Tag Archives: Science & Technology

04/12/08

Transcribed Marginalia on Librarything!

This is trippy. Librarything is hosting an index of annotations and marginalia in the books of famous individuals’ libraries. The linked example is of marginalia transcribed from John Adams’ library.

Sooner or later — like, maybe after I die of old age, but someday, anyway — this kind of index is going to be built right off the annotations that professional and amateur scholars, book-lovers, and others make in their electronic texts. They’ll be able to both annotate into, and upload annotations directly from, their reading interfaces. Online will be indexes with marginalia and notes and comments, and students will be able to choose those commenters based on things like their academic (or other) street cred, their rankings by past readers, and so on.

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04/10/08

Tech We Need

Boing-Boing reports: Biologist Rupert Sheldrake stabbed at lecture.

And to think I imagined, immediately, that it was some IDiot. But it was, apparently, a deranged visitor from Japan.

I seriously wonder whether it’s going to become easier, or harder, to pinpoint whether another person is a nutball or not as we get more deeply embedded into the Net in our daily lives — I mean, as the interfaces get more and more distributed to everywhere instead of just on little screens in front of us.

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02/16/08

Love Detector Phone Test and Voight-Kampff Job Interviews

So there’s a new service available in Korea through cell phone operator KTF that will supposedly analyze voice patterns to see whether a lover is honest, attentive, passionate, or whatever.

The first response most people have is one I share: yeah, right. As in, I doubt we’re quite at the point where such an analysis can reasonably be made from a single cell phone call.

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01/5/08

Ontarians 8% Stupider Than Rest of Canada

Via Canadian SF author Peter Watts’ blog, here’s a depressing factoid:

Ontarians 8% stupider than the rest of Canada. (And 2% stupider than Americans.)

That is, if we can equate stupidity with evolution-denial. And of course, we bloody well can. Yet again, Ontario leading the nation in the race to import the crappiest aspects of American culture to Canada.

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12/8/07

More on Exploiting Evolved Human Instincts and Cognitive Patterns

A post by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing titled “Neuroeconomics: sub-prime mortgages exploit a bug in our brains” reminded me of my own musings about how killer apps (and products) exploit basic evolved drives and factors in human psychology.

At The Frontal Cortex science blog, a fascinating explanation of the neurology of subprime mortgages. FMRI research shows that long-term decision-making takes place in a different part of the brain from short-term decisions — so when you offer someone a cheap two-year mortgage followed by 28 years of scorchingly high interest rates, the short-term side jumps in and overrides the sober long-term mind.

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11/29/07

On Derrick Jensen

Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy.

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06/15/07

“Junk” not junk

My friend and Clarion West classmate David emailed me a link to this article. How amusing, that the story titled “Junk” that I sold only a couple of weeks ago, to Nature, had an eerily familiar proposition, at bottom. Do I get to claim I “got one right,” even if it’s published after the news broke? I wrote it last winter!

But then, as David commented about his own suspicions, it’s long been imagined by some — me included — that the majority of the genome being “junk” is questionable. As I wrote to David:

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05/14/07

Facebook/Nonstandard

It seems to me that Facebook is a rather amazing little bit of social software. It allows one to find one’s links to others across all kinds of boundaries — having lost touch, having dropped out of contact, having moved to a new place.

However, the biggest limitation for a piece of software like this is that it’s monolingual. That means that many of my friends from Montreal, such as my francophone co-workers, are unlikely to enter into this particular social networking system. Those ex-students with whom I’m still in contact in Korea are also unlikely to do so, since, after all, there’s already an all-Korean version of this.

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04/14/07

All in a Day

  • I finished reading a really good book today. Happy happy.But you need to wait for my end-of-April reviews to hear more.
  • I am finally deep into reworking my Korean superheroes story. So far, it’s just small edits and collating the comments from my crit group — the comments I happen to agree with, anyway — but much of tomorrow and Sunday will be taken up with shoulder/digital-grindstone interfacing. After that, we’ll see.
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04/1/07

Hacking SK (Sky) Phones?

