- “Pigeon: Impossible.” 🙂
- How companies learn your secrets. The bit about the pregnant women (pages 6 & 7) is the creepiest. Hint: aside from not giving ’em any personal data (e.g. pay cash, never participate in a survey, etc.), don’t be a creature of habit.
- Oh, those tidy Swiss. Now they’re set to clean up outer space.
- How the brain responds to disaster. This specifically pertains to earthquakes, but I know from experience that it applies more broadly. (Tip o’ hat to PT.)
- Long feared, now here: microchips you swallow with your meds to report your body’s doings.
- This is creepy, too. But as long as it’s only by consent (yeah, riiiight), I can see how free cell-phone tracking services could be useful.
- And for those who didn’t get it via my (gods forbid) shiny new Twitter feed, I ponder ineptocracy over at Paladin Planet.
- ADDED (from D): the long arm of Uncle Sam just got longer — as yet another secretive, unconstitutional federal agency decides it has authority to regulate businesses, even if those businesses aren’t in the U.S.
Thank you once again to MJR, link detective.
Ineptocracy: Stolen! I never heard of that!
The gov’s been trying to regulate money services out of existence for years, though. I remember using them back in Kali, when I got paid by check but found it, er, inopportune to have a bank account. Government hates that.
Ineptocracy. Yeah, it’s a great word, isn’t it? When Jason first contacted me, I thought Peder had made it up. But seems it’s already a minor meme.
And those money businesses … yeah. I also hear that the new “consumer protection czar” Obama appointed is going to make them his first target. And it’ll turn out to be another prime example of both ineptocracy and idiocracy, no doubt. I know FinCEN’s motives are different than the “czar’s.” But just exactly what do they think is going to happen when they clamp down on legal money businesses?
The definition of “ineptocracy” brings this to mind:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
~ H. L. Mencken
I have to chuckle when I see the swiss space debris scheme. Its a great idea, but there are two main problems with it.
1. The amount of fuel required to be onboard the trash collector would be beyond belief. Perhaps they are planning on fueling it with unobtainum. Only way it could possibly work is for one trash catcher to catch one derelict debris and then reenter and destroy itself. Changing orbits is very very expensive fuel wise. They did mention ion drive, but the power of ion engines is pathetically small, although the efficiencies are extremely high. It would take a very long time to do an orbital change.
2. Anything that would be an effective garbage collector would also be an effective anti satellite weapon, TPTB will not permit that.
The Swiss space debris idea-the first thing that came to mind for me was the old “Salvage 1” and “Quark” TV shows..
I took some wilderness survival classes from a guy who could see so much detail in a person’s footprints, that he knew his wife was pregnant before she did. That was creepy to think about.
As for the chip-in-a-pill thing, I’ve had enough health problems i can see a lot of value in that, provided it’s used right. I don’t trust TPTB to use it right.
OMG, Ellendra. Do you have any idea how he could tell that? Do you know what, specifically, he saw in her footprint?
On the chip-in-the-meds — I agree. Just like cellphone locator services, the chips could be useful. But you know the “unintended consequences” will be … well, intended from the get-go.
If you look at a footprint very very closely, you’ll notice that it’s not smooth and uniform on the inside. It’s easiest to see this in damp sand, but there are little patterns inside, like a fingerprint, even if the person is wearing shoes. Some of these patterns are unique to the individual, and like a fingerprint they will stay the same for the person’s (or animals’s) whole life. But, other parts of these patterns will change frequently, because they correspond to functions in different parts of the body.
While studying with him, I got to where I could usually tell which way the person/animal was looking when they made the track, and with 4-legged animals I could tell if they were male or female. The guy had studied tracking for decades, so it’ll probably be a while before I get that good at it, assuming I get back into the habit of studying it, I’ve had too much other stuff going on.
Fascinating, Ellendra! Was this Tom Brown, by any chance?
Yep. I didn’t want to say the name because of flame wars I’ve seen in the past when his name was invoked, but you guessed it!
He’s a really nice guy, and I learned a lot from him. Not always stuff that was in the class description.
Flame wars? Seriously? I know some people don’t think Brown is all he claims to be (I read one of his books years ago and found it … unlikely). But flame wars over him? Hmph. People have too much time on their hands.