fiction fans are used to making pictures inside their heads. They don’t need to be shown everything. A hint, a mere suggestion, is often more than enough.)

Oh yes, I know Battlestar Galactica has been a huge success, a phenomena. One that’s now starting to confuse and disappoint even its biggest fans. Why? I think its easy to explain: once you replace ‘good guys and bad guys’ with tens of characters, all of whom have conflicted emotions, there can never be any really satisfactory resolution. Instead of telling a story, you end up mired in detailed characterizations. Too much detail for a late-arriving viewer to be able to pick up on mid-stream. Too much interpersonal BS for anyone to care about any of it over the long haul. Great concept, reduced to little more than office gossip around the water cooler.

But enough of my personal biases.