John’s Blog-o-Rama

I have a new favorite Linux distro: Ubuntu. I installed it on one of my desktop systems a few weeks ago, and today I just installed it on my laptop, and I have to say that I’m very impressed. It’s a very nice, simple Linux distro that really is “Linux for Human Beings.” The installer was very simple and easy to use: it has one install CD that asks a minimal number of questions, and installs most of the packages off the web. The management and configuration tools are also very clean and easy to use, much more so that Red Hat or Debian. Since its based on Debian, Synaptic is used for package management, including installing additional packages. Overall, I think any new Linux user could easily install Ubuntu without knowing anything about the OS. I think I’ll recommend this distro to others in the future.

Found an interesting article about the possibilities of human evolution on MSNBC. The article breaks the possibilities into five categories:

• Unihuman - through reproduction, all races merge into one race
• Survivalistian - post-apocalyptic humans
• Numan - genetically-engineered humans to add capabilities or remove limitations
• Cyborg - man/machine combinations
• Astran - re-engineered humans for space travel and to inhabit new worlds

These are all very interesting possibilities, and certainly all of them *could* happen, but some are more likely than others. I have no doubt that two of them will happen in parallel: Cyborg and Numan. Both are already in the works, such as bionic eyes, bionic ears, and prosthetic limbs, and all of the genetic engineering work going on with animals. I really believe that these two together are the future of humanity over the next several centuries. Astran is a long-term possibility that I also believe will happen eventually. Unihuman is an interesting concept, but I really don’t see that ever happening completely, and let’s just hope that Survivalistian never comes.

This article has really piqued my interest in evolution…I’m going to have to start studying it again. Seems like you need to know more about where we’ve come from if you’re going to influence where we’re going.

It’s FINALLY time for the final Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith. I enjoyed the first two movies, even though they weren’t particularly well acted or directed. However, if you realize what they’re actually about, which is the rise to power of Palpatine and how he pulls strings behind-the-scenes, they’re actually very interesting. That being said, ROTS has a chance to be the best Star Wars movie so far. It should pretty much tell itself, and I don’t really see how Lucas could possibly screw it up.

For the first two movies, I pretty much read all of the spoilers on the Internet, and even read the Episode 2 book before I saw the movie. This time, however, I’ve avoided all of that so that the movie will be somewhat of a surprise, even though I generally know what will happen. As good as the trailers were, the movie should be awesome.

In a related story, I came across the Darth Vader blog recently. Whomever the writer is, the person does an excellent job of blending story-telling, humor, and Star Wars knowledge into a compelling read. Every Star Wars fan should check it out.

Over the last several weeks there have been a number of articles focusing on new “cyberbonic” (my word for it) techologies:

• A robotic suit controlled by electrical signals detected on the skin by sensors
• a non-acoustic sensor that detects speech without sound by picking up the changes in capacitance in the vocal cords
• bionic eyes that will allow the blind to see

R&D into technology used to remove people’s limitations or give new capabilities really seems to be picking up steam, and I believe this is the future of technology. Technology is being “personalized”, meaning that it is becoming an integral part of the normal functioning of people’s bodies. Over the coming decades, I see the development of a “cyberbonic system” (system in the sense of the cardiovascular or nervous system), where technology and humanity are more tightly integrated, so that we can fully reap the benefits or machines and computing. These are some of the first steps toward that realizatoin.