To mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Global Voices yesterday pulled together reactions of bloggers from around the world—especially the parts of the world that are not the US or Europe. Fascinating, touching, discomforting…just what we want from the blogosphere. [Tags: 911 terrorism global_voices]

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Last night I semi-succeeded in installing (or perhaps I succeeded in semi-installing) Ubuntu 6.06.1 onto my wife’s computer.

I played around with the Ubuntu KDE user interface and included software. It’s a really spiffy combination of the best of the Mac and Windows. Superficially — I only spent a couple of hours with it — the Ubuntu UI is appealing, engaging, productive and fun.

But: Ubuntu is not yet ready to compete with the Mac and Windows for the gazillion of desktops out there. Close, but close in the way that taking a 3 meter leap across a 3.2 meter gap is close. Too bad, because I really want it to succeed.

The night before, the installation process froze as Ubuntu tried to install hardware drivers. The problem turned out to be that my wifi card uses the RTL8185 chipset, which the installation disk doesn’t support. That’s fine. Ubuntu will support it at some point or I could get another card. (In fact, I had a spare Linksys card on hand.) What’s not fine is that the installation hung without telling me why or what to do about it.

Once I (randomly) took the wifi card out and Ubuntu successfully installed itself—six questions and you’re done—I had three problems, none of which I would expect to have with Windows or the Mac: I couldn’t get it to enable the Linksys card I’d installed, I couldn’t get it to mount the system’s second hard drive (although it showed up in the list of drives), and I couldn’t get the motherboard’s sound system to work.

These are not insuperable problems. But they’re stoppers. And Ubuntu throws me straight into the bony arms of Linux to solve them. For example, it tells me that I can’t mount the second hard drive because it’s not listed in /etc/fstab. I shouldn’t have to know how to edit fstab to get my hard drive working. On the other hand, it gives me no help or hints about how to get wifi working. “Linux hacking or nothing!” is not the right battle cry for tech support.

I don’t mean to sound whiny and demanding. Linux is a gift. Thank you! And Ubuntu and KDE seem to have gotten the installation and desktop stuff right, which is no small feat. But I’m desperate for breaking up the OS duopoly. Until Ubuntu handles its inevitable errors and failures as well as Windows and the Mac do, users won’t get far enough to fall in love with it. Which is a shame. [Tags: ubuntu linux windows open_source]

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Ethanz is on the road and writing vividly. Not to mention the cool photo. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman travel]

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Sound is a wave moving through a medium, right? So, if air is the medium, if there’s a breeze, why doesn’t that totally fry the sound? How can we hear anything in a breeze except the breeze?
(Technically, this isn’t a puzzle so much as me being stupid in public. So, what else is new?) [Tags: doep puzzle quiz]

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We’re more than halfway through 9/11/06 and I’m feeling like we’ve fetishized it.

Thousands of innocent citizens were murdered, and they deserve remembrance. But listening to the public voices chattering without pause, today seems to have become about something else: Justifying the sacrifice of American ideals and values in the name of our fear.

On 9/10/01, if someone had told you that in response to a terrorist attack, a majority of Americans would back preemptive war and torture, would you have believed it?

For five minutes forget whether or not we’re safer now, five years after the attacks. The question I wish they’d talk about is: Are you proud of how our country has responded? I’m not. Our soldiers are brave and our fire fighters are heroes. We’ve done some things right. But, overall I’m not proud. And if the authorities weren’t out whipping up fear, I think most Americans would answer the same way. [Tags: 9/11 terrorism wtc]

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Name some things that can be seen and photographed from the front but that have no top down view and no view from the back.

For extra credit: Of the three available spatial dimensions (string theorists need not apply), how many would you say that thing occupies?

My suggested answers are in the comments. And yours? [Tags: doep puzzle quiz]

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The Boston Globe today endorsed Deval Patrick for governor of Massachusetts so strongly that it ignored the customary writings-off of the other candidates, as in: “Chris Gabrieli has shown himself to be a straightforward leader with some new ideas, and we remain impressed by the precision and resilience of Thomas Reilly’s comb-over.” I’m glad. I’m a Deval Patrick supporter, too, and have the lawn sign to prove it.

But I don’t understand why newspapers take editorial positions. Doesn’t that contradict everything newspapers believe about the value of a neutral point of view? Alternatively, if expressing a point of view gives the reader valuable insight into the inevitable bias of the paper—as I think is the case—wouldn’t it be at least as helpful to allow reporters to state their own stands, in blogs if not in the stories themselves? [Tags: journalism deval_patrick]

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Imagine a cube 2 meters square on every side. Imagine all six inner surfaces are lined with high quality mirrors, with no seams. Imagine that in the center of the room there is a small light bulb of the 60W variety. There is a tiny light sensor that leads to a meter on the oustide. The light is on. Now flick it off.

What happens inside the cube?

a. It goes dark as quickly as when you turn off the light in a sealed closet.

b. It goes dark imperceptibly slower than in the sealed closet.

c. It stays lit surprisingly long.

d. If the mirrors were perfect and you took out the sensor and made the light source invisible, you’d have a perpetual source of light, except that it would be completely sealed and thus of less use than a whale oil lamp.

e. Something else happens. [Tags: quiz puzzle doep physics]

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I can’t say as I understand this, but Hanan Cohen has set up a “WorldGame” page, the point of which is to get one visitor from each country to visit it and sign in. Just one.

It’s not too thrilling at the moment, but I can see a certain excitement building as we head toward the last couple of dozen countries… [Tags: worldgame games hanan_cohen]

Related only in the Wittgensteinian family resemblance way, at CreatureBreeder you can engineer your own virtual pets in a shared environment. Aim: Pass along the genes.

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My Hundred Million Dollar Secret, the young adult novel I self-published through lulu.com is now listed on Amazon. Cool! (It’s cheaper through lulu, though. And it’s online for free.) (I posted step-by-step instructions on getting an ISBN through lulu.)

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