I’m subscribed to a couple of hundred feeds over at Newsgator, but I have been seriously, seriously behind on nearly all of them — including the feeds of some close friends. I was just overwhelmed over the past year or so, and fell behind on everything. Anyway, in the past few days I chopped the items in the feeds from over 10,000 to just about 800 at present. That’s not bad, and I’m sure I’ll have to cull some more feeds and drop things I’m not reading, but if I can get it to 200-300 items a day, I’ll be …
Tag: Science & Technology
XY Column Installment Up.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned my column installment about the sociobiology of the Internet Troll a few weeks ago. The column was “inspired” (or at least, my thoughts about the problem of Troll scum on the Internet were inspired) by recent experience. It’s up now, and you can read it over at Cahoots.
Props to Carl Sagan
(I mean, for something more than being the guy who made my high school physics class interesting. We watched some video and I was like, “Hey, this is that The Dragons of Eden guy!” Or for being a great science-popularizer.) I’m reading the novel he wrote, Contact, right now, and despite the obvious criticisms many have made — such as that the novel is the postmodern response to the Femi Paradox: if there are no aliens, mankind shall have to invent them — there are a few things that are pretty striking about the first third (or so) of the …
I’m Voting…
… well, I’m not. As far as what I’ve been told, I’m not allowed to vote because I’ve been expatriate too long. Which is bloody stupid, but it’s what I was told during the last national Canadian election. (If you know different, please tell me!) But this is amusing and very interesting, and so are the Mac ad ripoff political spots here. I’m sure there are similar things on the right, though I wonder how much mass appeal is possible given the obvious disadvantages of the Right agenda. Still, the thing to remember is, we’ve only had an internet less …
The Day the Ruling Party’s Website Went Offline
Why was this image placed on the website of the ruling political party’s website? Why was some hacker logged on there as an admin, and responding to all commenter’s complaints with the same phrase: “Myung Bak is asleep!” What could possess anyone to do something so foolhardy? That’s the question I’m trying to answer in this post. It takes a while to get to, but I hope the read is worth it.
It Worked
If you’re a Boing-Boing reader, no point in trying — you know what’s in this video and it won’t work. But if you aren’t, then watch this video once, paying careful attention to how many times the balls are passed between people. Count ’em up. Make sure you get the exact number of passes. Here’s the video. Then click and see what to do next. DON’T read this until you’ve counted up the exact number of passes.
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 …
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. The scary thing is that to use the advantage, we’d have to be giving up …
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. But that’s not such an interesting observation. I mean, someday we doubtless will be at that point. We’ll be able to analyze voice prints (and other peripheral sound, like breathing patterns, for example) and compare …
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.