Year: 2004

RECORDING INDUSTRY: Please Place Your Fingers On The Touchpad

Excerpts from article:

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.

“In practical terms, VeriTouch’s breakthrough in anti-piracy technology means that no delivered content to a customer may be copied, shared or otherwise distributed because each file is uniquely locked by the customer’s live fingerprint scan,” claims the company.

RIAA officials also have announced plans for an even higher level of copy protection, involving voiceprint, DNA, and brainwave authentication. The new technology will require neurosurgery to implant cerebral probes to prevent the use of falsified brainwaves.

“But the good news is that the cerebral probes will also function as transmitters for the music, giving listeners the highest fidelity presentation of recorded sound ever!” enthused Rip Burnley, an RIAA spokesman.

Copyright lawyers for the RIAA also noted that the new, brain-based system would achieve the industry’s longstanding goal of eliminating the practice of “ear piracy,” which they explained was the overhearing of music that one had not properly paid for and licensed.

RECORDING INDUSTRY: Please Place Your Fingers On The Touchpad

Excerpts from article:

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.

“In practical terms, VeriTouch’s breakthrough in anti-piracy technology means that no delivered content to a customer may be copied, shared or otherwise distributed because each file is uniquely locked by the customer’s live fingerprint scan,” claims the company.

RIAA officials also have announced plans for an even higher level of copy protection, involving voiceprint, DNA, and brainwave authentication. The new technology will require neurosurgery to implant cerebral probes to prevent the use of falsified brainwaves.

“But the good news is that the cerebral probes will also function as transmitters for the music, giving listeners the highest fidelity presentation of recorded sound ever!” enthused Rip Burnley, an RIAA spokesman.

Copyright lawyers for the RIAA also noted that the new, brain-based system would achieve the industry’s longstanding goal of eliminating the practice of “ear piracy,” which they explained was the overhearing of music that one had not properly paid for and licensed.

BBC: Geologists Add New Era To Earth's History

(Slightly rearranged) Excerpts from article:

Geologists have added a new period to their official calendar of Earth’s history – the first in 120 years.

The Ediacaran Period covers some 50 million years of ancient time on our planet from 600 million years ago to about 542 million years ago.

It officially becomes part of the Neoproterozoic, when multi-celled life forms started to take hold on Earth.

Professor Ogg said many of the new life forms that appeared in the Ediacaran seem to be simple organisms, probably related to present-day sponges.

“They appear to be lying flat on the seafloor and people think they may have had photosynthetic symbiosis much like corals do today,” he explained.

“These organisms were probably ripped to shreds when the first predators came along. That probably happened in the Cambrian Period.”

However, Russian geologists are unhappy their own title – the Vendian – which was coined in 1952, was not chosen.

The Russians added that geological time was invented just outside Moscow, near the location of the Garden of Eden. “In the twenty-third century, everybody knows that,” said visiting scientist Pavel Chekhov.

Meanwhile representatives of the Institute for Creation Research of El Cajon, California decried the creation of the new era and refused to research it.

Others are keen to research and commercially develop the new period. Billionnaire developer John Hammond immediately announced plans to extract DNA from fossilized cells of the invertibrate life forms that thrived in the Edicaran Period, clone them, and build a multi-million dollar theme amusement center known as Edicaran Park, which he described as a wading-pool petting zoo filled with soft, harmless sponges for children to enjoy touching.

Hammond’s plans were immediately denounced by Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and disgruntled ex-employee of Hammond, who said his former boss was “Making all new mistakes” that were sure to lead to mayhem and destruction. “His last three parks have all ended in disaster,” Malcolm said.

But Hammond was unperturbed. “Dr. Malcolm is a reactionary,” he stated. “He expects the genetic resequencing in the cloning process to lead the sponges to grow hundreds of feet tall and become mobile, capable of menacing entire cities, and as sponges be immune to all forms of modern weapons, only to reproduce when cut in pieces. That’s crazy,” Hammond assured nervous reporters. “That will never happen.”

BBC: Geologists Add New Era To Earth’s History

(Slightly rearranged) Excerpts from article:

Geologists have added a new period to their official calendar of Earth’s history – the first in 120 years.

The Ediacaran Period covers some 50 million years of ancient time on our planet from 600 million years ago to about 542 million years ago.

It officially becomes part of the Neoproterozoic, when multi-celled life forms started to take hold on Earth.

Professor Ogg said many of the new life forms that appeared in the Ediacaran seem to be simple organisms, probably related to present-day sponges.

