5cience.net http://5cience.net en-us smallpaper (The Spice)
In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes. ... more »

In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version. Agreeing, he planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí as the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. ... more »

]]> http://5cience.net/blog/-the-spice-,4279/ Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:08:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/-the-spice-,4279/ weston The Man Who Lived On His Bike ]]> http://5cience.net/blog/the-man-who-lived-on-his-bike,4277/ Tue, 7 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/the-man-who-lived-on-his-bike,4277/ weston The Edge Of The World Cassini. There have been, recently, whole earth high-resolution shots. Famously, the blue marble, Sagan's "pale blue dot", a photo of Earth by Voyager 1.

What these other famous images lack however is the obvious display of human scale. Here, Buzz Aldrin, front and center. The relationship of his position, a man 261 kilometers above Mount Everest, a man embedded in technology. Like previous explorers, like journeys to the poles, to the most remote or extreme areas of the planet, the scale is human exploration fundamentally. Perhaps, these days, there's something embarrassingly self-centered about it, about the ego of the explorer, or the audacity of the raw politics of the attempt.

But I think this image represents best, even more than the moon footage, the early space era. There's something very concrete in Aldrin's expression (what we can see of it), an almost zen like intensity, a clarity that is compelling. From interviews with Aldrin he's matter of fact about the whole thing, lacking any deeply radical philosophy or wholeness shtick that may look good on greeting cards. When I look at this image, what I see is simply a very confident "yup, this is what we're built for."

And that's pretty cool.

more images via natgeo]]> http://5cience.net/blog/the-edge-of-the-world,4276/ Mon, 6 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/the-edge-of-the-world,4276/ weston Prof. Welton's Boxing Cats
Nothing really changes.]]> http://5cience.net/blog/prof-welton-s-boxing-cats,4275/ Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:04:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/prof-welton-s-boxing-cats,4275/ weston Rogue Websites If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time. ... more »
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now? ... more »

Richard O'Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces a potential 10-year term in a US jail despite never having been to America or using web servers based in the country. When still a teenager O'Dwyer set up a website, TVShack, which posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student's lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright. ... more »

But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington’s savviest players — not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America — signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism. ... more »

The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of section 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, or merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. ... more »

more at findings.com]]> http://5cience.net/blog/rogue-websites,4274/ Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:57:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/rogue-websites,4274/ weston No-one has ever lived in the past ]]> http://5cience.net/blog/no-one-has-ever-lived-in-the-past,4273/ Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:58:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/no-one-has-ever-lived-in-the-past,4273/ weston Acme Physics ... in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the series when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent. "I noted that the reason for that was that his examination questions were mostly qualitative, requiring understanding of the concepts rather than just calculational, using formulas, which is what most of the instructors did," Hestenes says. Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. So he and a colleague developed a test to look at students' conceptual understanding of physics. ... more »
Road Runner cartoons can easily and meaningfully be worked into the physics and physical science curriculum. Many vignettes involve fairly direct misrepresentations of specific physical principles. I developed the table below for my own use in deciding which clips to show and when. The two compilation videos are still in print as far as I know. I hope you find the information useful. (An asterisk denotes a particularly useful cartoon or vignette.) ... more »

]]> http://5cience.net/blog/acme-physics,4271/ Tue, 3 Jan 2012 20:05:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/acme-physics,4271/ weston You left the bodies but you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!
via the always great @paleofuture
Interesting that, again, like lots of late 80s to late 90s concept pieces they were able to see the logical extension of several concepts but missed the big one: ever-present networks. Until recently there was this weird idea with news (particularly print based news people) that we'd need "kiosks" and removable media for this glorious future of reading.]]> http://5cience.net/blog/you-left-the-bodies-but-you-only-moved-the-headsto,4270/ Sun, 25 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/you-left-the-bodies-but-you-only-moved-the-headsto,4270/ weston Public Service Announcement ]]> http://5cience.net/blog/public-service-announcement,4269/ Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:48:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/public-service-announcement,4269/ weston Cave Of The Book Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee via @cmenscher, love these.]]> http://5cience.net/blog/cave-of-the-book,4268/ Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:15:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/cave-of-the-book,4268/ weston Brutal Fornication And A Fascist Theocracy ]]> http://5cience.net/blog/brutal-fornication-and-a-fascist-theocracy,4267/ Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:30:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/brutal-fornication-and-a-fascist-theocracy,4267/ weston Anything Machines
Mostly. If you want to spend a worthwhile 200 hundred dollars on a device, you could do a lot worse than the Kindle Fire or Nook. You could get another much much more expensive Android tablet which just about completely, universally suck. They suck in comparison to the iPad2, which is relatively brilliant. I'm not disappointed with my Kindle Fire because I knew what I was buying. I wasn't buying the future, and I wasn't buying an Anything Machine.

