Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

I wonder if kids are getting stupid or if it’s just changing. Are we losing something when we can’t write papers?
Boston Globe Online: Writing term papers has become a lost art:

Although some students and critics contend that teachers are lazier than in the past, many educators say they can’t grade piles of papers for overcrowded classes while trying to meet the increased demands of standardized testing, many of which involve multiple-choice questions. Other teachers believe that term papers are meaningless exercises, because the Internet has made plagiarism more common and difficult to spot. And many say long (10- to 15-page) research papers are pointless, because many students’ basic writing skills are weak and are more likely to improve with shorter and more frequent assignments.

A report released recently by the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, a panel of academics gathered by the College Board, found that 75 percent of high school seniors never receive writing assignments in history or social studies. The study also found that a major research and writing project required in the senior year of high school ”has become an educational curiosity, something rarely assigned.” In addition, by the first year of college, more than 50 percent of freshmen are unable to analyze or synthesize information or produce papers free of language errors.

The commission chairman, C. Peter Magrath, blamed societal changes. ”We don’t write letters anymore, because we use telephone and e-mail and watch television,” he said.

I have a little folder on my computer at work where I file away little links and things I meant to write about or mention on the site. I was very glad to see this recent article, Like Fine Wine, Personality Improves with Age. I’d like to think we can actually change and improve as we get older:

The team found that conscientiousness increased with age, with the biggest jumps occurring among those individuals in their 20s. Agreeableness also climbed with age, largely among thirty-somethings. Men and women differed in their relative neuroticism: as women aged, their neurotic tendencies declined, but this was not the case for men. Openness waned slightly for both sexes, as did extraversion in women.

SARS Can Live on Common Surfaces: Key to Its Spread Lies in Quantity: The SARS virus can survive on common surfaces at room temperature for hours or even days, which could explain how people can catch the deadly lung infection without face-to-face contact with a sick person, scientists have found.

One study showed the virus survived for at least 24 hours on a plastic surface at room temperature, which suggests it might be possible to become infected from touching a tabletop, doorknob or other object. Another found the microbe remained viable for as long as four days in human waste, a crucial finding that could clarify how the virus can spread through apartment buildings, hospitals and other facilities.

From MATRIX²:

The ability to create photorealistic virtual human beings raises unsettling questions, especially in conjunction with the means to cut-and-paste them into any landscape. These questions troubled Gaeta himself so much that, a few years ago, he wrote a letter alerting President Clinton to the fact that such technology could be used for purposes of mass deception. (The letter was never answered.)

As it happens, one group deeply interested in the new breed of hyperrealistic CG is the military. Darpa is fast-tracking image-based rendering and lighting for use in immersive battle simulations. In 1999, the US Army launched the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC, where Paul Debevec – Borshukov’s former mentor at Berkeley – is now the head of graphics R&D.

Gaeta recognizes the paradox. “You have these paranoid films about the Matrix depicting how people are put in a mental prison by misusing this technology, and you have the military constructing something like the actual Matrix. Or maybe our technology will become the actual Matrix, and we have inadvertently spilled the vial of green shit out onto the planet.”

Wired: Prepare to Meet Thy Doom:

For years, games have been racing to catch up to the visual standards of animated films. Before long, Carmack says, game graphics will rival Monsters, Inc. in their detail. When that happens, technical advances in games will proceed at Hollywood’s more measured pace – incrementally instead of in great, creative leaps. Innovators will focus on optimizing existing code, and major revisions will happen less frequently. In effect, Carmack will be obsolete. “There’s a real chance that the next-generation rendering engine will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time,” he says. “Programmers will move from being engine coders to being technical directors in the Pixar style.” …

Eventually, Carmack says, real-time rendering will be so dynamic that animators will be able to produce films using game engines. Motivated modmakers will have the tools – for free, if Carmack has his way – to bring to life a vision as compelling as the new film Finding Nemo (see Swimming With Sharks). In his book Pattern Recognition, William Gibson writes about a “Garage Kubrick.” Carmack foresees a Basement Disney.

The ideal Carmack has always had in mind is the Holodeck, the immersive simulation device on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s science fiction, of course, but a major influence on his thinking all the same. “When I create a game, I’m not telling a story,” he says. “I’m creating an environment in which interesting things will happen.” If, as Carmack believes, graphics engines are reaching a plateau, “now is the time to do a generalized environment” that would be the ultimate mod – a programmable virtual reality like the Metaverse described by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. …

Even with all that processing power at his disposal, Carmack then squeezes out every ounce of performance he can. For the game’s monsters, he created an algorithm to reduce a 500,000-polygon character to a mere 2,000 when viewed at a distance – just the amount to ensure the game’s speed. Carmack also fixed the tendency for shadows to invert when the viewer’s eye was inside the darkness by calculating the shadows from above instead of from the player’s point of view. The technique inspired several dissertations and a name: Carmack’s reverse.

