reflections in the rain about a dream
Velocite Magnus
The new frames from Velocite have arrived. The Magnus is an aggressive sprinter/climber road bike, while the Flux is an aggro hardtail MTB. The Helios has also arrived. It’s geometry is more conventional. I was going for the Helios, but Victor’s description of the Magnus make me question my initial thoughts. I might just get the Millennium (titanium) as my training bike and the Magnus as my carbon fiber bike.
Velocite Flux
If you aren’t using Gmail as your main email client, this new Google announcement might change your mind, as moving stuff into the cloud has never been easier. Google has announced more storage for less money!
I’ve never come across the term trollumnist, but it’s pretty self-evident that there are quite a few trollumnists out there. So what is a trollumnist?
{Note, the word has been added to the Urban Dictionary}
Trollumnist (n.) — A writer or blogger who “trolls” in a multichannel, multimedia environment, trying to bait readers into a reaction that editors want to generate. Comes from the term trolling or the noun trolls.
Here is what trolling is all about:
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
Here is where the term first came to my attention:
As the newspaper business model heads south, though, we’ve been subjected to the rise of what we might christen the “trollumnist” — the writer who simply “trolls” in a multichannel, multimedia environment. And the erstwhile self-identification of papers like the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian as quality outlets matters little in the attention economy: on the internet, no one knows you’re a broadsheet. Whereas a true columnist might make controversial arguments or challenge common sense, trollumnists merely provoke outrage in order to sell papers, draw links and capture increasingly scarce reader attention. The beauty of it all is that it doesn’t take much training to do it, and as media content goes, it’s cheap as chips. Any fool can offend people given a reasonably prominent platform.
{via david reid}
Aerial view of NSA HQ at Fort Meade, via NSA
The NSA is building two new storage facilities to house yottabytes of data. One in Utah and one in Texas. The scale is staggering. There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. A yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB¹.
This data is mostly pocket litter: trillions of phone calls, email messages, web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other data trails.
The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers.
Does this scare you? As for myself, no. As a mathematician, I’ve often fantasized working at the NSA. From the article, it seems like they don’t have enough supercomputing power to deal with the vasts amounts of data that they are harnessing and storing.
I like the term infoweapons used in this article. Infoweapons are supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs.
On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.
Unlike Borges’s “labyrinth of letters,” this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015.”[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.
It looks like Polaroid instant film and cameras are coming back! Polaroid film was discontinued last year. This created quite the uproar. For many people, Polaroid film was reminiscent of a simpler form of instant photography. Polaroid film and cameras will return midway in 2010.
Heck, this makes me want to get a Polaroid camera! There are some really cool Polaroid photo projects. What’s really great with Polaroids is it’s instant! You can get the photos right away. Almost like a precursor of what it would be to have digital photography. Speaking of which, the new Nikon D3S was announced. It costs $5,200 and can do up to 102,400 ISO. Sounds incredible. Personally, I’m fine with my D200. I’ll upgrade in 2010 or 2011 and keep the D200 as a backup camera. (via pica+pixel)
Japan’s CEATEC is really a great place to find some up and coming home tech. It’s really cool to see what is going to be possible, especially with OLED displays.
The FCC has ruled that bloggers need to reveals if they have received freebies, or face a stiff $11,000 fine. This especially applies to all those mommy-bloogers, who seem to pimp products at every post. Personally, I was reading a few but got tired of them. I don’t read any mommy blogs anymore, but then again, I’m not their target audience. I honestly can’t stand dooce anymore.
The Observer on the divide between Hollywood and the rest of America about their reaction to Polanski. This led me to Kate Harding’s post. Her original post that went viral was for Broadsheet. Harris from The Observer remarked at how Hollywood’s reaction had united different American factions, from feminists to right-wing activists. I also liked Kate’s piece on Whoopi Goldberg’s insane rape-rape comment.
Some of the tech journalists that have been trying Google Wave for the last few days have got some mixed feelings about it. Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, and Louis Gray all conclude that Google Wave is more unproductive than conducive to team collaborations. I haven’t gotten an invite, so I can’t really comment, but I can see how this is an issue.
The UCI has taken the decision to phase out radios in the coming seasons. I think that it’s a good idea. The race will be less controlled by the racing directors and more by the cyclists. Sure, teams are going to be annoyed, but if some basic precautions are taken, it should be really interesting.
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Astana pro license under scrutiny. It’s not looking good for Astana, which had it’s pro license revoked in 2008, enabling Spaniard Carlos Sastre of the Cervélo TestTeam to win the Tour de France because Contador couldn’t defend his title. The main concern is because of doping issues. Vinokourov has come back to Astana, and the Kazakh team was made for him. Lance Armstrong is already gone to his new Radioshack team. This leaves Contador on a team that’s going nowhere quickly. I think that Contador should join another team and have them buy out his Astana contract. Apparently, Vinokourov will also be the team director, which is just bad news all around.
This makes Astana a very unstable team. From being on the top of the world in 2007 with Contador’s win of the Tour de France, to having their pro license revoked in 2008 because of doping issues, to winning the tour again in 2009 with Contador and Armstrong getting #3, to once again possibly getting their team license revoked.
If I was on the Astana team, I’d bail ASAP.
I'm Range, your host. On the menu, photos, art, stories, entertainment and reviews. Links, maths, education and social issues. I'm in Quebec (Canada) or Taiwan (R.O.C.). Follow me on Twitter. 
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