Pentagon opts to go for IPv6

According to this report, the Pentagon has decided that all its systems will have to be IPv6 compliant by 2008. That should push a lot of people off the fence. Long overdue IMHO.

Ellen Ullman goes mainstream

Well, at any rate the NYT has reviewed her novel, The Bug. Flattering review, too. Quote:

“Ullman has already established herself as an indispensable voice out of the world of technology in her memoir, ”Close to the Machine” (1997), and in her essays for Wired, Salon and Harper’s Magazine, where last year she published a remarkable essay titled ”Programming the Post-Human,” about robotics and the spark of life. She is neither a booster cum franchiser of the latest terms and gadgets nor a Luddite with an ax to grind — Ullman is a knowledgeable skeptic reporting from inside the walls of a holy city closed to most of us and, to top things off, she is an accomplished stylist.”

Coincidences

One of the great things about living and working in Cambridge is the way one unexpectedly runs into all kinds of interesting people. Yesterday, for example, I was invited to lunch in Churchill College, and an elderly but sprightly lady plonked herself down opposite me in the dining hall. It turned out she was Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames. She’s writing her memoirs and is here to look up family papers in the College’s Churchill Archive. We talked for a time about her parents, and about the public perception of them as distant and abstracted. She says their letters to one another about the children do not confirm this image. Nor, it seems, do her own memories. But this may have been because she was the only child not to be sent away to boarding school. She also found letters in which Winston and Clementine agonise about their son, Randolph.

As well they might: everyone I know who had anything to do with Randolph regarded him as a monster. There’s a famous story about Evelyn Waugh in this context. It seems that Randolph developed a tumour and was operated on to remove it. Waugh was sitting in White’s (a right-wing men’s club in London) when someone came in with the news that Randolph was going to be OK because the tumour had been found to be benign. “Ah”, said Waugh, “the wonders of medical science — to have found the only piece of Randolph that was not malignant — and remove it!”

UK government launches inquiry into risks and potential benefits of nanotechnology

Guardian report. “The government today launched an independent study into the benefits and risks of nanotechnology, the science of manipulating ultra-small particles.

The Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering have been commissioned to look at this emerging area of science, engineering and technology to see how it should be regulated as it develops. “

Interesting that public concern is growing. According to an earlier Guardian story, “Nanotechnology research is on the increase – growing in the US from £270m to £378m in the last five years, and in western Europe from £79m to more than £219m. But it is Japan that is really going all out to harness the new science, with a six-fold leap in spending from £75m to £470m.”

A Toronto Thinktank suggests that it may not be entirely daft to worry about the potential pitfalls ahead. Quote: “In a paper published in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology, Canadian researchers, from the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB), claim that although the research into extremely small devices is still in its early stages and most applications may be decades away, it is already arousing alarm about people’s privacy and security.

Hailed as the first major scientific revolution of the 21st century, nanotechnology will make possible invisible microphones, cameras and tracking devices. And although it holds out hope of cheap, pollution-free production, little has been done to assess possible impacts on the environment when nano-materials are released. “

Wonder if any of them have read Michael Crichton’s Prey?