“They appear to be lying flat on the seafloor and people think they may have had photosynthetic symbiosis much like corals do today,” he explained.

“These organisms were probably ripped to shreds when the first predators came along. That probably happened in the Cambrian Period.”

However, Russian geologists are unhappy their own title – the Vendian – which was coined in 1952, was not chosen.

The Russians added that geological time was invented just outside Moscow, near the location of the Garden of Eden. “In the twenty-third century, everybody knows that,” said visiting scientist Pavel Chekhov.

Meanwhile representatives of the Institute for Creation Research of El Cajon, California decried the creation of the new era and refused to research it.

Others are keen to research and commercially develop the new period. Billionnaire developer John Hammond immediately announced plans to extract DNA from fossilized cells of the invertibrate life forms that thrived in the Edicaran Period, clone them, and build a multi-million dollar theme amusement center known as Edicaran Park, which he described as a wading-pool petting zoo filled with soft, harmless sponges for children to enjoy touching.

Hammond’s plans were immediately denounced by Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and disgruntled ex-employee of Hammond, who said his former boss was “Making all new mistakes” that were sure to lead to mayhem and destruction. “His last three parks have all ended in disaster,” Malcolm said.

But Hammond was unperturbed. “Dr. Malcolm is a reactionary,” he stated. “He expects the genetic resequencing in the cloning process to lead the sponges to grow hundreds of feet tall and become mobile, capable of menacing entire cities, and as sponges be immune to all forms of modern weapons, only to reproduce when cut in pieces. That’s crazy,” Hammond assured nervous reporters. “That will never happen.”

Children On Animal Talk

pigOnomatopoeia (words that sound like what they symbolize) doesn’t play a very large role in human languages. There are a few words that are onomatopoetic, such as the English hush, swish, or clink. One area, however, where all languages use onomatopoeia is animal noises. Humans always make up words for animal noises that are imitations of the actual sounds animals make.

Some humans are more successful in this than others, and it’s interesting to compare the words for animal sounds in different languages and see which ones are closest to what the animals actually sound like. It seems to me, for instance, that the Spanish word for “oink”–which is tru-tru–is closer to the noise pigs make than “oink” is.

In case you didn’t see it in a story I linked yesterday, there is an initiative called The Quack Project which records children attempting to represent the noises of different animals. They’re interesting to listen to. Often the kids are being too influenced by the word that they have been taught the animals say. Other times, though, they are quite close.

To me it seemed, for instance, that the kids who speak Cantonese has more actual experience with pigs than other kids. Both the Italian kids and the Columbian Spanish kids both had variants on “oink.” But the Cantonese were so dead-on that it’s almost impossible to spell their imitation (kkchhh! fff! is about as close as I can come).

Animal Talk

Regional differences in the noises we make aren’t just confined to humans. A recent study in England showed that urban ducks are loudmouths compared to their country cousins. (Of course, we humans are far too suave and sophisticated for something like that to hold true among us.)

Researches plan to turn their attention next to the dialectical differences among the wolves in Tex Avery cartoons.

“Just look at a cartoon like Little Rural Riding Hood (1949),” one researcher said. “In that cartoon Country Wolf has a pronounced, rustic ‘aw, shucks, golly’ manner of speech, with marked differences in vowelization, consonantal dropping, cadence, word choice, and even syntax when compared to his cousin, City Wolf, who basically sounds like Charles Bouyer.”

“Compare those two to The Wolf From Down South, who appears in cartoons such as Sheep Wrecked (1958) and Blackboard Jumble (1959). He always speaks in a friendly, laid-back, ‘Hey, y’all!’ manner with an accent and intonations that could come from any of the Gulf South states.”

“These can’t be attributed to anything other than regional differences,” the researcher noted, “because all three wolves were voiced by actor Dawes Butler, meaning that the biological substrate for each wolf’s vocal capacities was identical.”

Kindler, Gentler Warfare: Part II

One can argue that by its ordinary Magisterium the Church has infallibly defined that wars can be just, but it has never tried to infallibly define the precise conditions that must be met for a particular war to count as just. The conditions enumerated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2309) are certianly true in their broad outline, but there remains potential for doctrinal development in this area.

On thing that may force that doctrinal development to occur would be the advent of widespread use of non-lethal weapons.

Church thought on just warfare has been affected by developments in weapons technology before. When the crossbow was developed in the Middle Ages, Pope Urban II forbade its use against Christians. So did the Second Lateran Council, which stated: “We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on” (Canon 29).

