A metafeed of interesting news tidbits
My blog post queue has gotten a little bit overrun with lots of little interesting things I wanted to write posts on, so I’m clearing out the queue all at once by combining all of the interesting stories into one metafeed.
- Slate.com compares Mike Judge’s movie Idiocracy to recent dystopian flick Children of Men. You may know Mike Judge as the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill, and as the director of Office Space. His recent movie Idiocracy was utterly shafted by the movie companies; it was only shown in seven theaters as part of a contractual obligation. The article makes some intriguing comparisons between these two movies, for example, they’re both set in dystopian futures, were criminally underpromoted, have reluctant heroes as main characters, and feature plots involving failure of humanity to procreate. Idiocracy is a bit more light-hearted though. Now I want to see it.
- Scientists have discovered the (new) largest living organism on Earth. It is a fungus of the species Armillaria ostoyae that covers 2,200 acres (890 hectares) and is estimated to be over 2,400 years old. The main bulk of the fungus lives underground, although periodically it shoots up mushrooms to spore. It sends out little filaments into trees to sap out the nutrients, which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of trees. This organism was actually only found because so many trees were dying in one particular area. Genetic testing was used to confirm that all of it was indeed a single organism.
- A new study finds that 65% of Americans spend more time with their computers than with their spouse. It sounds startling at first, but upon closer examination, it’s not really that unexpected. A computer is really just a tool, and it’s not comparable to interacting with one person. At my job I was spending eight hours a day in front of a computer, much longer than I spend with any one person in a day. I suppose a more interesting metric might be, “Are you spending more time chatting online with other people than do you talking with your spouse?” or “Do you spend more time playing games on a computer than recreating with your spouse?” But just talking about general computer usage isn’t really a useful metric.
- The Congressional Black Caucus says that whites are not allowed, even if they represent primarily black districts. This seems kind of like shooting oneself in the foot to me. Also, I suppose it qualifies as a form of reverse-racism. I don’t think our highest levels of government should have exclusive clubs whose admittance is based on skin color.
- Scientists say that they have observed sound waves propagating through a material faster than the speed of light. The article is rather dense, and if you can figure it out, kudos to you. It’s very neat stuff, though it should be pointed out that it’s already known that phase velocities can exceed the speed of light without violating general relativity or causality. You could not use this new technique to send information faster than the speed of light, for instance. As for this latest experiment it demonstrates infinite and faster-than-infinite group velocities (by a quirk of definitions), but it does not demonstrate faster-than-light, but still finite, group velocities.
- Is Microsoft trying to pay people to edit Wikipedia? An Australian software engineer alleges that he was contacted by Microsoft and offered money to edit Wikipedia articles about document standards. This claim should be taken with a grain of salt, but if true, it does bring up some thorny issues. How many articles on Wikipedia are written by people with vested interests? Wikipedia’s articles on document standards could be improved, so is it really so bad if someone is paid to do it, as long as they do so neutrally? But how can we really be sure? In the interests of full disclosure, I was involved in the blocking of Gregory Kohs, who runs a company called MyWikiBiz. He was charging corporations to write or edit their Wikipedia articles. The resultant articles were somewhat less than neutral, though to be fair, at least they weren’t blatant advertising propaganda. Update: A few hours after writing this I see that the Associated Press has published an interview with Gregory Kohs.
