I like this line in a recent letter from Ron Paul regarding the Rally for the Republic:

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Along with solar energy, one technology that has fascinated me recently is the various “air to water” condensers or Atmospheric Water Generators as they’ve been called.  The technology doesn’t quite seem fully developed yet, but I imagine that if these start-ups have their way, nearly free water will be available at any location on earth, with just (somewhat humid) air and solar energy as ingredients.

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This is one of the coolest things I’ve heard about, ever.  It isn’t a technological fad that will be superseded in a year or two… it will last thousands of years.  It’s called The Rosetta Project, and according to Kevin Kelly, it was just completed this week:

The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 500X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 15,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 2500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

I’ve long held a belief in the importance of information and its archival–not only as a computer guy who knows what it’s like to lose a week’s worth of work, but also as a humanist who loves the idea of preserving our knowledge for future generations.  I just wish I could afford one at $25k

Take a look:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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I’ve heard this is a great documentary, and with it featuring Ron Paul and David Walker, I think it’s worth seeing.  It will be showing tonight at the Provo South Towne Theatre (Cinemark 16), at 6 PM.  I’m without a car right now, but I’m going to see if I can make it anyway.

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I read a techPresident.com email this morning wherein the authors disclosed their relationship to the Sunlight Foundation:

PdF’s Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior strategic advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

I really like the Sunlight Foundation and what they are trying to do. They seek honesty and accountability in the public sphere. And at the same time, their disclosure got me thinking about bias in politics. It seems to me that techPresident, for all of their middle ground in politics, tends to speak more favorably of Barack Obama than John McCain. And who could blame them? When it comes to honesty and disclosure, John McCain and the Republican party have done an absolutely horrible job. Barack Obama and the Democrats, on the other hand, have only done a bad job of bringing light and accountability to politics. The desires of the Sunlight Foundation probably seep through just a bit, favoring the bad rather than the absolutely horrible.

The problem is that in a two-party system, there is very little context for comparison. We’re subconsciously forced to align the two parties on a one-dimensional scale of honesty, and as a consequence a rating of “bad” becomes “better than the other”. The unfortunate effect on reporters is that what is actually discriminate selection of honest facts can appear to be bias since one party is often doing a poorer job than the other at being open and honest. A reporter might feel, for example, that he or she has to balance a disparaging story with one full of praise, in the name of fairness. It’s almost like we somehow subconsciously feel like both parties should be treated “fairly” because there are only two of them (perhaps this is a psychological phenomenon?).

They say that “three is a crowd”, but in politics, I think three crowds out dishonesty. Three or more parties would make it possible for the media to distribute attention (positive or negative) based on merit rather than on fear of being called “biased”. At present, I think our two-party system encourages “fair coverage” between two underdeserving parties.

Textmate is an awesome text editor for Mac OS X with one unfortunate weakness: the “Find in Project” feature.  Find in Project is slow, and what’s worse, it can sometimes be so slow that it takes minutes to come back (meanwhile, Textmate is unresponsive and the system slows down).  I’ve actually waited for 15 minutes on one occasion, until I finally had to kill the application and start over.  I’ve lost data on 3 occasions that way.  It has also crashed when searching text files with extremely long lines.

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So this is my 7th year at BYU and I just now found out about a web page that tells which books you’ll need for the semester. The book list becomes available August 26th, since (according to the BYU bookstore) professors change and reassign textbooks a lot until that point.  Also note that you have to be logged in to your RouteY account to access the page.

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I’m sorry, Mozy, I really wanted to keep you.  You tried to make things better, and I appreciated that.  But your backup system is just not ready for the Mac operating system yet… if you make the following things work, I will very likely come back:

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