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 …
Tag: Science & Technology
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. My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I …
Why Diamonds? Evolution, Instinctual Niches, Advertising, and the Killer App…
Editorial Note (7 March 2015): This post has been edited from its original form. Basically, the original post triggered a year of rampant, but off-and-on, trolling and discussion derailing (some of it under bizarre pseudonyms, a lot of it passive-aggressive, some of it quite lunatic) by the person whose own blog post prompted the thoughts here. It was bewildering, and not fun. In the end, I decided to negotiate a peace with the nut: I’d erase the evidence of his crazyass trolling, and he’d take down ridiculous slander he’d posted elsewhere. Despite not liking that — I don’t enjoy helping people be nasty with impunity — …
Things For Looking
Via the flea king, a funky video on the inner lives of cells. (Though I’d love to see an annotated version.) And via Ellen Datlow, very cool book art. (I like it, anyway. Lime’s not impressed.)
“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: Of course, there were people …
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, …
Doctors to the Dead
You know, I just wrote a story eerily lime like this… but with zombification, instead of proper rescusciation: Docs Change the Way They Think About Death Via Fragment of the Day
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. I spent an hour this evening with a tiny class of mine, discussing the first page-and-a-half of the graphic novel V for Vendetta with my students, kind of …
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). The necessary …
Yi So-yeon
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. One of the odd things I’ve noticed …