August 2007 - Posts
Now they have confirmed solar nutrinos. It is interesting to see more and more of the bizarre theories of quantum physics get empirically confirmed.
Next big thing is of course the Higgs and Neutralinos. Can't wait.
I was watching bits and pieces of a SciFi movie about solar flares igniting the methane in the atmosphere. According to the movie, this huge series of solar flares overheat the upper atmosphere. The higher percentage of methane (is this true?) gets ignited by this. This global level ignition of the atmosphere will eventually will consume all oxygen and cause extinction.
So, the hero, overcoming the opposition from the disbelieving officials, finds a solution. Explode some nukes in the Antartic, causing huge amounts of ice to evaporate. This will work as a huge fire extinguisher and we will be saved.
In the last scene, the bombs explode, hero's ex-wife watches from distance, the burning sky starts clearing from the north, and then, snow starts falling. Everybody claps.. world is saved.
Just one doubt though. If 5 nukes caused this snow, wouldn't the snow be radio active? Embracing the lesser evil?
I was going through the hundreds of very interesting comments on the Grand Challenges For Engineering global brainstorming project. While reading them, I was wondering what I think the challenges that we face.
Unlike a lot of people I am not worried about the future of earth. Earth has survived much more than what we humans can do to it, including a whole planet ploughing through it. So, earth, whatever we humans do, has a very long and bright future.
On the other hand, I am not so sure about humans though. We have seen unprecedented growth in technology in the last century. Unfortunately, we also have unprecedented inequality, animosity and violence. We are facing series of crisis even greater than the last ice age. We will face acute shortage of energy sources in this century. We have a very real climate crisis in offing. We are facing a major crisis of religious conflict parallel to the ones in the dark ages. Urban centers are proving to be very expensive in every way.
There is a very real chance that this could be the beginning of the end of humanity as a species. May not be in 100 years but a few hundred. The interesting thing is that, this wont be from a global catastrophic event like a thermo-nuclear war, but a gradual decay of humanity. Cities withering away, communities broken up, intense localized violent squabbles wasting the last of our resources, uncontrolled diseases eliminating whole races...
We are still very young to face such a slow painful extinction. We need to slow down. For a moment, consider downsizing our lives and societies while improving the living of all humanity. Change our priorities from terra-forming Mars to inhabiting the deserts and seas. Lets forget the mad rush to centralize everything, and move towards decentralized, equitable and sustainable development.
I think the grandest challenge of technologists is to perceive this need and change our world view. For once, lets not try to drive everything faster, higher and more bizarre, but make things simple, more efficient. Lets slow things down a bit, take a breath.
We humans have a long way to go, a lot of incredible things to achieve. Lets preserve ourselves.
Here is a news item that I cannot afford to not comment on.
It is not very often to hear broad reaching statements from IT professionals (except when Steve Jobs exhorts his cult members).
It takes courage to question accepted norm especially when the norm is about security. Steve Riley has shown that courage. Not only that he has the right perspective on IT security but also has the right things to say about war on terror.
The over r0mantic nationalism of the US makes a balanced discussion about the security of the country and war on terror almost impossible. I think this is not just an issue with the US. A lot of countries assume that blowing up nationalism out of proportion is the best way to keep people from real issues.
It is high time we stop making our lives into one paranoia after another.
If you read the article, don't forget to read the comments. There are quite a few of them, most of them showing overwhelming support for Steve's stand.
Well, it is not that I wanted to move away from wordpress, but it refused to install in my server. Something wrong with my MySql. I also lost the original data files, so it was not like I could get the previous posts anyways.
Another one of course is that I wanted to have a .net blogger instead of PHP. Once again, no I do not make any judgement calls from PHP, but just like .net better.
If this doesn't work out, I will move to something else. I actually started yet another evaluation process of DNN. It does have an interesting architecture. May be I can use it to run the CMS, and write add-in/modules for my music management thingie.
We will see.
So, here is the first post.