Monday, 30 Oct 2000

An update on the StarLink genetically engineered corn story: Seems the corn has (excuse the pun) cropped up in more consumer edibles, and over a million bushels of the corn are still unaccounted for. How to solve the problem? Seems someone is petitioning the EPA to “grant tempory food-use approval” for this corn so that there won’t be any more recalls or processing plants shut down. Also, while the crop was never approved for export, the USDA decided to let crops that might have been mixed with StarLink corn to be exported. While it is hard to find any fault with grain processors who have no way of knowing whether a given shipment of corn has been genetically modified or not, it does point out that our food-processing supply chain is not adequately prepared to deal with the issues raised by genetically engineered foods. Sane people wonder how a crop not meant for human consumption growing in field A was supposed to be kept isolated from a crop NOT meant for human consumption growing right next to it in field B. Given normal corn propogation methods and uncontrollable variables like wind and pollination, it’s hard to figure out what regulators were thinking when they let farmers growing crops intended for humans also grow similar appearing crops not approved for human consumption. Would it be too much to ask to at least have labels on the things we KNOW are genetically engineered? [story]

Monday, 30 Oct 2000

I wish someone would develop a functional natural language meaning parsing routine. The ones in widespread circulation at the present seem awfully rudimentary if askjeeves.com is any indication. I was trying to find an answer to the what I thought was a fairly straightforward question, e.g. “How do I change the task bar orientation in windows from vertical to horizontal?” What I got back was information about Barre, Vermont and Bisexuality. [try it] Apparently all it is doing is looking for keywords (e.g. “orientation”=bisexuality) and assuming I don’t know how to type (it ignored “task bar” and assumed I meant “Barre, Vt”) [update: 2000-12-01 Ask Jeeves now returns a much shorter list of results which does not list the Vermont links, is still pretty much evenly split between sites about Windows and sexual orientation.]

Tuesday, 10 Oct 2000

Freedom to publish information would no longer be in the control of sometimes oppressive governments or corporations according to the thinkers behind Publius,which they bill as a “Censorship Resistant Publishing System”.

Tuesday, 10 Oct 2000

In a really different twist on the file-sharing/royalty-payment conundrum currently plaguing the music and online worlds. Mojonation.com provides an encrypted file exchange network where people get paid for sending data and pay for receiving data, but the content itself is exchanged for “free”. Like fairtunes.com, a downloader can provide payment to the author/creator of the the content if s/he wants to. If you don’t want to wade through the self-descriptions on the site itself, Salon has a story on the founder and the site.

Tuesday, 10 Oct 2000

I learned a new word today “toyetic”. Apparently it is used in the movie industry to measure how well a film can be used to market toys - more commonly I guess called “product tie-in”. Not being in the industry I don’t hear these terms, I guess I am not that well read either because both online and print media giants like Time have published stories that discuss the phenom of “toyetics”.