My desktop is an Anything Machine. Put X in, get Y out. Write instructions, write anything. A node upon a vast network. Complete maleability in purpose. Is it a magazine? Sure. A video? Sure. A jukebox, an evolving narrative, a library, a painter's easel, a math cruncher, a galactic telescope, a publisher, a generic mashup machine, sure, all of them. And the interface is the keyboard. And a mouse. For me, as a programmer, to a much lesser degree, the mouse. My desktop is too big to put in my pocket, or scatter in clumps on a work desk, which is why I'm eager for tablets. I want Anything Machines everywhere.

Now whenever I see a TNG rerun and I see them tap-a-tapping upon their PADD I can't help but think, is the soft keyboard better in the 24th century*? Goddamn, I hope so, because I absolutely cannot get anything done on any existing tablet. I want to like them. As I write this, I do so on a netbook, my portable Anything Machine. Why? because the relationship to any construction of language or other set of instructions from a real keyboard to a soft keyboard seems about 10 to 1 to me. That's 5 minutes of my time, or a really frustrating hour.

So here I'm getting cranky. We've been handed a future we weren't really even expecting to be realized and fundamentally my reaction is "fuck, where's my goddamn keyboard". Ungrateful wretch. However, my reaction has some validity (I'd argue) because I still think of computers as primarily Anything Machines and not primarily Consumption Machines. The tablet, the form factor, turns out, is amazingly, perfectly Consumption. I'm not knocking tablets for this, what I'm expressing is that my expectations of them have been wrong, I was caught up in futurism.

* I wonder, given that there are now more "apps" being made than any other recent human endeavor, over time won't this be completely unproductive? If you really want tools that do things, you create them at the lowest, most abstract level which does the greatest number of things. A hammer that only works on one nail and one kind of wood (for $3.99), or the idea of a hammer? Apps, it seems, generally lack the idea of actual applications.

** I also wonder if tablets aren't properly the tools of bureaucracy and militaristic hierarchies. Sometimes when we think about the future and Trek particularly we forget that we're looking at a civilized space navy, and certainly no lack of bureaucracy. The gadget fever masks an ideal future world with a lot of annoying electronic paperwork. Screw that.
]]> http://5cience.net/blog/anything-machines,4266/ Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/anything-machines,4266/ weston PDP-11 So Thompson and Ritchie got crea­tive. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC's newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote.

Management took the bait, and an order for a PDP-11 was placed in May 1970. The machine itself arrived soon after, although the disk drives for it took more than six months to appear. During the interim, Thompson, Ritchie, and others continued to develop Unix on the PDP-7. After the PDP-11's disks were installed, the researchers moved their increasingly complex operating system over to the new machine. Next they brought over the roff text formatter written by Ossanna and derived from the runoff program, which had been used in an earlier time-sharing system. ... more »]]> http://5cience.net/gallery/pdp-11,4264/ Sun, 4 Dec 2011 20:21:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/gallery/pdp-11,4264/ weston Profound Culpability ]]> http://5cience.net/blog/profound-culpability,4263/ Sat, 3 Dec 2011 20:59:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/profound-culpability,4263/ weston The Umbrella Man Fantastic piece by Errol Morris at the Times (sadly, they won't let the video be embedded).
For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
]]> http://5cience.net/blog/the-umbrella-man,4262/ Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:30:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/the-umbrella-man,4262/ weston The Evolving Local Of Nonlocal
For a long time developer culture has overlooked nationality. Programmers have tended not to care about what country another programmer is from because there is very little space, it's about code, and projects, and shared toolsets, procedures. The lack of nationalism that I've seen there I'm seeing spread. And this must piss off large national institutions. They are less necessary -- their corruption, bureaucracy, and policies of inequity are obvious when you have a language and a culture that doesn't emotionally (or linguistically) require allegiance. This lays bare the real power structure of the nonlocal, of the global, which of course is corporate. I worry here that the new found freedom from thinking nationally is covering up the real problem of corporate citizenship.]]> http://5cience.net/blog/the-evolving-local-of-nonlocal,4261/ Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/the-evolving-local-of-nonlocal,4261/ weston Linux Mint Debian
10. You’ve got drawer full of smart phones and tweet disgustedly about each, and providers, as you rotate through them during the week.

