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On the Edge of Peace [PDF] (A Baseline Magazine article.) Sierra Leone is a place of unending devastation. Warring factions erupt and kill indiscriminately over things of little value -- it's a country where the young never grow old, and are usually armed to the teeth by rival forces. Drop in this mix, a UN mission made up of disparate forces, cobbled together to assist in ensuring a 2000 peace plan is a success. The mission has faded from most Western eyes, now that the US has pulled out, they've made the movie, and feel good about themselves. Imagine running the IT operation to support the UN troops in such an environment -- where information must flow in order for peace to be maintain -- must flow so that the peace keepers don't die. Information must flow between the UN HQ and it's various remote outposts -- outposts that are staffed by soldiers from different countries, using different equipment. Add to the mix, lightning strikes, a lack of spare parts (th...
Salmon Days From this past week's Saturday Toronto Star , comes a few emerging catch phrases that made me laugh out loud. Here's the best of the bunch: Seagull Manager: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves. Assmosis: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard. Salmon Day: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end. Percussive Maintenance: The fine art of whacking the stuffing out of an electronic device to get it to work again. Adminisphere: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve. Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a big mistake. Crop Dusting: Surreptitiously passing g...
Beyond Compare I missed this when it visited Toronto earlier this year, but it's still traveling, and is currently out west. It's Dove's BeyondCompare -- Women Photographers on Beauty. Check out the site, it has some photos in the gallery section -- which isn't the same as seeing the show in person, but what the heck. Neat thing about the photographs -- they portray women as more than fashion model types.
Urinal.net This site bills itself as "the best place to piss away your time on the Internet." And it's true. Apparently, there are people out there, who go around, taking pictures of urinals and posting them on the internet. They're not just Americans either. This idea of this site is quite disturbing -- you haven't seen smut on the internet until you've seen this site.
Armageddon Online Feeling a little depressed? Want to know when you should drop that placard over your shoulders and profess the end of the world to people on the street? Better yet, want information you can use to convince people to join your end of the world cult? Or just want to keep up on the latest rounds of mega disasters that threaten to end all live on the Earth as we know it? Then check out this site. It's a great read!
Hunt for the God Particle It's known as the Higgs boson , postulated by British physicist Peter Higgs in 1960, as the mechanism by which particles acquire mass. Why does a particle have the mass it has? Why does an electron have the mass it has? Why is a top quark 200,000 times more massive than an electron? Physics has no answer. But Peter Higgs' proposal is that there is a field that permeates space, known as the Higgs field, which gives particles their masses when they interact with the field. From quantum theory, we know that fields have particles associated with them, and hence the Higgs field must have a Higgs boson. Scientists at CERN are building the Large Hadron Collider -- a massive particle accelerator that will send protons in 17-mile laps at nearly the speed of light, then direct the protons to collide with each other. This will result in a disaster for the protons , but an incredible opportunity for scientists -- somewhere buried within the protons,...
Shanghai Circus My youngest and I attended the Shanghai Circus today, at Massey Hall. It was an amazing event or acobatics. The act was called the Mongolian Dream, and featured acts that were Mongolian themed -- apparently. The contortionists were scary -- people were not meant to be that flexible! And muscles -- everyone were built! I didn't know, but apparently non-flash photography was allowed -- if I had known that I would have brought my camera. Damn!
Home Server [PDF] From MIT's Technology Review, comes a case for having a server at home. As more and more people adopt broadband connections, and attach multiple PCs to the internet, home networking is moving away from being the exclusive domain of geeks. Check out what you've been missing, if you're the non-geek type.
Elder Boom [PDF] Some estimates predict that by 2050, the world population will reach its peak of around 9 billion -- then the decline will start, and as it progresses, the world's population will be increasingly dominated by elderly citizens -- with not enough young to care for them. The future's elderly are today's technology adopters and information hungry. They will most likely seek technology to allow them to continue living useful, productive and indendent lives. How will technology respond? For one thing, there will be more biotechnologies employed -- such as wireless, invasive body sensors. There will be a need for better ways to index, search and deliver content. As the workforce grows smaller, production will look for more ways to exploit technology -- the trend of the 90s isn't about to abate. As the elderly become less and less mobile, look for technologies to enable socializing over vast distances. Then bring in the robots -- they will be needed to...
InterNetWorking [PDF] An article from MIT's Technology Report. A new breed of software and services is emerging to tap and exploit the social network. The concept is simple. You have friends -- and you know what their interests are -- but what about your friends, friends. And your friends, friends, friends? What if you could tap into this internetwork of friends to do everything from get work, increase sales, get advice, share knowledge -- or just get new friends? Or, from a business perspective, being able to mine your knowledge workers to exploit the knowledge scattered across your organization -- think of the consulting dollars you would save! Gives the age old saying of "it's not what you know, it's who you know" a hell of a lot more credence.
Children's Peace Theatre The Children's Peace Theatre is a charity organization that is working towards a worldwide culture of peace for children of the world -- they use theatre programs to engage children in conflict with courage, compassion and creativity -- believing that there is peace to be found in every conflict. A noble goal. I hope they're making a little progress. This group is located in Toronto, and offers programs in performance and leadership for children.
Art - via the Computer I was looking up Corel's Painter , Photopaint and Wacom's Intuos Tablet , and came across some amazing art. Just a bit of background -- I've used all three of the tools before to create my own digital art, or to take something I created on paper, and take it to another level with the computer. Corel Painter used to be owned by a now defunct company called Fractal -- I've been using Painter since version 2.0. It's an amazing piece of software -- gives you a complete set of artist tools in a single application. Photopaint is like Photoshop . It started out being a photo manipulation tool, and slowly evolved to become more than that. The artsy types still prefer Photoshop -- only because it runs on a Mac, but I know Photopaint, so my preference remains there. Now check out some art created with the tools listed above: LiQUidWerX - amazing art! Some fantasy, some nudity! Portrait Artist - a site offering advice on how to draw, includ...