History, Poetry, Security

The Paris Review and DRM

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There are a number of historic interviews being posted online by the Paris Review. For example, you can read a 1960 discussion with Robert Frost:

So many talk, I wonder how falsely, about what it costs them, what agony it is to write. I’ve often been quoted: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.� But another distinction I made is: however sad, no grievance, grief without grievance. How could I, how could anyone have a good time with what cost me too much agony, how could they? What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it?

There are almost as many contradictory suggestions for writers as there are interviews in the collection. You know what they say about opinions…

I also noted this awesome start and abrupt end to the Graham Greene page:

GREENE: “No, one never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one cannot remember what toothpaste they use, what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge: minor ones may be photographed.”

NOTE: We regret that we have been unable to obtain web rights to this interview. We have worked hard to make this archive as complete as possible, and hope you’ll forgive us the omission.

The Editors

Curious that the magazine does not have rights to its own interview.

Poetry, Security

NOAA Poetry

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NOAA offers some interesting insights in their “Poetry Corner“:

What do poetry, engineers, and scientists have in common? The NOAA Poetry Corner, home of weather poems, survey poems, and ocean poems written by the men and women who served in NOAA or its ancestor agencies. […] All these poems help tell the story of the people and the ancestor agencies of NOAA, showing a love for the work and a love for the environment in which the men and women of NOAA’s ancestor agencies worked….

Here is my favorite so far:

Oceanography is dangerous

by Arch E. Benthic, a.k.a. Harris B. Stewart
“The Id of the Squid,� 1970

The Exec has spent two weeks in traction,
The Chief has a cut on his head,
The Doctor is missing in action
With a burn that has sent him to bed.
Various others have bruises
And legs and backs that are sore.
The dangerous parts of these cruises
Are the motorbikes ridden ashore.

In: AOML Keynotes, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 1-4.

I don’t follow the squid reference, but the punch-line is funny. Wonder if NOAA pays a bonus for poems?

Security

Protein Cell-net to run on PS3

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Scientific purposes for distributed computing is now being explored on gaming devices, according to Seed. Sony’s ironically named “cell” chip will be working on how the study of proteins in disease:

Volunteers would download a program giving access to the PlayStation’s superfast Cell chip, which the researchers would use when the gamer is not playing. The processed information would then be sent back via the Internet. […] “A piece of research in this field could typically take up to five years–using the processing of PlayStation 3 could potentially reduce this to just three months,” [Stanford Professor Vijay] Pande said in a statement.

It seems that over 400,000 PS3 units have already sold in just a few weeks time and another 600,000 are expected to sell by the end of the year. Wow. That’s a lot of processing power if you can harness it together. But my first question is how does someone opt-in to the research? In other words, how does a PS3 owner distinguish the good causes from the bad?

Food, Security

Bees trained to find bombs

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Reuters reports that bees have been sucessfully trained to smell out explosives:

By exposing the insects to the odor of explosives followed by a sugar water reward, researchers said they trained bees to recognize substances ranging from dynamite and C-4 plastic explosives to the Howitzer propellant grains used in improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

“When bees detect the presence of explosives, they simply stick their proboscis out,” research scientist Tim Haarmann told Reuters in a telephone interview. “You don’t have to be an expert in animal behavior to understand it as there is no ambiguity.”

If you have to get close enough to see their proboscis sticking out, you might be too close to the bomb to do much about it.

Now if they could just be trained not to get so angry and sting. Or, alternatively, maybe they could be used to swarm and attack anything that smells like a bomb. Imagine stopping a suicide bomber in his/her tracks by covering them with attack bees.

EDITED TO ADD (06 Dec 2006): Curiosity was getting the better of me so I found a source that describes how bee communication can be interpreted by humans from a distance. An optics.org report from August 2005 explains that trained bees will alter their behavior when flying over landmines, which can be detected by horizontal LIDAR:

The co-polarised LIDAR system uses a frequency-doubled 532 nm Nd:YAG emitting 100 mJ pulses at a repetition rate of 30 Hz. The back-scattered light is passed through a receiver with a linear polarisation parallel to that of the emitted light.

To test the feasibility of the approach, the team carried out an experiment on a live mine field. Using tens of thousands of bees, the researchers conclude that the scanning LIDAR consistently detected a higher bee density near most of the significant chemical plumes. But there is still a lot of work to do.

[…]

“The primary limitation was identifying bee-specific signatures from grass and other interfering objects,” said Shaw.

I love the details in optics.org. Ok, so let’s say that bees would be flying around checkpoints with LIDAR sensors. Could anyone stung by a bee, or that bees hover by, be reasonably assumed to have trace amounts of explosives? Not only does this present a very interesting partnership with nature and science, but imagine all the side benefits like military checkpoints planting flowers and selling honey on the side.