CyberMouse Thursday, October 07, 2004: Here are three news items which have something in common. What do they have in common? See you on Tue. and we will talk about it. You should put your thoughts on your Blog about the three items as well. Clark ALL-IN-ONE MEMORY CARDS Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brands, is now developing memory cards that can be used for a variety of purposes -- from making cashless payments to opening locks. In Japan, people are already using smart cards to board commuter trains, and cell phone models enable users to buy drinks from vending machines, pay restaurant bills and play games at a Tokyo arcade. Matsushita's smartSD Card features 128-megabytes of memory, compared with Sony's FeliCa smart cards, which have only 32 kilobytes of storage. The enhanced Matsushita model will enable users to download movies or music and provide secure storage for documents, says Matsushita director Masaki Akiyama. (AP 7 Oct 2004) ***** FLASH CARD "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." (Barbara Tuchman) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: COPIES OF COPIES In his new book on Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine, David Owen writes: "Copying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language, the device by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. We are distinct from chimpanzees because speech, through its irrepressible power of reproduction, multiplied our thoughts into thinking. "The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets, they exponentially extended the human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made thinking permanent, portable, and endlessly reproducible. "Civilization has evolved at the speed of duplication. One mark in clay became two; two became four; four became eight. Like all doubling, copying accumulates slowly at first but compounds. Less than a millennium ago -- forty centuries after the Sumerians -- a single literate polyglot theoretically could have read every book in the world; today, copied language constitutes so much of the intangible infrastructure of existence that we consciously register only glimpses of the shadow of its shadow. A newsstand in Manhattan contains more duplicated text than did the legendary Library of Alexandria. "The earliest written documents were simple tallies: so many animals, so much grain. For centuries, that was all the writing in the world. Last week, a small plastic latch broke off my clothes dryer. I copied the number molded into its side and searched for it on Google. Less than a second later, my computer screen filled with a list of suppliers all over the country, with links to their inventories and their prices, along with half a dozen portals into a galaxy of intricately cross-referenced self promotion. Behind the copied words on the screen lay invisible sentences of ones and zeros, and behind the ones and zeros lay a babel of electrical impulses and magnetic fields: the ultimate modern repository of replicable meaning. The world we live in -- as distinct from the world we live on -- is made of supplicated language. We build our lives from copies of copies." *** [See for David Owen's "Copies In Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine" -- or use RedLightGreen.com from our friends at RLG to explore what's available in your favorite libraries. Note: We donate all revenue from our book and media recommendations to adult literacy programs.] Unknown // 4:28 PM ______________________ Sunday, October 03, 2004: Your Blogs should be set up and ready to go. Your first blog should be three or four sentences welcoming people to your blog and telling them something about yourself and what you are interested in and like to do. Longere is better here so that a few paragraphs would also be OK. Clark Unknown // 5:10 PM ______________________
Here are three news items which have something in common. What do they have in common? See you on Tue. and we will talk about it. You should put your thoughts on your Blog about the three items as well. Clark ALL-IN-ONE MEMORY CARDS Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brands, is now developing memory cards that can be used for a variety of purposes -- from making cashless payments to opening locks. In Japan, people are already using smart cards to board commuter trains, and cell phone models enable users to buy drinks from vending machines, pay restaurant bills and play games at a Tokyo arcade. Matsushita's smartSD Card features 128-megabytes of memory, compared with Sony's FeliCa smart cards, which have only 32 kilobytes of storage. The enhanced Matsushita model will enable users to download movies or music and provide secure storage for documents, says Matsushita director Masaki Akiyama. (AP 7 Oct 2004) ***** FLASH CARD "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." (Barbara Tuchman) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: COPIES OF COPIES In his new book on Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine, David Owen writes: "Copying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language, the device by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. We are distinct from chimpanzees because speech, through its irrepressible power of reproduction, multiplied our thoughts into thinking. "The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets, they exponentially extended the human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made thinking permanent, portable, and endlessly reproducible. "Civilization has evolved at the speed of duplication. One mark in clay became two; two became four; four became eight. Like all doubling, copying accumulates slowly at first but compounds. Less than a millennium ago -- forty centuries after the Sumerians -- a single literate polyglot theoretically could have read every book in the world; today, copied language constitutes so much of the intangible infrastructure of existence that we consciously register only glimpses of the shadow of its shadow. A newsstand in Manhattan contains more duplicated text than did the legendary Library of Alexandria. "The earliest written documents were simple tallies: so many animals, so much grain. For centuries, that was all the writing in the world. Last week, a small plastic latch broke off my clothes dryer. I copied the number molded into its side and searched for it on Google. Less than a second later, my computer screen filled with a list of suppliers all over the country, with links to their inventories and their prices, along with half a dozen portals into a galaxy of intricately cross-referenced self promotion. Behind the copied words on the screen lay invisible sentences of ones and zeros, and behind the ones and zeros lay a babel of electrical impulses and magnetic fields: the ultimate modern repository of replicable meaning. The world we live in -- as distinct from the world we live on -- is made of supplicated language. We build our lives from copies of copies." *** [See for David Owen's "Copies In Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine" -- or use RedLightGreen.com from our friends at RLG to explore what's available in your favorite libraries. Note: We donate all revenue from our book and media recommendations to adult literacy programs.] Unknown // 4:28 PM
Your Blogs should be set up and ready to go. Your first blog should be three or four sentences welcoming people to your blog and telling them something about yourself and what you are interested in and like to do. Longere is better here so that a few paragraphs would also be OK. Clark Unknown // 5:10 PM
