Just wanted to share another fantastic TED talk, this time from Michael Specter of The New Yorker.
In his talk, Specter argues that by any metric, we are currently living in the greatest time in which anybody could ever have lived throughout the entire history of the world. He then qualifies that claim by stating that if we don’t change popular opinion on the issues currently facing modern science, that state won’t last. In particular, Specter has beef with what most people call ‘junk science,’ including homeopathic medicines, herbal remedies, and the batshit-crazy beliefs of Jenny McCarthy. It is his belief that in order to solve the important problems that are facing modern science, we as a people must overcome our superstitious distrust toward the scientific method, and the gifts that it has brought humankind.
I have never understood how some students can justify going away for reading week, while I inevitably spend the week in the library, writing papers and studying for the next big test. But then I figured it out – if I simply took all of the time that I spend procrastinating throughout the school year and compressed it into a single week, I would have all the time in the world. Alternatively, I could have majored in communication studies.
Since this is my last reading week ever it’s a little bit late to try either of those approaches, and so I stuck with the tried and true, and spent an evening surfing the ‘net instead of doing my school work. Luckily, while squandering my precious time, I found a few excellent TED talks that I think that everybody should take the time to watch.
The first is by American author Michael Pollan, the guy who brought us the Omnivore’s Dilemma, a great book that discussed the many problems inherent in the way that we eat, as well as a few strategies for getting back to the basics and disarming the epidemics of obesity and diabetes that will become a major concern within my lifetime. He also had a big role in Robert Kenner’s Food Inc., an eye-opening documentary about the current state of the industrial agricultural system in America, Canada, and most of the western world. Together, these two works have really changed the way that I look at my food, and have influenced many of the decisions that I’ve made to try and change my diet, and to spread this message to the people that I care about most.
This talk in particular is a thought exercise that challenges the viewer to take another look at our place in nature, and to use that new view to reevaluate the decisions that we make when choosing what we eat:
The second talk that I’d like to share comes from England by way of Chef Jamie Oliver, who most people have heard of, especially if they’re of the female persuasion. He is on a serious mission to change the world through a better understanding of food. It is his dream to see a reality in which every kid is taught what they need to know about food and is armed with the education required to make healthy life choices about what we put into our bodies. And they really are life choices – the vast majority of deaths in the western world are caused by entirely preventable diseases related directly to diet and lifestyle decisions that we make every day. This talk won him an award at the most recent TED sessions, and is generating a lot of buzz right now:
Finally, I found an older talk by teacher turned slam poet Taylor Mali entitled What Teachers Make. This is an interesting attack at the old adage that “Those who can’t do teach,” that eloquently explains in only three minutes exactly why our teachers deserve more respect than they get in everyday society:
Who ever thought that not doing anything of value could be so educational?
Ah, the Cloud. A wonderful place in the electronic ether where you can put all of your data and software so that you no longer have to manage it yourself; never mind dealing with hardware or software purchases, tech support, or IT professionals. Never mind dealing with privacy and security, avoiding vendor lock in, or being free to do what you like with your data – the cloud will take care of it all. For once, I actually agree with the viewpoint of Richard Stallman:
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control… If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.
Stallman may be a crazy hippie, but unfortunately, he’s right. In our mad rush to create software as a service, we’ve repeatedly reinvented the wheel in an effort to coerce web browsers into doing things that desktops do with ease – and we’ve lost control over our personal data along the way. In the words of Schneier:
When a computer is within your network, you can protect it with other security systems such as firewalls and IDSs. You can build a resilient system that works even if those vendors you have to trust may not be as trustworthy as you like. With any outsourcing model, whether it be cloud computing or something else, you can’t. You have to trust your outsourcer completely. You not only have to trust the outsourcer’s security, but its reliability, its availability, and its business continuity.
Even though living in the cloud may look great on paper – “All of my services are served by Google, and available via a single user account!” – what happens if the Almighty Goog goes out of business tomorrow? Or just shuts down Google Docs? God knows, it isn’t making any money off of the service. Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services are no better, with rare, but sometimes lengthy outages that can negatively effect many online businesses that rely on the services being running.
The point that I’m trying to get at with all of this ranting and raving is that nobody owns your data but you. How many times have you been told to back up your hard drive? The same rules apply (if not doubly so) when talking about data stored ‘in the cloud’. There is little incentive for the vendor to care about what it does with the data of users who get its service for free. Remember Schofield’s Second Law of Computing:
Data doesn’t really exist unless you have two copies of it. Preferably more. And the only person who can be held responsible for that is you.
