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.
Tag: Science & Technology
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.