Seven Generational Ruminations

Basically any thing with a circuit board needs to be treated as hazardous waste. Yet, often they aren't. e.g. "There's a lot of stuff in a circuit board that you really don't want to ingest. Lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium all have been shown to have harmful effects on humans." And that's not to mention the plastics in the case, etc.

One of the trickiest things to recognize about working in digital art is whether you are working in the color you see on the screen. Ideally all computer monitors would work the same way, displaying the same color given the same signals from the computer. In the real world monitors vary slightly in how they reproduce the colors. This means that you may think you're working with a nice shade of pink or whatnot, while the color that's actually going into the image you're painting is much redder than you think.

We shouldn't have to damage our health in order to use computer systems. Wait, let me try and rephrase that in a positive wording. Computer use should be a healthy experience. Computer designers might do well to remember the Hippocratic Oath which starts with "First, do no harm...". Unfortunately computer usage requires confining yourself to a fixed position, that's very bad for ones health. Besides remembering to get up and walk around a little every so often, there's a few things you can do to have your workspace more ergonomically correct.

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

I wish I understood quantum theory a bit better so I could better understand this article: Quantum computer works best switched off. I want to read this as supporting spiritual or psychic awareness, but I don't know enough to quite follow the dots.

The article discusses what they call: "Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running."

Here's an interesting question ... suppose police capture a terrorists laptop and they want to get into the laptop to extract plans and other documents? Suppose the laptop is rigged so the file system is encrypted meaning the police can't get through the encryption? Suppose there's a ticking bomb, and the plans for the bomb are in the laptop?

There's been big questions from the 2000 and 2004 elections about whether the election system is rigged. In the 2004 elections a big sideshow formed around electronic voting machines, especially those from Diebold. The electronic voting systems (a.k.a. touchscreen voting) was supposed to fix the glaring problem with the 2000 election fiasco, which centered on the punch card system. But that's presuming touchscreen voting is the only alternative, which it is not.

Okay, today is December 31, 2005. A posting on Scripting News had a pointer to five years ago and I suddenly remembered what that day was like. The big concern? Remember Y2K? The fear that come midnight that night, that the whole mechanised world around us would come crashing to a halt?

I remember being in San Francisco that night and passing by someone on the street shortly after midnight, and we exchanged the observation "Well, it all seems to still be working".

Remember a few years ago there were power blackouts in California?

For years car makers have been putting computerized control systems in our cars. This gives more control over how the cars function, gives service shops more data with which to diagnose problems, etc. But it isn't readily accessible to the end user, hence isn't readably usable. Or, is it?

CarChip E/X OBD II Data Logger, USB Version