Computers, Society, and Nature

Want to hunt deer or bear remotely? You pay your money and you are given remote control of a rifle physically located in the Texas brush. The Washington Post explains how it works:

The Remington .30-06 rifle is mounted atop a homemade contraption of welded metal and a piece of butcher block, and is attached to a small motor, three video cameras (two linked to the Internet, including the one embedded in the gun scope) and a door lock actuator, like that used in a car. The actuator is attached to a wire that pulls the trigger at the click of the mouse. From virtually anywhere, someone with an Internet connection can fire the rifle.

Not surprising what the Internet enables. What is surprising is the coalition that supports a ban on animal hunting by remote control.

In a rare alliance, hunters and the National Rifle Association have joined forces with their traditional foes, the animal welfare and Humane Society activists. And some scholars, not surprised to see violent computer games elevated to another level, are questioning the propriety of an enterprise that blurs the line between the reality of man-stalks-beast in the great outdoors to the virtual anonymity of shooter-pulls-trigger from thousands of miles away.

This application inevitably begs the question of whether diabolical individuals wouldn’t propose this for a city street in Bagdad. Let’s hope the alliance is as vocal about humans as they are about hunting.

BTW, why can’t someone design a remote control device that is more beneficent towards the environment, like a tree seedling planter or a litter remover?

I stumbled across the blog of Zach Braff today, specifically his garden state blog. It is a reminder of how powerful celebrity has become. Some of his posts have over three thousand comments, and the average seems to be about one thousand comments per post. Admittedly, the posts seem to be on the order of about one per month, allowing more time for comments to be made.

Such large numbers of posts, particularly when compared to most other blogs seems to indicate something about the internet audience. Mainstream North American culture has a huge presence on the internet, and its presence seems to justify the use of the term audience, the majority of its presence on the internet is not interactive, it is one way communication: no one would expect Mr. Braff to respond to comments, and the comments reflect that. Because of this, I feel many people tend to underestimate its online stature.

It is this mainstream which is being completely missed by most websites. Sites like RealClimate and even much larger sites like slashdot or fark, still can’t address even a fraction of the audience that conventional media reaches. In addition, the internet audience of those sites generally tends to be the converted, not exactly the median view on any given issue.

I feel it is the challenge of the left to push their message into the mainstream in such a way that it is for the most part indistinguishable from entertainment.

Even as they used the technology, residents of rich North American communities thought they were free of its infrastructure. Instead the ugly but necessary–if you want to use cellphones–towers are invading even the wealthiest burb.

Their losing battle is becoming commonplace as hundreds of communities around the country wage the same fight against cellphone companies and the march of spindly, metallic and freakishly tall antennas into quiet, affluent precincts of suburbia.

Fears that the gigantic towers will reduce property values and cause health problems from radio-frequency emissions have created the kind of opposition that is usually reserved for waste treatment plants in many towns.

From the UK newspaper, The Independent:

In the first modification of its kind, Japanese researchers have inserted a gene from the human liver into rice to enable it to digest pesticides and industrial chemicals. The gene makes an enzyme, code-named CPY2B6, which is particularly good at breaking down harmful chemicals in the body.

And the debate:

[Professor Richard Meilan, a geneticist at Purdue University in Indiana]: “I do not have any ethical issue with using human genes to engineer plants”, dismissing talk of “Frankenstein foods” as “rubbish”. He believes that that European opposition to GM crops and food is fuelled by agricultural protectionism.

Environmentalists say that no one will want to eat the partially human-derived food because it will smack of cannibalism.

I find this mindboggling, but according to the Wasington Post, women over 40 now comprise the largest segment of game players online .

You match the Nicole Kidman card with the Nicole Kidman card, the Julia Roberts card with the Julia Roberts card, the J.Lo card with the J.Lo card. Simple enough. The game is called Ditto, and it’s on the Web site of Ladies’ Home Journal, and Karen Heal is, at this very moment, too preoccupied playing the game to talk about it.

…

When it comes to online games, women over 40 play the most often and spend the greatest number of hours doing so, even beating out teenage boys, according to a study conducted by Digital Marketing Services. The study is called the Casual Gaming Report. But there’s nothing casual about a 45-year-old mother of two who, day in and day out, logs on to her favorite site — Yahoo! Games, MSN Zone, Pogo.com, to name a few — a couple of hours before she goes to bed and a few minutes after she gets out of bed.

What I haven’t included here is that much of the gaming is the online version of traditional card-playing such as bridge. A lot of the activity combines gaming with chat, so it represents a multi-tasking use of the Internet. Still, read the whole article. It’s enlightening.