Right now Jaffna is under effective siege, cut off via A9 (road) and sea. I’m not going to dwell on the specifics so much. The A9 was opened under the cease-fire but now it’s closed. The reasons are twofold, one is that the LTTE collects millions of dollars in tolls from the road. Two is that the LTTE has been blowing shit up in Colombo and Galle. Explosive people things and people move down the A9, hence. Unfortunately, food always moves up and down the A9. And ordinary people who just want to get out. Hence hence. Trouble. In fact the peace talks broke down over this point, and the fact that the talks had no point. I’m not going to address this issue cause it’s a motherfucking bramblebush, but rather the general drift of the thing. I’ve been reading this book that describes the nature of modern conflict. PM Barnett describes the conflict as this age as not being ‘Democracy vs Terrorism’ or ‘Islam vs West’ but rather as ‘Connectivity vs Disconnectivity’. I think there may be a better word for that.

Google is getting smarter and smarter every day and it’s coming closer to the Holy Grail of AI – natural language processing. Google can already spell better than I can – and it doesn’t hesitate to correct me. Also, it has a rudimentary historical knowledge. These are the results from Osinga’s Google History project. I asked it to guess the year of Kennedy’s death:

I found this data on zeropaid.com Peer2Peer Networks January 24, 2004 Network Users: 9,009,263 P2P Networks January 11, 2003 Network Users: 6,415,653 P2P Networks April 11, 2002 Network Users: 2,224,289

This is the Map of the Internet taken from the perspective of a single computer. It’s done by the Opte.org project. I read about it in the New Scientist. “Each colour on this Opte map represents a region; North America, blue; Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa, green; Latin America, yellow; Asia Pacific, red; Unknown, white. (Image: Opte.org)” [...]

Nanofibers are tiny wires. They conduct electricity really well. Neurons are tiny cells. They conduct electricity really well. “… nanotubes may already have been around for more than a century. A US patent granted in 1889 to two British men reveals how to make them using marsh gas better known these days as methane. The [...]

Skype is free phone calls. Voice Over IP. Skype users can talk over the Internet. For free. It’s pretty sweet, I’m going to get a 15$ headset and see if I can call Sri Lanka. Tha sent me the link to the New York Times article Skype was featured in. It’s by the original programmers [...]

been reading this book Nexus, by Mark Buchanan, which ThaTha sent me. He’s talking about the Math of “small-world graphs,” a mathematical theory that can describe Networks. Here’s a copyright violation, I mean Free Speech. Social Networks turn out to be nearly identical in their architecture to the World Wide Web, the network of Web [...]

It was my Birthday, then school starts, hundreds of people I know got back into town, People started offering me McGill Web jobs, and, yeah. I’ve been busy. My voicemail is clogged and I miss calls.. and I don’t mind. Justin is uber-social and he told me that’s just how it is. I just have [...]

Walking around Campus looking for a hamburger. Then I found one. It made me happy. Ran into this hot Iraqi girl I met last year. Her sister & I were speaking Pro-War on this panel. Sister was hot too. An Iraqi girlfriend is the must-have fall accessory! I’m kidding, but Iraqi stock is going up [...]