9. Rackspace cloud had an awful web interface, so I went to ec2. But I couldn’t stand the Amazon documentation so now I’m building a machine bottom up for co-lo.

8. PostgreSQL, no, MySQL, no, Mongo. No. PostgreSQL. No wait, redis. Redis is the best, the rest suck.

7. I was using nginx before you were. I’m not anymore of course.

6. I have several virtual machines with different OS’s and configurations because I know I’ll get sick of whatever I’m on shortly.

5. Unity isn’t for me. Not only that, it gives me grave doubts about the direction of the Ubuntu distro overall. Time to switch distros.

4. I still use Windows for games because it’s always worked, even though I know I can probably get them working fine on my Mac now.

3. NY Times paper on Sunday. Latest thriller on Kindle.

2. I’ll think I’ll start using this gmail thing everybody’s talking about, seems like it might be stable now, time to move off of Yahoo.

1. They’ll pry the Lisp from my cold dead programmers hands.

I’d been on Ubuntu for a few years, moved to it from FreeBSD, not because FreeBSD was in any way lacking, but that I liked what Ubuntu was up to. And I liked the Debian core. I wasn’t doing it because I believe in the Linux Desktop. It was mostly curiosity, some boredom. But, yeah, like a lot of people, my impressions of Unity, Ubuntu's new GUI are less than positive. Also, it doesn't indicate that the project has the same goals I have for my use of the OS as a daily workhorse. I want minimal, solid, working. I'm never going to apply animated transitions, or other doodads, when I want things out of the way I want them out of the way goddamnit. I'm here to get stuff done. Make it easy for me to do that. As a developer window placement, ability to toggle, having a custom set of tool layout positionally is crucial. XFCE is always an option as a GUI, love that, perfect approach. Can always just do a base stable Debian install with Gnome2, also good. But here's the fickle curious bit again, what's a distro up to that sees the value of a more pure Debian base as well as understanding that the workaholic Linux Desktop users want zero bullshit? Linux Mint Edition looks like they're that distro.

At least for now. This is a common cycle Linux distros go through. Red Hat started close to the minimal Linux bone, then diverged as they got more enterprisey. Ubuntu too, started where LMDE seems to be now. Peculiar that years ago I'd installed SUSE and thought "well that's it, don't have to do that again". In fact, I think that the fickleness of distro users is good for distros generally, and this is the only OS space that does it. You want immediate change, you can have it.

So far all my LDME installs are operating well. Couple rough edges presentation-wise, but none of that really bothers me. Solid Debian base doing what you expect it to.]]> http://5cience.net/blog/linux-mint-debian,4260/ Sat, 19 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/linux-mint-debian,4260/ weston Fly Over ]]> http://5cience.net/blog/fly-over,4259/ Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/fly-over,4259/ weston Tornado vs Django Tornado is a server which is also a minimal framework, Django is a full featured framework which includes an ORM and is not a server. The early stage decision to use one or the other seems to often hinge upon the concept of speed. This, as well as my framing as “versus” to get your attention, is wrong, and here’s why.

(If you’re looking to benchmark geek, the baseline is that Tornado is asynchronous and fast compared to the still speedy Django served through nginx and uwsgi.)

These two pieces of tech have different purposes. Pairing them in a death match isn’t the right way to start thinking about a project, they serve different purposes.