Current attitudes toward warfare are heavily shaped by the experience of World War II, which ravaged Europe the current generation of Vatican officials were young, and the Cold War, which threatened to turn nuclear when they were in middle age. The assumption presently made in Vatican circles is that increasing technology ineluctably makes warfare more and more deadly, making it harder and harder to justify. This perception is displayed at a number of places in the Catechism, including in the conditions of a just war, which state in part:

The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Certainly the possession of modern means of destruction weighs heavily on anyone planning to use them, but the concept the Church is expressing needs to be further refined. It is not a given that better weapons automatically lead to deadlier wars. The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, were both far less deadly for both sides and for the civilian population than would have been the case had they been fought in the 1940s, when carpet bombing was commonly imployed to get at munitions factories within urban areas. Modern “surgical” warfare may still be messy, but it is far less deadly.

Studies have been done on the casualties caused by warfare at different technological levels and the results are quite clear: The more primitive the weapons are, the more people get killed by war. It is in the most primitive societies that the highest percentage of the population dies by warfare, and it is in the most technologically advanced societies that the fewest people die. (NOTE: I know people will be curious about these studies, so I’ll post more information on them soon.)

One of the reasons for this, undoubtedly, is that the more lethal you and your opponents’ weapons are, the more carefully you are going to think about whether you really want to go to war, the more motivated you will be to find options other than warfare to settle your differences. Another reason is that it is possible to apply force more precisely and have fewer casualties as collateral damage.

What remains to be seen is what effect the development and widespread deployability of non-lethal weapons will have. Paradoxically, it might have the effect of making wars even less deadly–but more common.

All of this is likely to give Catholic moral theologians fits, and the debate will rage for several generations. Doctrinal development seldom happens quickly, and do not expect it to happen on this question for years to come. As long as the destruction of World War II and the terror of the Cold War remain living memories for Vatican officials, a re-examination of this question will be out of the question.

Kindler, Gentler Warfare

Periodically news stories appear about the next-generation weapons we currently under development. Some of these are improvements on things we already have (e.g., conventional bombs that make a bigger boom), but the most interesting are the non-lethal weapons that may change the future of warfare.

In this story is reported a device known as the Active Denial System. Excerpts:

WASHINGTON – Test subjects can’t see the invisible beam from the Pentagon’s new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds.

People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.

“It tricks the pain sensors into thinking they’re on fire,” said Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M.

Garcia knows firsthand. He was among hundreds of test volunteers, standing in a doorway with his back facing the device.

“They did a full body back shot,” he said. “It hit in the small of my back first. For the first millisecond, it just felt like the skin was warming up. Then it got warmer and warmer and you felt like it was on fire.”

He said he lunged out of the doorway.

“As soon as you’re away from that beam your skin returns to normal and there is no pain,” Garcia said. “I thought to myself, ‘Why you wimp. You know it’s not causing any damage. You’ll be able to override it.’ Each of the next three times, I was on there a little bit longer.

“The fourth one was the longest. It was about two seconds. It felt like my hair was on fire.”

The Active Denial System is only one of many non-lethal weapons under development (others are described in the story).

Should they become widespread, such weapons have the prospect of altering current understanding of just war doctrine. More on that tomorrow.

BBC: Harry Houdini Outed From Trunk

Magicians the world over are outraged that an Appleton, WI museum has revealed how Harry Houdini performed his famous “Metamorphosis” trick, performed while handcuffed in a sack in a trunk.

At a hastily-called press conference, several stage magicians threatend to put a hex on the museum and its patrons.

“They want to see how Metamorphosis works?” an enraged David Copperfield was quoted as saying. “I’ll show them how it works from the inside. POOF! They’ll all metamorphose into asthmatic newts!”

Teller, silent half of the comedy magic team Penn & Teller, angrily shouted “——— — —- – — ————— — ——— ——– —— – —— —– ——— ——-!”, his eyes bulging with rage.

Even the normally smiling Doug Henning wasn’t smiling at the press conference. “If the BBC thinks that it will escape our wrath because it only explained on its web site what the museum revealed, they’re wrong! They’ll wake up one morning to find their mouths and fingers have disappeared! How will they file their oh-so-informative stories then?”

Despite these threats, Libby Bias, head of the BBC News Division, seemed unconcerned. “The BBC have retained the services of Prof. Quirrell, instructor of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I’m sure that with him working at the organization, evil forces will never be able to infiltrate or harm the BBC.”