moon traveller herald

Last week I sat down and recorded a podcast in my living room that was sort of my impersonation of a radio show. First show is called Overhaul Junction after an Albert King song. [NOTE: Our first experience is in. For now, Podcasts will post and then remove in 1 month. If you access this page one month after publication, the podcast link will have expired..sorry. Get it while you can.] I spin a few disks, various media really, and mutter a bit. This is experimental, hopefully the mix will improve. The show lasts 15 minutes, and it is a big 10 Meg download. This took virtually no time to download on a corporate network, although, if you were to do it when the corporate network was busy .. say noon time, it might take 5 or 10 minutes. If you have DSL or cable modem, it should work okay at home .. but if you have dial-up, probably not. I think over the next few years, if the Good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, this podcasting will be easy to do, and we can all spin our disks in...

At a keynote at Usenix a few years ago I heard Rob Pike describe the Google app dev environment. He gleefully described the cheapness of the hardware Google used, at least to get going, complete with photos of loose, stacked commodity disk drives held to racks with good old Velcro. Google, the killer app, uses cheap disks that are expected to fail. The company has been able to fashion Linux to make up the difference, creating a self-healing system, although day by day, individual humans - you might call them "Healers" - must go down the racks swapping-in good disk drives for bad, using velcro. The biggest stories in recent application development history -- Amazon.com and Google -- are so big that they are pretty much hidden. Both applications required a big helping of chutzpah to happen at all. And both disrupted existing industries, creating whole new ones.Amazon.com's and Google's development managers stuck their necks out and trusted clusters of cheap computers to...

“The Lord is subtle, but malicious he is not.” This inscription is ascribed to Einstein, said to bedeck a portal in his Princeton offices. It seems like a play on the quandary koan of whether or not God plays dice with the universe. Looking at this week’s news I would say, yes, the Creator has ceded to us a subtly mixed-up crazy world. But not a bad place. It was however a bad week for U. of Mich style Intelligent Design. On the other hand, Mr. Bad of All Time, Judas, is making a comeback. Page One, New York Times, Friday April 7 . The existence of a Gospel of Judas was known. I found reference to it in Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels’ learned and popular book of 2003. Discovered near El Minya in Egypt, it is here now on Page One after a 30 or 40 year journey [including 16 years in a Long Island safe deposit box]. In Pagel’s book, the reference to Judas Gospel is per Irraneus, the Father of the Church who cut off the Catholic gospel project at Four. He referred to this gospel to indicate ...

Page A19, New York Times, Friday, April 7. A reconstruction of ancient genes from extinct animals has demonstrated, it is said, how nature modifies and reuses existing genes to create new cell mechanisms via evolution. The focus of U of Ore biology professor Joseph Thornton was on two hormone receptors associated with, respectively, stress response and kidney function in higher animals. Equivalent antecedents were found in jawless primitive lampreys and hagfish. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/science/07evolve.html?ex=1302062400&en=c4dfe02b8d70db4b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Page One, New York Times, Thursday April 6. The long-postulated big crawl from the sea to land got a shot in the arm with the lead story: Fossil called missing link from sea to land animals. In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods. Now, with more belief in yourself than ever, when someone cuts you off in traffic, you may safely launch the invective: Go back to the Sea where you came from!” Intelligent Design proponents can jump in the lake and still be with their own. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/science/06fossil.html

Apple introduced Boot Camp beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS X or Windows XP. Are the strange bedfellow operating systems really in the same bed at last? No. The Apple approach is a bit less than elegant. Users must hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. Users must restart to come back to the Mac. Read slightly extended version.

I saw William Burroughs read in Boston, Probably around 1975. He'd just come back to the U.S. after many years. It was at the Charles Street Meeting House, and I, as student journalist, engaged him with questions afterward. The one question I recall asking: "Is the U.S. more of a police state today than it was when you left?" The answer was: "No." and he looked me in the eye, and up-raised an eyebrow in some surmise, and continued: "It's much looser now. It was much more uptight then." Maybe in my query I was thinking of what he said in an interview about Time-Life and time as a police apparatus back in the mid-50s. There was a connection between Yale, and CIA, and Time. And Burroughs was especially aware of this. Here is the partial text of the interview which is also offered as a podcast, below . Burroughs: Q: What do you think of Time Publisher Mr. Luce? A: I don't admire him at all. He has set up one of the greatest word and image banks i...