Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Utopia and the Interwebs

A very interesting piece by Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy called Think Again: The Internet, where he argues that the Internet has not ushered in world peace or done many of the things that it was supposed to. My instinctive reaction to the piece as a self-described Net evangelist is "hell, no". But when I read the article through he's made good points and qualified most of the negativity. I think the problem is with perception - the Internet is like any other technology in that it can have an impact, but it can't do miracles (though the real-time nature of Net is miraculous enough for me).

Perhaps this is a good time to pimp (again!) my article in the Times of India, Shackling the Net. This is in the context of Internet censorship, but there's definitely some overlap.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Here Comes the Sun

Just...wow.

This is from NASA's latest telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

More pictures at NASA's photostream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/sets/72157623903514852/, along with some awesome videos.