If you’re building anything other than the most well spec’d small featured set web application, you’ll be building a lot of pieces from scratch in Tornado if you’re using Tornado as a framework. There’s a very good chance that you’ll eliminate every bit of speed you’d been hoping to get through writing messy code or patching on an ORM. I’m not saying you aren’t the best developer in the world, but you know, really, you aren’t. I’m certainly not either. One of the things I realize as I get older is that if a group of much smarter people can get together to build fundamental reusable components, and all their tests, and their upkeep and improvement, that I should let them. I’ll then use those to build flexible features quickly and cleanly.

Good frameworks are systems you devote a certain amount of energy learning, and in return you get the knowledge of a collective. Bad frameworks are systems you devote a certain amount of energy learning, and in return you get the mistakes and bad design decisions of a collective.

Both Django and Tornado are very good projects. Django is a much better framework. Tornado is a server with some framework type helpers. Tornado isn’t trying to be Django.

Tornado is great at what it does. Glance through the code. It’s super clean, well organized. Tight. It’s making a much different set of decisions, quite legitimately, to get out of your way.

Django has, from day one, realized that building web applications traditionally means lots of boilerplate and repetitive work that has usually led to lots of bugs, mess, brittleness -- and it wants to help you avoid this, to build things better. It needs to get in your way by applying conventions and patterns to prevent you from fucking it up.

You’re building a web app, OK, how much time do you have? This should be the basis for your decision about your project, not speed.

If you have lots of time to write the components you need to play with Tornado solely as a platform, given that you are shooting for a web app with a commonly sized featureset (social, admin tools, content scrubbing), and you want to control every piece of it, then you’ll be making a good choice. Be ready to write lots of code, be ready to choose an ORM. Yes, I’m making the fantastical assumption you’ve got a database and need to manipulate data from it. If you are writing a web app without a database, please tell me where you live and how you’ll let me visit your magical world.

If you have very little time and a featureset that is either commonly sized, or uncertain (and what developer has ever worked with an uncertain spec), or needs to be flexible, the amount of time you’ll put in to learning Django will come back to you tenfold. You’ll be able to turn around pieces radically quicker. You’ll also be looking at fewer bugs because you’ll be writing less code, and less maintenance because you’ve written less code and have fewer bugs. More time for feature building.

That said, if you have any extra time whatsoever, spend it learning whichever you didn't build your project with. Both are worthwhile, and both can help you in the long run.]]> http://5cience.net/blog/tornado-vs-django,4258/ Sun, 6 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/tornado-vs-django,4258/ weston The Pattern of Decomposing A pattern language, he says, in its essence, is a fundamental worldview: "It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it." In that way, a pattern language, as a parallel structure, invokes a sense of responsibility to and for the world, holding out an alternative to the monoculture. ... more »
Just over 30 years ago, an Englishman named Christopher Alexander tried to revolutionize architecture. In A Pattern Language, Alexander told architects and planners to design homes on emotional and spiritual principles – not on traffic flow. The revolution didn’t quite come. But the book had a surprising influence on another group of experts: the computer scientists who were just beginning to shape the Internet ... more »

I understand that the software patterns, insofar as they refer to objects and programs and so on, can make a program better. That isn't the same thing, because in that sentence “better” could mean merely technically efficient, not actually “good.” Again, if I'm translating from my experience, I would ask that the use of pattern language in software has the tendency to make the program or the thing that is being created is morally profound -- actually has the capacity to play a more significant role in human life. A deeper role in human life. Will it actually make human life better as a result of its injection into a software system? Now, I don't pretend that all the patterns that my colleagues and I wrote down in A Pattern Language are like that. Some of them are profound, and some of them are less so. But, at least it was the constant attempt behind our work. That is what we were after. I don't know whether you, ladies and gentlemen, the members of the software community, are also after that. I have no idea. I haven't heard a whole lot about that. So, I have no idea whether the search for something that helps human life is a formal part of what you are searching for. Or are you primarily searching for - what should I call it - good technical performance? This seems to me a very, very vital issue. ... more »
]]> http://5cience.net/blog/the-pattern-of-decomposing,4257/ Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://5cience.net/blog/the-pattern-of-decomposing,4257/ weston