The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.

Steven Pinker in NYT Magazine.

My Genome, My Self - Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code - NYTimes.com

New York police officials are studying the feasibility of disrupting cellphone communications between terrorists during any attack, after revelations that gunmen in Mumbai received electronic transmissions during their killing spree in November.

:(

Police Study Way to Jam Cellphones in an Attack - NYTimes.com

Rambus, a designer of high-speed memory chips, may not use 12 of its patents to demand royalties from Micron Technology, a federal judge ruled.

This has been in litigation for something like a decade now!

Business Briefing - Court Action - Chip Maker Rambus Loses Patent Case to Micron - NYTimes.com

His unfinished software project, Xanadu, grew out of his 1960 insight that paper would inevitably be replaced by computer screens. For several decades he continued to labor on the project — for a while at Autodesk, the engineering-oriented software publisher. More recently he has lived in Asia and Europe, where his work has generally been more deeply appreciated than in his native country.

Last year, he returned to the United States to finish his history. In “Geeks,” he settles some old scores and sets down his own version of the history of computing.

He wrote in a recent e-mail message: “I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ — it sounds so objective and inexorable — when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.” His quarrel is with the dominance of “packages” like Microsoft Office and Windows, which he argues are the arbitrary result of business practices and not the inevitable result of technology evolution

I said almost exactly these words to someone in a similar context recently.

Slipstream - In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates - NYTimes.com

This short essay is well worth the couple of minutes it will take you to read it.

Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don't reach forty until they're five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

gladwell dot com - rice paddies and math tests

Early in 2008, the Israeli government signaled that it might be preparing to take matters into its own hands. In a series of meetings, Israeli officials asked Washington for a new generation of powerful bunker-busters, far more capable of blowing up a deep underground plant than anything in Israel’s arsenal of conventional weapons. They asked for refueling equipment that would allow their aircraft to reach Iran and return to Israel. And they asked for the right to fly over Iraq.

Mr. Bush deflected the first two requests, pushing the issue off, but “we said ‘hell no’ to the overflights,” one of his top aides said. At the White House and the Pentagon, there was widespread concern that a political uproar in Iraq about the use of its American-controlled airspace could result in the expulsion of American forces from the country.

U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site - NYTimes.com

Although widely encouraged by economists - including within the Congressional Budget Office - who say it's a more efficient and direct approach to cutting emissions, the carbon tax has been largely shunned by most lawmakers as it's seen as politically unfeasible to pass. That may be why Exxon has joined the ranks of other heavy carbon emitters calling for a carbon tax, as it would reveal more transparently of the actual costs to the economy of putting a premium on greenhouse gas emissions.

UPDATE: ExxonMobil CEO Urges CO2 Tax, Not Cap-And-Trade Law

Decius wrote:
I have some hard drives. I want to throw them out. They have data on them. Some of that data is personal correspondence and some of these hard drives are rather old and I have no idea what is on them, but I'd rather not provide that data to whoever happens to be buying stuff from the local computer recycling center on the off chance its personal. Furthermore, if the government is going to hold that police searches of garbage can be conducted without either a search warrant or any constitutionally required factual predicate than one must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-911 mentality. If you are willing to provide the state with warrantless access to your hard drives there is really no point in complaining about 4th amendment issues or warrantless searches at borders, for example. So, I can't just throw these drives out.

Unfortunately, my local computer recycling center makes stern warnings that they are not responsible for data on devices given to them. I don't see why they won't just buy a degauser, but I'm guessing they don't have one, and I'm not going to go out and drop 2 grand on an industrial degauser for my loft.

This puts me in an odd position that I'm sure many of you have also been in:

What do you do with old hard drives? Do they become a permanent part of your electronics junk pile, carried with you everytime you move? Do you know of an inexpensive way to destroy them?

If they're still attached to a linux box 'shred /dev/sda', otherwise, I smash them with a hammer. If the media is dented, for all practical purposes, noone is going to get any data off of it.

This by the way is a strong advertisement for full-disk encryption.

RE: Lazyweb: Hard Drive Degaussing

Yet the semisweet spot that Pittsburgh finds itself in was never inevitable. As recently as 2000, it had a higher unemployment rate than Detroit or Cleveland. Just as Michigan has traditionally put all its chips on the auto industry, it took Pittsburgh a long time to come to terms with the end of the steel era.

“The emphasis was on fighting the presumed causes of the decline by getting rid of low-cost foreign imports or providing more subsidies,” said Harold D. Miller, president of Future Strategies, a consultancy. “The assumption was that steel will come back and we’ll go back to the way we were.”

Pittsburgh Thrives After Casting Steel Aside - NYTimes.com

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin is planning to leave office on Jan. 20, and a short list of potential replacements is starting to emerge as the incoming Obama administration moves toward Inauguration Day.

SPACE.com -- NASA Chief to Step Down