Anyone know anything about hacking an SK (Sky UM-7000 series) phone?

After a long search, I’ve discovered that:

  • Like every other website in Korea, it requires a Korean national ID, and the foreigner IDs don’t work.
  • The website could register me by some alternate means, but it’s a rigmarole involving me having a freaking “sponsor” — just so I can download software in order to access my own phone. She’s understandably leery about entering all her personal information into a site for this purpose, given how little respect is given the privacy of customers these days (especially here).
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03/14/07

Yi So-yeon

YiSoYeon image I figure as possible the biggest anglophone hard-SF geek in Korea, I should at least mention this on my blog.

The Korea Times reported on Yi So-yeon recently, who may be the first Korean astronaut. I don’t know the other guy, but having seen the podcasted video interviews with her on SeoulGlow (which are worth your while) I’m familiar with her and therefore rooting for her. Michael’s been covering the story a lot better than I have, and I’m a few months behind on it, but I wanted at least to note it.

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02/11/07

Mac vs. Windows vs. The Other Guy: Think Prophylactics and Full Potential

So this mailing list I’m on is caught up in one of its repeating discussion-obsessions.

The Mac fanatics are arguing the points of the Mac. The Windows users are responding, mostly in terms of how much better Windows is for gaming. I am reading it on my little Linux machine.

Outside my window, I can hear one of those bloody trucks that drives around selling stuff. You don’t have these in most countries. I really wish someone would make it illegal to disturb the peace that way… driving around the back roads and side streets with a loudspeaker attached to your tape deck, a repeating tape saying, “Fresh vegetables! Fresh vegetables! Come and get them, fresh and delicious! Carrots, potatoes, celery, tomatoes! Why not get some… Fresh vegetables! Fresh vegetables! Come and get them, fresh and delicious! Carrots, potatoes, celery, tomatoes! Why not get some…”

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02/3/07

Ms. Dewey

Ms. Dewey

is a really weird search engine… but, I think, is probably a decent model for the kind of thing we’ll be seeing as bandwidth pipes get wider and wider. But I hope they get a little more intelligent, so they’re not pestering me to enter new searches while I’m reading the results from the last one. And I hope the interface is a little more workable. I am vaguely impressed, even if it is an M$ product.

(via Hypersonic Beams)

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02/3/07

Wartime Rape, Seen Scientifically

I’ve been researching the Comfort Women issue (most recently, having completed George Hicks’ book on the subject), and ever since I read Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, and more recently, since I got into a discussion about rape in the comments section of this post, I’ve been thinking a lot about rape in terms of it being a human behaviour. It’s the theme of a story I’m slowly reworking these days, called “The Crystal Methuselah,” as well as one of my Clarion stories which I’d like to rework and send out in the next little while, a horror tale called “Comfort Woman”, and so I’ve devoted a fair bit of thought to the subject.

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01/4/07

Weird Medical Fact of the Day

Yes, another that I realized I hadn’t posted yesterday. In the course of explaining her feeling that anyone considering plastic surgery should be required to see a surgery, be present for one and really experience how gross it is to cut open a human body and fiddle with it, Lime mentioned a weird fact to me… it surprised me, but of course, I know rather little about the practicalities of the practice of modern medicine.

Anyway… apparently during operations, it stinks. It stinks something awful. You know what it stinks like?

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01/4/07

Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?

After reading Deepak Chopra’s discussion of Dawkin’s The God Delusion all I can conclude is that he’s an idiot who knows jack shit about science. OR, he’s a liar who is purposefully twisting the facts.

On some level, I sometimes feel like the biggest war going on right now is one that has been going on, constantly, for ages: between reason and superstition. Don’t get me wrong: I can respect and care about religious people. But it comes back to me, from the television program “Root of All Evil”, that some religionists are so quick to say to atheists, “Don’t be arrogant!” This strikes me as the height of arrogance, because, of all people, shouldn’t the theists who purport to know the demands and expectations of an invisible deity, who claim to know secrets of an afterlife that none have seen, who claim to know the truth of the world — shouldn’t the mystical conspiracy leaders be the ones accused of arrogance?

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