recently, a disturbing thought spooked in my mind. in the actual debates about human genome project, genetic engineering and the like i always miss the question about the consequences for the long-time problematic relationship between human genders.
for aeons and still, the most important positions of society, science, politics, arts, philosphy and business are being occupied by men. the last female bastion is parturition to ensure propagation of mankind (as far as i can see it according to history, that's the only task men always granted women and doing so, they simultaneously could restrain them to a role as mothers at the margins of society). i consider this not as the constitutional arrangement of nature but as a status quo whose genesis i honestly do not feel able to analyze. i hardly can shape the present scenario very well.
regarding the current efforts in creating life the artificial way (guess what, yet another male-dominated field), wouldn't it be imaginable that the intention behind those efforts is purely to take over that last but probably most important disposition from the suspected female sibling?
in pretty oversimplyfied words (which might lack scientific proof but not good intuition), male behavior lacks a respect for creation in a sense that it tends to destroy for the sake of creativity. and men mostly tend to see women as sex objects, always willing to have intercourse, thereby inferior and in need for protection (a way of perception i do not wish to share, though).
the only exception of such disrespect for equally created individuals is that men indeed do respect maternity. their own mothers and the mothers of their children are sacred in a sense of being responsible for the most valuable personalities in a man's life: himself and his natural clone. which leads men still to feel jealous and insufficient regardless of all the power and influence they already gained.
but what if this respect decreases due to empowerment of procreation by the means of gene technology? do i have to fear that women will become modern slaves of lust or even an oppressed human underclass in a world ruled by male darwinism? is this another fatal development accompanying the already deeply discussed consequences of genetic selection, loss of human identity and drone production? or merely the other side of male paranoia?
and then i fell asleep drenched in cold sweat.
leni riefenstahl compilation: the wonderful, horrible life of leni riefenstahl, epinion about latter movie, leni riefenstahl and "tiefland", jodie foster playing leni riefenstahl?, interview on arte-tv, frieda grafe on the monography "die verführung des talents".
dave winer: "if there's a single thing that makes building apps in frontier special, it's the ease with which you can program databases. that innovation is already a dozen years old, and has yet to show up in any other programming environment, as far as I know."
helma is developed further, obviously.
kris is right: it's fun to poke in filepile's mp3 archives – finding instead of searching.
macintouch reports a cool way to avoid revealing one's e-mail address to spam spiders: encode the address as hexadecimal character entities. e.g. interface@p3k.org is encoded as
<ampersand/>#105;<ampersand/>#110;<ampersand/>#116;<ampersand/>#101;<ampersand/>#114;<ampersand/>#102;<ampersand/>#97;<ampersand/>#99;<ampersand/>#101;<ampersand/>#64;<ampersand/>#112;<ampersand/>#51;<ampersand/>#107;<ampersand/>#46;<ampersand/>#111;<ampersand/>#114;<ampersand/>#103;
simple, but efficient. and here's a quick rebol hack that does the encoding.
fax your mp (not mp3, dude!).
"sorry, faxing suspended due to lack of mps. on monday may 14th 2001 a royal proclamation announced the dissolution of parliament. until the general election on thursday june 7th you do not have a member of parliament. (although your ex-mp still gets paid. nice.) as there's no-one to receive your faxes we've turned the service off. we will be back and faxing as soon as possible after the election."
is it just me or did the bloggers forget about justin hall and his early efforts to provide a regular dose of references to net resources?
the question is always "who coined the term?" but i consider it more interesting who realized the idea. generally, it appears to me as if the so-called net pioneers were sent to almshouse already years ago.
however, sometimes they are still interviewed.
i did not check out the ibook's cd-rw drive, yet. so simply inserted a fresh recordable cd-rom and to my amazement shortly after a dialog appeared asking which format the cd-rom should be prepared for. excellent!
btw. the equation g3(500) = g4(400) seems to apply for tolerant macalculators.
reconnected, too: i am writing this at home on the new schneewice-book. ie. chello already changed the mac address in my account settings.
in a very egocentric sense, this was a very good day. i bought a logitech usb mouse, my first (and hopefully last) dvd-rom, the maltese falcon, and a package of recordable cds. the 256 megs additional memory are ready to be fetched from the store, too. but it was too late to get there before closing.
(shhh, we have to be very silent because the ibook hardly makes any noise. compared to the old wallstreet powerbook i finally can hear the traffic down at gumpendorfer strasse again!)
mmmh... relax... so calm...