May 2008
21 posts
“Damn you Twitter! Once again, you’ve failed me for the last time!”
– Me, on my inability to give-up the unstable mistress.
Monkeys Control a Mechanical Arm With Their... →
mills: This is actually an utterly fascinating article, but I freely admit that I’m posting it only because it has the most hilarious title I’ve ever seen on the NYT. I’m surprised it wasn’t written by CNN.com staffers.
Two Days, No Internet
This is no accomplishment for the ages, but since I purchased an iPhone, it has become an increasingly unlikely event. Given the horror stories of international data-roaming fees, I let frugality trump my need for always-connectedness while spending the weekend in Montreal. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. On the other hand, I’m not sure what I gained from it. I had one less...
Stop Thinking, Start Knowing: a Glimpse into our...
I play an interesting and scary game with my friends. When one of us asks “Who was that Actor?”, or wonders about “When did [some event] occur?”, or any kind of question with a factual answer, I call “Full stop, bring out the iPhone!” This takes the ‘wonder’ out, and that’s the point. We’re living in a world where this information is...
WatchBen, Jace & I spent the afternoon ‘trap shooting’, which is apparently shooting corn-based clay pigeons. So while we didn’t end up reducing the trap population any, we had a lot of fun blowing orange discs to high heaven. Update: Sorry, the Vimeo transcoding made the pigeons really hard to see. This particular round consisted of 5 shots @ 5 different stations/angles, with the...
Games With a Purpose (GWAP) →
joelaz: Simple, fun games that pair random strangers to solve tasks like tagging photos and categorizing music. Players enjoy a game while the data that’s collected is used for other purposes that benefit… Luis von Ahn is one smart guy. For those of you that caught the “Cognitive Heatsink” video on my blog a few days ago, GWAP should make a lot of sense in that context. Worth...
The Metric Revolution
nrbd: I propose that we all start using the Metric System for units and Celsius for temperature. Cars already have km/h markings, we drink from 2-litre bottles of soda and measure drugs and the nutritional content of food in grams. Converting to Celsius is as easy as pressing a button on my iPhone. The majority of the world, save a handful of countries, switched decades ago. Fuck the government,...
Watchthakker: Fascinating talk by Joshua Klein about the intelligence of crows, including a clip showing a totally untrained crow using a tool. Early in the talk, he mentions synanthropic animal species: that is, animals like rats, crows, and cockroaches that have adapted to survive and even thrive in human-based ecosystems. He makes a great point about these species: ”they’ve become extremely...
Dumbification and the science of Engagement
PR prodigy & digital renaissance girl, Amanda Mooney, points us this morning in the direction of a new book, “The Dumbest Generation”. In it, Mark Bauerlein argues that the kids are trading enrichment for entertainment, and the Internet is to blame. My gut reaction is that this is both true and misleading. (I have yet to read the book, but before you take me to the coals, Amanda...
Friend Portability? Bah, Brightkite & Twitter FTW.
There’s a lot of hullaballoo around open standards, and portable data in general. The tech elite complain to each other about the walled-garden nature of Facebook, and laude Google’s Open Social as a step in the right direction. They say ‘the data is yours!’, that the problem is it’s locked away by evil companies, and the solution is for everyone to cooperate on open...
100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in... →
Sadly, I find myself guilty of a number of these. Yikes!
WatchClay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus, via John Eckman & Anand Thakker
“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of...”
– John Milton 