The internet is a magical place, and has changed our world in inumerable ways. In this video, Kevin Kelly dissects the accomplishments of the first ’5000 days’ of the World Wide Web, and makes some startling predictions for the next 5000. Ultimately, for any of his ideas to come to fruition, we users will need to surrender much of the control over our data to faceless companies motivated solely by profit. I’m for crafty capitalism as much as the next guy – hell, I want to make my living in this industry – but is this really how we want it to go down?
A few more excellent TED talks that I’ve recently stumbled on:
Malcolm Gladwell on what we can learn from spaghetti sauce: As per usual, Gladwell challenges the idea of “common sense” and gets you thinking in ways that you normally don’t.
Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice: Does freedom of choice really make us happier as a people?
Bill Gates on what we can do right now to change the world: As a lifelong believer of giving people the tools to solve problems well within their reach, Gates poses simple solutions to seemingly complex problems. His argument is that some problems don’t get solved simply because the market is not motivated to tackle them. What can we do to change that?
If you have a few minutes to be challenged, do drop by the TED website and listen to some smart people.
After being linked to the website by a colleague today, I spent a few hours rediscovering my love for TED Talks. For those who have never been, the website is like youtube, but without all the garbage. It is simply a massive collection of lectures by really smart people on just about every topic under the sun.
This evening, I stumbled upon a particularly amazing talk by Ed Ulbrich, the visual effects executive producer on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He and His team at Digital Domain spent four years creating the digital head that plays the part of Benjamin Button for the first half of the film. Most importantly, they didn’t animate any of it.
The team developed a technology called Emotion Capture that allowed them to analyze video of Brad Pitts’ facial performance of a scene and map that directly onto their computer models of his face. For anybody interested in computer graphics, this is an incredible lecture, and a must see.
More information regarding Digital Domain and the technology that they developed for this project can be found here and here.
Trying out the @seesmic web-based twitter app, because I got tired of struggling with Adobe Air on Linux. So far, I'm really liking it.about 11 hours agofrom Seesmic Web
Sadly, when reading the article, it becomes apparent that little has changed in over ten years. Artists and fans still get screwed by RIAAJul 17thfrom TweetDeck
Courtney Love does the Math: A dated but excellent read about the music industry from an artist's point of view http://bit.ly/3N6QoCJul 17thfrom TweetDeck
Looking forward to a meeting next week with @peterbraid regarding my concerns about #c32#fixc32 If you have questions, send them my wayJul 16thfrom TweetDeck
Ever wonder what sites are storing on your machine in the form of flash cookies? Check out this tool from adobe: http://bit.ly/17uIEGJul 16thfrom TweetDeck
#bpspill is stopped and all I can think of is how cool it is to see the live feed from halfway across the world and 1.5km under the oceanJul 16thfrom TweetDeck
Jon
The primary contributor to and maintainer of the site
Steph
My girlfriend, who sometimes posts her writings
Downloads
Charles Darwin
An essay that I wrote about Charles Darwin’s contributions to Science and Society for a history class at WLU
DRM Essay
An essay that I wrote for an Ethics class I took at Laurier that examines DRM, the USA DMCA, and the failures of both as security against piracy
iTunes Playlist Exporter
Exports all of the songs in any iTunes playlist file to any location on your computer. Originally written to load a blackberry or other mp3 player with music.
MAX 3D Engine
A not quite finished 3D engine written in C++ and OpenGL for my CP411 computer graphics course.
Ted Rogers
A paper that I wrote about Ted Rogers’ personal and business pursuits for a history class at WLU
The Battle of the Atlantic
An essay exploring the lessons learned by both sides during the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII. The essay explores the military and industrial capabilities of the combatants, the technology behind the Enigma and Allied code breaking efforts at Bletchley P
Tile-Based Map Editor
Written in VB for my top-down XNA rpg, allows easy creation of 2D tile-based maps, and exports to both a PNG pallete and an XML map description. Use it or modify it as you see fit.
Bus Error
Jake Billo’s excellent weblog, always good for a laugh or some handy info.
Matthew Good Online
The excellent (although sometimes jaded) blog of Canadian musician Matthew Good.
MusikPolice @ Last.fm
My profile over at Last.fm, one of the few social networking sites that I use.
The Linux Experiment
Seven Windows users with varying levels of Linux experience attempt to run it various distributions on their primary computers for four months. Hilarity ensues.
TylerBurton.ca
The blog of fellow computer enthusiast Tyler Burton, who uses it primarily as a showcase of software he’s written.
About This Site
My name is Jonathan Fritz, an Honours Computer Science student with a minor in History at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.
This is my blog, if that's what you must call it. Moreover, it is intended as a record of my personal work and musings about politics and technology. Here you will find not only my ramblings, but a selection of small programs that I've worked on for both school and pleasure.
