AKMA and Margeret dropped by last night, thus disproving a rumor: I can now confirm that they are indeed corporeal.

They schlepped all the way to our home late-ish because Ann and I spent the weekend at my in-laws’ celebrating Rosh Hashonah (Happy 5763, everybody!), and then they stayed late because we were having fun.

AKMA wasted no time in raising the hermeneutical issue that he’s been working on, a version of which he and I blogged about in the thread we now refer to as The Topic that Drove Away Our Readers.

But it’s a really important topic, and one that has also deeply engaged both Margaret and Ann, because it unjams science, ethics, and the relationship of the world’s religions. To my surprise, we didn’t resolve it once and for all, but hearing AKMA and Margaret describe the current state of biblical studies gave me a much better understanding of the issues they face.

We will do this again, Margaret and AKMA. This is non-negotiable demand.

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D.C. Denison at the Globe has an excellent article on the state of Wifi distribution. There are about 100 hotspots in Boston now, and over 150 in NYC. Still, those numbers sem paltry. But it’ll change; Denison quotes Sarah Kim, an analyst with The Yankee Group:

”Most of the major universities now offer WiFi to students on campus,” she said. ”That means that many college students are getting, and using, laptops with wireless cards. And then they bring those laptops along with them when they graduate, and go out and get jobs. So those students are going to drive adoption, too.”

Mainly what will drive adoption is that it’s easier to create a hotspot than to force people to pay for it. Denison recounts the story of Michael Oh. On Labor Day, Michael positioned a black Saturn Coupe with a 6-foot Wifi antenna across the street from a Starbucks. Starbucks charges $3 for every 15 minutes of use, while Oh’s Saturn charged $0.00 for all-day usage. The reaction of the company that provides Starbucks with connectivity actually was pretty enlightened: ”There’s a place for those vendors. But our customers want to know who they are dealing with. They want security and the reliability that comes with a real network company.”

But mainly we want free connectivity everywhere.

You can read Denison’s article here until the Globe locks it in its 15-minutes-for-$3 archive.

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I thank Norton Anti-Virus for discovering that my laptop caught the Nimda virus last night. I’ve come down with Nimda few times in the past couple of months. But, Nimda works by placing a file in a high percentage of the directories on your hard drive. For each file, Norton Anti-Virus puts up a dialogue box asking if you want to get rid of the infected file. Several thousand clicks later, you have a virus-free machine.

Yo, Symantec, you mighty maker of Norton Anti-Virus: How about putting in a button that says: “Shall we remove in one blow all the nasty files created by this despicable virus, or would you like to look at every single one in case some make a plea for their lives that you find compelling?”

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Ralph Quezada has written a letter to John Ashcroft that tries to carefully explain to him how the Congress is getting copyright law wrong. If you like it, you can e-sign it, as I have. (Thanks to Kevin Marks for the link.)

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Here’s what I said during my five minutes at the front of the room at the stealth telecom conference I was at this week:

The strong sense of the room is that the telecom incumbents are going to go Chapter 11 in the next 1.5-5 years. I’ve asked every one of the people on the panel yesterday [on this topic] and they all agree that the best thing would be for the fire to burn bright and fast. And they — we — all fear that the government will try to resuscitate the corpse, pumping money into these companies.

To prevent this, we need a new myth. Not just a story, but the framework for stories.

The current myth is that the telcos have hit a bad patch but if they go away, then we lose our dial tone. We need to present a different picture. It’s not simply that the telcos are a crumbling castle. It’s that they’re holding back a wave of innovation that will not only ensure the continuity of dial tone but will make life much better for us.

We don’t have to tell the story about the doom of the telcos. They’ll fall on their own.We should be out telling the upbeat, excited, enthusiastic story of the world that’s waiting to happen once the old edifice falls: the innovation, the global connectedness, the scalable and robust network bringing us continuous service. Otherwise, our legislators will continue to identify AT&T and dial tones and will think that the only way to ensure service, cast as a Homeland Security requirement, is to prop up AT&T.

So let’s go out and mythologize!

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I asked AKMA what a person of faith saw when he saw the events of 9/11. I saw human mayhem. What did a faithful person see?

AKMA replies. I’m really glad I asked.

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I’m in a beautiful room with 50 people smarter than me. We’re sitting in a four concentric half-circle rows, all pointing at the hub. Three people are at the hub, staging a panel discussion. This is an extremely informal group. Over the past three years, the conference has gotten more formal because it — properly, IMO — started at an extreme of conversational anarchy. Each year we better understand what limits will be helpful.

This year, the organizer required all atatendees to arrive with a laptop and an 802.11 Wifi card so we can all participate in an online chat even while presentations are going on. The conversations are posted on a large ooh-I-want-one plasma screen at the front.

I’ve been interested in the way the online conversation organizes itself. Here’s what’s the chat room been used for:

Competitive speed posting of links related to whatever the speaker has just said.

Wise cracks.

Questions about what the speaker has just said, e.g., what’s that acronym?

Digressive discussions.

Occasional challenges to what the speaker is saying, usually with no followups from anyone, as if criticizing the speaker were bad form (as it probably is).

It was as distracting as having a news crawl at the bottom of the screen as the news reader is talking about some event. But in this case the distraction was directly related to what’s being said on the main stage.

It’s been a worthwhile experiment. I noticed a change during the times the big screen was down. Talk got looser. Knowing that everyone in the room is going to hear your wise cracks inhibits the wise cracks (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Next time, I’d vote for keeping the chat board but taking down the screen; comments from the back of the room are more valuable if they stay in the back.

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At the stealth conference I’m at we just heard from David Gallo from the Woods Hole Oceanic Institute (WHOI) who has explained that we’re entering into a mini-ice age in the next 10-15 years that will drop temperatures 10-15 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the northeastern US and northern Europe. It will last 200-300 years. It is due to the current warming cycle which is melting the polar ice caps which is putting fresh water into the Atlantic which is disrupting the flow of warm air up the coast of the US and cycling down to Europe.

Stockpile eiderdown.

Here’s a Discover article. And one from the WHOI.

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Yet more links from the stealth conference I’m still at. These also come from the conversation on the chat board simultanteous with the front-of-the-room presentations.

Pingtel has an IP (SIP) phove that has a Java API phone
USB VoIP Device with RJ11
Internet call waiting
Internet fax reception also from callwave
http://netaction.org/futures

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More links from the conference I’m at. These come from the discussion going on on the chat board displayed at the front of the room.

Andrew ODLYZKO ´s home page
Location-based user content
Keyhole viewer
Reed’s Law Reed´s Law
Peter Kaminski’s Wiki of quotations
Terrorism book
people play games with different goals
internet security alliance
Book recommendation: Technologies of Freedom by Ithiel de Solla Pool
govnet
used books: http://abe.com and http://powells.com
Book recommendation: The Collapse of Complex Societies

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