Illegal Immigration: There's an App for That

From a group calling themselves Electronic Civil Disobedience comes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a simple mobile application intended to aid and abet border-crossers from Mexico to the United States.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

Reality Is Imagined

The curious interplay between our imagination and external reality gives credence to the argument that the struggles over the mental environment are the future of activism. By protecting our mental environment we change external reality more quickly than any number of direct actions. But to make such an argument in today’s materialist, secular and scientific world requires the courage to imagine a different way of thinking.

Three hundred and seventy years ago, René Descartes sat down in a comfortable chair, with a candlestick on his table and his feet warmed by a fire. Closing his eyes, he gave free reign to his imagination. “What can I know for sure,” he wondered, “if I doubt everything?”

Modern philosophy began in this moment, with Descartes leading us through a series of thought experiments in which the rejection of all dubious knowledge leads him to discover the only knowable fact, famously expressed as “cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am. The freedom to imagine and to doubt all conventional wisdom and traditional truths was, thus, the first step in building our modern world-view.

Cosmic pattern to UK tree growth

Tree rings
Cosmic record

The growth of British trees appears to follow a cosmic pattern, with trees growing faster when high levels of cosmic radiation arrive from space.

Researchers made the discovery studying how growth rings of spruce trees have varied over the past half a century.

As yet, they cannot explain the pattern, but variation in cosmic rays impacted tree growth more than changes in temperature or precipitation.

The study is published in the scientific journal New Phytologist.

You have the right to broadband - in Finland

You have the right to broadband-in FinlandFinland, the land of reindeer and hockey, will soon be the land of broadband for all as well.  The Finnish government has made broadband internet action a right, not a privilege or a luxury, and says every citizen will be legally entitled to such a connection by July 2010. 

Initially, the connection will be 1 Mb but will be ramped up to 100 Mb by 2015.  This will make Finland the first country in the world to make broadband access a legal right for its citizens.  The move will hopefully move other countries to make similar laws.  France has gone so far as to declare internet action a basic human right but so far has not made it a law.

Conquering the Demons from the Holocaust

Each night after falling asleep, the demons keep coming back. They personify the millions of victims of the Second World War; infants, adolescents, young men and women, and the elderly who suffocated in the gas chambers or were burnt or shot or who starved to death. The terrible pictures return in the dreams of the survivors and the survivors keep re-experiencing the tragedy over and over.

Despite the fact that over sixty years have passed since the war, the enormous impact of Holocaust Trauma upon the survivors becomes even more apparent, because for them, the passage of time has made it even more difficult to cope.

via hnn.us