Not even on fumes, mind you. Entirely unpowered and moving by momentum alone.
I'd say that 2024 has been a hell of a year, but I don't have to tell you that. If you've been paying attention at all to everything going on chances are you're feeling a mixture of dread, resignation, frustration, and most of all weariness. Bone-deep tiredness, and you can feel each and every one of your cells marinating in it. Or possibly frying like a whole turkey in peanut oil. But trauma dumping is Not A Thing We Are Allowed To Do, so I'm going to …
"The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless."
--Alan Moore
I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately.
In the month or so since my last post I've been basically keeping my head above water and trying to live as productive a life as possible. It's easier than it sounds, oddly, but it costs a lot …
The current state of anyone's capacity to get any useful information in the United States these days, which is to say next to impossible due to the proliferation of fake news sites and pro-trolls doing their damndest to lower the signal-to-noise ratio to epsilon, is the logical end result of the following progression of cliches:
"You can't believe everything people tell you."
"You can't believe everything you read in books."
"You can't believe everything you see on TV."
"You can't believe everything your friends tell you."
"You can't believe everything your teachers tell you."
The sum total of the Edward Snowden revelations have pretty conclusively proved one thing: That we can't trust anything. The communications networks wrapped around the globe like a blanket are surveilled so minutely that Russian President Vladimir Putin has openly stated his admiration for the US getting away with it so successfully. Much of the cryptographic infrastructure used to protect our communications and data at rest is known to be vulnerable to one or more practical attacks that, in the end they can't really be called effective if one wants to be honest. The company RSA has all but admitted …
A couple of years back scientists at HP figured out how to make memristors viable. Memristors were first conceived of back in the 1970's and are components that remember (for lack of a better term) how much current passed through them for a particular interval of time. They've been compared to neurons in that the more often they fire, the more likely they are to fire in the future. On the other side of the house, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the principles (and combination of mechanisms) by which organic brains operate. They're not binary devices …
More and more in the year 2012 of the common era, I find myself noticing what Warren Ellis once called 'outbreaks of the future'. Advances and developments in technology that were once the thoughts of the dreamers of science and are now the fruits of the labor of shapers and makers of novel things. Perhaps it's due to my lack of 3d modeling ability that I tend to focus on the field of 3D printing, which has fascinated me since I helped build a 3d printer several years ago. So it goes.
A couple of days ago I finally got around to posting about what's kept me offline and not particularly feeling up to doing anything, in a nutshell being inundated with everything going wrong in the world (as if this is different from any other year; with life comes suck and fail. It happens.) Then, during my daily newscrawl in which I keep an eye on happenings in the world and look for things that might be sneaking up behind me (the work of a sysadmin is never done), I noticed some things popping up with synchronistic regularity. A couple of …
I've been waiting to put together an article about Wikileaks and Cablegate (the gradual release of a quarter-million diplomatic cables written and archived by the United States diplomatic corps). Mostly, everyday life has prevented me from doing so: the holiday season is here once again and, all things being equal, work and cleaning up the apartment with Lyssa have taken priority. I also didn't want to vent my spleen on the Net without having a coherent idea of what I was going to say. Turing knows, enough of that is happening right now and I won't fall prey to it …
