Watch the Skies

OK, I was minding my own business. Su Byron and I were walking her West Highland Terrier, Baxter. Or maybe he was walking us. It depends on your point of view.

OK, so it's about 9:10 p.m. We amble around Eastbrook -- this circular drive in our neighborhood. We're heading east. I look behind me. To the southwest. And there's a big red light crossing the sky on a northwest trajectory.

As far as I can tell, it's moving at about 35 degrees in the direction of Venus, which is hanging pretty low in the night sky.

So, I look at it. Study it. Various thoughts go through my mind.

It's not a plane. What the hell is it?

It's a big glowing object. Red. incandescent. Glowing from within. A hot air balloon?

Well, no. On balloons, the fire's one the bottom. And balloons are pretty much evenly round. This thing is irregular. Spheroid, but not exactly spherical. There's not one light on the bottom. The whole thing is glowing.

Shit.

"Hey, uh, Su? I think you want to look back at this. Maybe I'm crazy. But I think I'm looking at a UFO."

She stops. Looks.

"Is it a plane? Maybe it's a plane on fire."

"No. It's moving across the sky. Planes on fire tend to go straight down. Fast."

She looks at it.

"Maybe it's a nuke."

"No. Not unless the Mexicans are nuking Tampa. It's going South to North."

"OK. This is weird. This is definitely weird."

"Yeah. Uh. I think it's slowing down."

"It's definitely slowing down."

"Maybe it's an optical illusion. OK, now it's getting smaller."

"Or further away."

"Or it's burning out."

"Do you think it's a meteor?"

"Maybe. But it's moving too slow.

"I think it's stopped."

"No. It's gone."

And it was. Down the street, kids were playing with -- yeah, irony of ironies -- flying saucer toys with glowing lights. I figured a thousand people must've seen this thing -- which seemed to me to be right over Siesta Key.

Back home, we checked the Internet.

Nothing.

For the record, I don't think it was Little Green Men. My vote would be meteor.

But it was pretty damn weird.

To be fair ...

Environmentalists always seem to bitch about any energy technology that actually works. Now that the energy companies are rolling out functioning wind turbines, they're fighting them tooth and nail. If photovoltaic solar panels ever got cheap, they're probably fight them too. All that reflected sunlight flashes in the birdies' eyes and makes them squint.

Spill, baby, spill

Gee, we're pumping up thousands of barrels of a highly pressurized, volatile, flammable, liquid hydrocarbon sandwiched beneath unimaginable layers of silt and rock squashed down by all the metric tons of water flowing by in the chaotic currents of the Gulf of Mexico. What could possibly go wrong?

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

Ah, Soviet science marches on ...

Cyber War

Richard Clarke's track record as a bearer of bad news is pretty good. He's written a book called "Cyber War" which -- based on the Terry Gross interview I'm listening to now -- ain't just based on hypothetical cyber attacks in the future; he's also talking about stuff that's already happened.

Evidently, the Chinese have implanted logic bombs in the USA electrical grid. We've returned the compliment. He suggests it'd be a good idea if the electrical companies took their shit off the Internet. Gee, you think?

He speculates that our pals in the PRC will probably not want to destroy the USA banking system because -- I paraphrase -- we owe them some much freaking money. The North Koreans don't have this problem. Shit, they print as much American money as they want.

He adds that the North Koreans have honed their cyber attack skills in freaking 4-star Chinese hotels. So the Chinese aren't entirely our best pals. Or entirely sane.

Clarke's basic point seems to be our pants are down and our nethers are flapping in the wind. Yep. I've pre-ordered his book, natch. Will do a full review as soon as I read it. But I've got something to say and I have to say it now. It's a profound irony and I want the credit for saying it first.

The Internet was originally the Arpanet. It was created by DARPA -- the Defense Departments Advanced Research boys. OK, here's the gag. You ready? The whole point of the Arpanet was creating a self-contained communication system whereby defense spooks and advanced university researchers could still communicate with each other in the event of an atomic attack.

It was meant to be a double-secret private conversation. A cone of silence.

Not an open barn door.

IPad redux

The iPad is basically the Newspad from Kubrick's 2001.

I.e.: a portable flatscreen with the functions of a TV set, a laptop computer and a cell phone.

In Jobs' vision of the future, there aren't many keyboard-based laptops. In Jobs' tomorrow, people walk around with something that looks like the Newspad. He figured it's a safe bet. This thing didn't exist yet. But people wanted it anyway. He decided to be the one to sell it.

Basically, Steve Jobs is trying to fill a relatively empty niche in the gadgetry ecosystem. Yeah, others have tried -- and failed. He's getting his foot in the door. Chances are, it'll have a lot of bugs. Thanks to the halo factor surrounding Apple devices, they'll sell a ton of these things to early adapters in black turtlenecks who want to look cool, plough the $ into R&D and make the device more elegant and functional over various product cycles. It's what they do. My guess is, the strategy will probably work.

People want this thing. People like portability, but they hate keyboards.

Me too. The truth is, the keyboard is a pain in the ass, a design compromise as ungainly as a throbbing cold sore. Nobody likes the keyboard. A touch-screen keyboard may be a kludgy solution. On the other hand, the magic iPhone slide-your-finger-like-that-dude-in-Minority-Report interface will probably work for most of what users want to do on the iPad. For the rest, really good speech recognition is probably just a matter of time. Jobs' vision of the future is probably right.

But I'll wait a few product gens until I buy one.

Big Brothers Is Watching You

OK. Speaking of predictions. Jesus, or somebody, said the Internet was going to create a jolly wonderful world of interconnected, global democracy. The wisdom of crowds, hallelujah. Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" lists many examples of this. But he also stresses the importance of culture. I.e. it ain't just the tools that matter. A screwdriver heals in the hands of Hank Hill. In Bernard Goetz' hands, it might wind up in your skull.

So, Wikipedia is an example of self-correcting, self-emerging information based on a neural net of committed users. By the same token, a Wikipedia based on the shared philosophy of destroying Wikipedia is impossible.

I submit that the Internet is destroying the operating system of democracy. To be more precise, it's destroying the operating system of representative democracy in the United States.

I could offer specific examples, but that's too much like work. So I'll stick with analogy.

Me.

I am, for what it's worth, creative. In my brief experience in the cubicle world, I got my work done by an act of subterfuge. I could never really explain what I was doing to my Type A bosses. So I'd come up with a cover story. They were always convinced if I was more organized and didn't waste so much paper, I'd do a better job. They would go through my !@#$ trash to see if I was making too many photocopies. My response was to hide my trash.

I was fiercely proud about what I did. But I could never explain HOW I did it. My style of working was to hide my style of working. I'd be pursued by relentless micromanagers trying to nail me for wasting company resources. I got results. They didn't give a fuck. I WASN'T FOLLOWING PROCEDURE. And they lived for the day they could nail me for violating procedure and make my sorry ass hit the gate.

The more they supervised me, the worse my work became.

I think the same thing is happening to today's politicians. They've got a million Big Brothers going through their trash and they can't get anything done.