Saturday, May 28, 2005
The Floating Head of TImothy Leary
"Many people do not realize that after Timothy Leary's death in 1996, Leary's body was spirited away by freedom-loving entities from a parallel dimension, but his head was captured and subjected to a massive array of insidious CIA experiments before it escaped in 2001. His head is now the picture of vicious psychedelic insanity, suspended by little rockets where its neck once was. Until now, the existence of Leary's head has been a closely guarded secret, as the CIA hoped it could eventually recapture Leary's head for use as a weapon against terrorism. But now, it has become clear that the CIA's plan has horribly backfired, as these excerpts from the LiveJournal of the floating head of Timothy Leary demonstrate." /Erowid Columns : eScottology/
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Smart Drugs and Other Steps to a Better Brain
"It doesn't matter how brainy you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them." /New Scientist/
ClearChannel sets up fake anti-ClearChannel station
"Clear Channel has set up a fake pirate radio station in Akron, Ohio, which it's using to hurl insults at other Clear Channel stations. Radio Free Ohio has feigned overthrowing Ohio's media monopoly by bleeding its broadcasts into local Clear Channel stations... presumably, it's all part of a marketing campaign for a new CC 'alternative.''" /Boing Boing/
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Charles Stross' Tough Guide to the Singularity
Charles Stross: "This is the ToughGuide to the SIngularity. The SIngularity is a hot topic right now among ScienceFictionWriters who are trying to write SingularitySf, and in writing this guide I hope to help you learn more about the SIngularity, its LOcation, its ORigins, how to TRanscend, and, oh, UpLoading, ArtificialIntelligence, NanoTechnology, PostHumans, and stuff like that." /Singularity!/
Bill Gates want you to evolve!
Bill Gates on the New World of Work: "(I)nformation-worker software needs to evolve. It's time to build on the capabilities we have today and create software that helps information workers adapt and thrive in an ever-changing work environment. Advances in pattern recognition, smart content, visualization and simulation, as well as innovations in hardware, displays and wireless networks, all give us an opportunity to re-imagine how software can help people get their jobs done." /Executive E-Mail/
Monday, May 23, 2005
Singapore, Dakinis, & High Priests
"Timothy Leary was the golden boy of modern psychology. Noted Harvard professor, and keeper of the established patterns... 'I discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil, all exist inside my body, outside my mind'." /Thornton's Guerilla_Blog/
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Dozens of Markets of One
"Blogsite is atypical because it provides filter patterns - a mechanism for creating custom blogs that are subsets of your complete blogs... Filter patterns work with blog item titles, summaries, body content, and keywords (tags), and it also supports logical operations such as and, or, and not. This provides a significant advantage over categories because categories do not support add-hoc context assembly." /Dozens of Markets of One/
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Twelve Ways to Think Differently
"Twelve methods that will exercise parts of your brain that rarely get it, and make you more creative and better able to understand the world." /blog.dshin.net/
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Inventing Our Evolution
"Traditionally, human technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment, resulting in, for example, clothing, agriculture, cities and airplanes. Now, however, we have started aiming our technologies inward. We are transforming our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities and our progeny. Serious people, including some at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, consider such modification of what it means to be human to be a radical evolution -- one that we direct ourselves. They expect it to be in full flower in the next 10 to 20 years." /Washington Post/
Saturday, May 14, 2005
SciFi2Now: Subvocal Cell Phone Calls
In his remarkable novel Eastern Standard Tribe, multigenius Cory Doctorow describes a near-future of circadian-synchronized conspirancies, homebrew lobotomies and subvocalized cell phone calls. Apparently NASA thinks the last of these ideas has potential (NASA producing something useful might be the most amazing part of this whole story!): "How do you talk to someone without opening your mouth? Psychics call it telepathy. NASA refers to it as subvocal speech. Scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have developed a system of tiny sensors that read nerve signals in the throat that control speech. You may not make a sound when, say, you read silently, but your nervous system is buzzing with activity. Recently, they used the system to make the first subvocal cell phone call." /TheFeature/
Thursday, May 12, 2005
The Significance of "Social Software"
"Social software represents a new generation of social technology development - a generation that is dependent on moving beyond the laboratory and into mass culture... By allowing people to easily stumble upon the work of others, media sharing services have prompted new ways of organizing information and playing with the intention of producing media. These advancements complicate critical theoretical ideas about the nature of the public(s), the role of relationships in sharing, and the collective desire to organize information." /Many-to-Many/
Statistically Improbable Phrases
"Discover the hidden transexual tie-in to Da Vinci Code. Take 'Corporal Mortification' to Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, take 'million pesatas' to The Blind Man of Seville, take 'sight lesson' to Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary." /O'Reilly Radar/
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Social Networks that Work
"I want to use Russell's question about the 'real use' of LinkedIn as a window into what I think is a profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term 'social network' by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchananin the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as 'a map of the relationships between individuals' Basically I'm defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call 'object centered sociality'." /Smart Mobs/
Friday, May 06, 2005
Increasing Intelligence
"Average IQ scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades... And the climb has continued, with more recent studies showing that the rate of IQ increase is accelerating." /Wired/
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Bionic Retinas
"Developed by researchers from the University of Southern California and the Doheny Eye Institute, the artificial retina pairs a tiny electronic eye implant with a video camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses. The implant, a four-by-four grid of electrodes, connects to damaged photoreceptors -- rods and cones -- on the patient's retina. The electrodes stimulate the photoreceptors, which transmit signals to the brain through the optic nerve." /Wired News/
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Speaking of Info-Overload...
Donald Norman: "Listeners cannot absorb too much information at once. Talks should be limited to getting across just a few critical points. The goal is to get the listener intersted enough to explore the subject in more depth on their own, perhaps by reading, perhaps by conversation" /In Defense of PowerPoint/
Info-Overload and IQ
"Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist King's College London,... asked 80 volunteers to carry out problem-solving tasks, first in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with emails and phone calls. Despite being told to ignore the interruptions, the average IQ of the volunteers dropped by about 10 points." /New Scientist/
Monday, May 02, 2005
Welcome to 'Minority Report' Advertising
"At the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco last week, advertising experts contemplated a variety of approaches, ranging from round-the-clock automated ad tracking to simply reducing the number of ads per show, that could make it easier for advertisers to reach an increasingly fragmented viewing public.
To measure the impact of ad campaigns, VNU and Arbitron are developing an experimental program called Project Apollo... will require participants to carry a pager-sized device that records all advertising messages to which its wearer is exposed. Participants will also record everything they buy, so that advertisers can figure out exactly which messages made an impact." /Wired News/
To measure the impact of ad campaigns, VNU and Arbitron are developing an experimental program called Project Apollo... will require participants to carry a pager-sized device that records all advertising messages to which its wearer is exposed. Participants will also record everything they buy, so that advertisers can figure out exactly which messages made an impact." /Wired News/
Solipsis
Solipsis, an attempte to approximate Neal Stephenson's Metaverse, is "a public virtual territory. The world is initially empty and only users will fill it by creating and running entities. No pre-existing cities, habitants nor scenario to respect...
"Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can find here a good place to have fun!" /Solipsis/
"Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can find here a good place to have fun!" /Solipsis/
