2006 War on Drugs = 1920 Prohibition
A short but very interesting documentary about a group of judicial and law enforcement agents in the US openly critizising the current “War on Drugs” from the past 36 years as a flawed policy, in the same way that the prohibition on alcohol between 1920-33 created the scarce market that lead to the increase of criminality. Interesting not only because of the facts presented, but because of who these 5,000 people are – the ones who deal with the drug reality on a daily basis. Via the MLS blog.
Computational Heating
This might be the wrong time of the year to be thinking about this (at least in the northern hemisphere), but this old idea of mine (don’t know if it has been proposed before) has come to mind by the pretty hot (in all senses) MacBook Pro sitting on my lap. If modern computational devices produce so much (waste and wasted) heat, and considering that in some parts of the world electric heating is used extensively, why not combine the two?
Instead of having regular electric heaters to warm up your house and your water, with the decrease in cost of processing capacity, you could have devices that doubled as heaters and processing nodes – processing capacity that you could use for yourself, sell, or donate to projects such as SETI@Home. These devices would be plugged to the mains for power, and have some kind of wireless connectivity. For now, computational heating surely is more expensive (in terms of hardware, not energy) than purely resistive heating, but who knows what the future brings? In a few years time you might be able to go down to the hardware store, and buy a heater (either a space heater or a water heater) with capacity measured both in watts and teraflops! 
Baby Rock Records
A beautiful take on alternative rock songs, transformed into instrumental lullabies. I do hope they start selling the CDs here in Europe or through iTunes, I want them all for Carolina! Via BoingBoing. [update: they'll ship the CDs worldwide, I've pre-ordered four - Radiohead, Coldplay, The Cure, and the Beachboys]
Cory Doctorow – Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom
I’ve just finished reading the electronic version of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, a story about the ad-hocracy fights in the post scarcity Bitchun society for the control of Walt Disney World. An interesting read, although the real scale of the changes is very subtly described.
And just today I saw this video (via BoingBoing) about a rare Walt Disney World moment captured by a visitor, the Haunted Mansion with the lights on! It’s funny because the Haunted Mansion is one of the main “battlegrounds” of the book.
The quiet path to the Singularity
Although most people refuse to believe the concept of the technological Singularity, I can’t help but wonder if some apparently unrelated research is not leading the way to our future of uploaded post-humans.
