2004-06-03

Everything becomes a computation

step right up

It's obvious these days that everything of any value to The Man is becoming a computation. This means your physical life will increasingly develop into new and further entrenched channels of your digital life, as this information age of ours progresses. The picture above is from a company that offers a new tool for livestock producers to better track each and every animal. It is important for them to have accurate tracking when there are outbreaks like mad cow disease, and to know the pedigrees of your different prize beasts and their progeny. It comes down to storing and analyzing biometrics. The biometrics game is centuries old, and examples are even found in the stories and legends of ancient cultures (think about Quetzalcoatl, basically this god's distinction is a primitive biometric: fair colored skin and hair). So yeah, we have a history of trying to encode life into things like DNA (amazingly there really is this holy grail code to life - that we discovered this past century!), so simple applications like monitoring the geneology of livestock could potentially unlock greater fundamental codes into a purer "essence" of life. Of course, that is the job of our modern physicists/mathematicians (if you noticed, DNA hasn't made us the "super-race" quite yet…), but if you were a cattle rancher in Greeley, Colorado (the home of this livestock retinal scanner company), wouldn't you want to get your hands on the code if you could? Hell, it sounds like a good sci-fi movie plot: cattle rancher unlocks genesis code to breed new Super-Saiyan Bovine of the Holy Tabernacle. Anyways, at least it is a dream that farmers can ruminate on for a good while, a dream which admittedly rivals the loftiest dreams of the mega-elite, intellectual, ivory tower thinkers… damn those ivory tower people! I bet they are afraid of retinal scanners too.

Really I just want retinal scanners and biometrics so I can stop having to use the same silly passwords for the computer. Passwords, mothers' maiden names, your SSN, and the name of your first stuffed animal are just no match for Herr Doctor's Double Helix!

  • OPTIBRAND
  • 0 Commentaries:

    Post a Comment

    << Home