Month: October 2006

Battlestar Galacticons

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its 3rd season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s 3-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers. Needless to say, this did not go over very well in the Galacticon camp.

lol. right-wingers tried to see themselves favorably in BSG, a plan which has backfired

Quantum Mechanics and Experience

accessible text

The more science tells us about the world, the stranger it looks. Ever since physics first penetrated the atom, early in this century, what it found there has stood as a radical and unanswered challenge to many of our most cherished conceptions of nature. It has literally been called into question since then whether or not there are always objective matters of fact about the whereabouts of subatomic particles, or about the locations of tables and chairs, or even about the very contents of our thoughts. A new kind of uncertainty has become a principle of science.

Google Earth Integration

What might the implications of such a directive be for Google Earth and Maps? There are many opportunities for their integration with other services in Google’s constellation of products — and in the case of SketchUp and Picasa, such integration is already very visible. Other projects may well be underway, but that shouldn’t stop us from making our own little matrix of Google services and speculating on other ways in which geospatial data might come to infuse Google. So here they are then, the A-to-Y of Google services that have the potential for integration with Earth and Maps. let’s look at the current state of their integration and some scenarios for what could be.

some pretty good ideas in there