>The blogs are spreading. We now have Lui, Ian, Martina and a group blog for IDC.
The big questions are: who will continue to write and who will continue to read and comment. I think blogs are a very interesting form of conversation. For me, I think it’s a way to get rid of excessive amounts of adrenalin, or, a way to say small nice things about the world we live in.
The last couple of days have been crazy. Mona, my wife, has been ill and I’m really worried about what’s going on. The local medics and hospital staff have been really nice, but we’re still not out of the woods. I’ve been trying to write a number of things, ranging from PhD-stuff, to admin stuff and research reports. At times, I’ve been so over-stressed so I’ve been trembling. Not good. Not good at all. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to have a normal life, whatever that is. But I’ve never had one. Only my life. And that’s pretty complicated. If life were easy, everybody would be doing it.
We watched a nice old Stanley Kubrick film this evening – Dr. Strangelove. It’s amazing how relevant the issues still are, despite the disappearance of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. The actor doing General Jack Ripper (!) looked very much like GWB (scary). Which brings me to my next thought.
So now we have an imagined War on Terrorism, which is a total oxymoron and lie. I’ve only had a single year of formal military training (about 28 years ago, and before that, a couple of years of voluntary study of air force stuff), but as far as I know you cannot fight a War on Terrorism. The latter is not localised to a country or territory. There are no declarations or protocols of conduct. No laws. Before terrorism, we (or rather they) had the problem of Guerrilla tactics. You can’t have a War on Guerilla[s]. It’s also an oxymoron. It’s insane. When will people of this lonely planet finally notice the lies we’re being fed through mega-media and start thinking (according to Ripper, above, the problem is Fluoridisation of drinking water, a Commie-plot to contaminate our clean bodily fluids – same idea as Kathy Synnot in the recent EU election ;-). We need to stop the oil-profiteering and energy-guzzling b****xes of Planet Earth. When I’m finished with the PhD, I definitely will spend some time on sustainable tech (and a wee bit on Music).
At the end of the day (perhaps 20 million years from now) Earth will finally be pretty Mostly Harmless (Thanks Douglas!). Humans (and a lot of other things) will probably be gone. Entropy wins. Still, if your lucky, the atoms, or in worst case the quarks, of your mind and body will still be somewhere in there 😉
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Mikael Fernstrom 
One Comment
>Your big questions raise some interesting points about blogging. There seem to be 3 or 4 different models for a weblog. The first is the personal “diary” blogging, where the author doesn’t really consider what they’re doing as publishing. They are really archiving their thoughts and ideas as a personal resource. The second type is the “listen-to-me” blog, where the author has a strong interest in something (an idea, a hobby, a place, whatever) and they want to communicate this passion to a wider audience. The third type is the “conversational” blog (which the wrath tends towards. This replaces email as a way of keeping in touch with people. All those cool links, strange pictures, film recommendations, book reviews that you might otherwise mail to someone…they suit the web medium much better than emails (which imho, should never contain html).The last type is the “group” blog, which in some sense replaces the mailing list as a way of communicating with a disparate group of people who share an interest. This has features of all the types mentioned above. It allows for the archival of useful ideas (and the possibility that they might be useful to others in the group), it (hopefully) communicates the passion that draws the contributors together, and it replaces email as a way of sharing things that are more naturally web based. This is what I hope will happen with the idc blog, assuming there is sufficient interest (and time!).It would be interesting to see if software evolves to cope more naturally with “type 1” blogs. I can see a time when they might not be “published” on the web, but rather made available to a small number of people (perhaps just one person) and integrated with email. Outlook definitely seems to be moving this direction, as a personal information organiser…with everything dated, meta-tagged, and searchable.As for the war on terrorism…well it’s the perfect type of war from a certain perspective. There are no rules. There’s no beginning or end. You can declare victory at any convenient point (like, say, in the run-up to an election). You can suspend all sorts of rights and blame it on the terrorists. If the economy goes down the tubes, blame the terrorists. The shadowy nature of the terrorists lends itself to a “with us or against us” attitude, that can be very useful in stifling dissent. After all, anybody could be a terrorist Their lack of a well-defined location means you can declare war on any country you feel like, for any reason.In this sense they are even better than the communists. You can use terrorists to cover any act of greed or political expediency. People are easier to control when they’re scared, so you invent “alert levels”. Any time your junta dips in the ratings, you goose the alert level a little. 24-hour “news” channels know that people watch more when they’re scared…and so they report your alert levels constantly.So, from a certain perspective, a War-on-Terrorism is the ideal war. GW is a lot smarter than people give him credit for.Well, enough ranting…I hope Mona is getting better.