“It was one of those really elegant solutions,” says Carmack, that could come only after grueling hours of work. “There’s this cultural stereotype of a person staring off into space until a light bulb turns on, but that’s just intellectual laziness. You have to get inside a problem and work it.”

1. Scientists develop experimental silicon-based hippocampus replacement. World’s first known brain prosthesis. Any device that mimics the brain clearly raises ethical issues. The brain not only affects memory, but your mood, awareness and consciousness – parts of your fundamental identity, says ethicist Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
2. Serbian prime-minister assassinated by mafia?
3. Death rate for eating disorder not unusual Anorexia nervosa: Mayo Clinic study looks at patients over 60-year period
4. Serbian Prime Minister Assassinated: The Serbian government said later in a statement that a Belgrade-based criminal group was behind the assassination. It called the group the Zemun clan, named after a Belgrade municipality, and said it was responsible for many murders and kidnappings during the past few years. It also named several alleged leading figures. It reminds me of the line in ‘The Godfather’: “If history has taught us anything, it is this: Anyone can be killed.”

While some animals die, or slowly vanish due to overkilling and destruction of habitat, other animals are seizing the opportunity to become even more successful. Sometimes growing much larger, breeding more frequently, and becoming vastly more numerous. You have to admire the stubbornness and indomitability of life. Nature is various and complex, never failing to seize any opportunity for expansion. Nature is optimistic.

Sometimes I like to imagine that if there were beings on a higher plane of existence, nearly immortal and outside the bounds of time and material constraints they might regard the biological infestation of earth with curiosity. It’s almost as if our planet were a roiling mass of things coming into and going out of being, feeding off one another, birth and death, consumption and elimination, like a fungal mass or vegetable bloom, or infected sore, or a giant heart, pulsing with life.

Even when I consider my own body I am ignorant of everything that is going on there. I have some understanding of my digestion, respiration, etc., but I still don’t understand why or how I think or behave the way I do. Is it determined by chemicals, hormones, and biological processes? In some way, I am simply a well-developed colony organism. If you were able to keep my cells fed with oxygen and sugars I would continue to ‘live’, if you were somehow able to compel my pilotless body into exercising its muscles I would continue on in much the same way I do now, physically-speaking. My living cells could be grown in petri dishes for countless millenia, long after ‘I’ have departed. What is it that makes me who I am? In this sense I understand reincarnation as my life is arguably little different in substance than anyone else’s. These same questions have been asked and the general trajectory of my life has certainly been experienced by my predecessors.

I’m not so sure that humans are the height of earth evolution, or the masters of creation, but we are certainly its witnesses. We pop into being thrown right into the mix of it, eyes open and questing. One moment a drop of fluid and the next a handful of dust. Slaves to the movements we barely comprehend and acknowledge. Not until we have that real awareness that we are tied to it and that the only lasting significance we possess is in our relationship to its whole. And nothing last forever, our short lives and everyone and everything around us and after us will disappear in the same quiet way. No posthumous monuments can preserve your memory. Even our known universe is powerless against time. By current theories either expanding forever outward until all matter and energy is infinitely diffuse or collapsing back into the tiny nugget of matter and energy that preceeded the birth of our universe.

Government urges under-16s to experiment with oral sex.

Via CNN:

In a study conducted at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, researchers found that centenarians were five times more likely than others to have the same mutation in their mitochrondrial DNA.

Mitochondrial DNA, the portion of DNA located in the mitochondria or “powerhouses” of the cell, passes only from the mother to offspring. The mitochondria capture the energy released from the oxidation of metabolites and convert it into energy.

“It is possible that in the process of replication these molecules are less damaged by oxidation, but we don’t know that yet,” said Dr. Guiseppe Attardi, Caltech professor of molecular biology, and an author of the study.

The .mil visitors seem to be concerned enough about GPS jamming to go searching for information on it. Although the Russian jammer is no longer sold they are apparently easy to manufacture. The Russian AviaConversia unit runs on batteries and has an operating range of 150-200 km! Although this could jam Russian Glonass and civilian GPS according to things I’ve read it does not affect the encrypted military gps band which can be alternated or moved. However, theoretically one would have to assume it’s at least possible. Imagine if US jets were sent the incorrect GPS coordinates or if their GPS was blocked entirely. The military is becoming more and more dependent on this tech which just opens up further vulnerabilities. The future should be very interesting indeed.

05 Feb, Wed, 14:26:34 WCS1-SCOTT.NIPR.MIL Netscape 3 Other

05 Feb, Wed, 14:26:39 WCS2-SCOTT.NIPR.MIL MSIE 6 Windows 2000

The search terms: aviaconversia, GPS jammer

I’m curious why DoD pinheads are using Google’s Canadian site.