Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Just this morning, I was thinking that I needed an accordion file to slip into my laptop bag. The GAMAGO gods heard my prayers and responded this afternoon with a handsome Accordion File that certainly beats manila. It is $10. GAMAGO's Accordion File
The Beastie Boys' Michael "Mike D" Diamond is part of an AT&T investor group seeking to put a net neutrality question on the shareholder ballot: "The shareholder resolution would recommend each company 'publicly commit to operate its wireless broadband network consistent with network neutrality principles,' the letter said. The companies should not discriminate based on the “source, ownership or destination” of data sent over their wireless infrastructure." (via Consumerist)
— Cory
Bret Victor was once a "Human Interface Inventor" for Apple, and was apparently key to the iOS/tablet efforts at the company. In this hour-long presentation to CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference), he delivers a stirring manifesto for interaction design and relates it to having a principled stand on technology and ethics. It's an extraordinary presentation, first for the dazzling technology on display, and second for the thoughtful way Victor connects it to a larger question of human ethics and life.
[Video Link] Adafruit's Circuit Playground looks like a major update to Collin Cunningham's earlier circuit design assistant app.
Circuit Playground simplifies electronics reference & calculation so you can have more fun hacking, making, & building your projects! This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad.
Decipher resistor & capacitor codes with ease
Calculate power, resistance, current, and voltage with the Ohm's Law & Power Calc modules
Quickly convert between decimal, hexadecimal, binary or even ASCII characters
Calculate values for multiple resistors or capacitors in series & parallel configurations
Store, search, and view PDF datasheets
Access exclusive sneak peaks, deals & discounts at Adafruit Industries All that, plus updates with additional features & enhancements.
"Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games so you can learn to code while you play with a Code Gun that shoots Javascript in Unity 3D." I was very impressed with the demo of Code Hero that Alex Peake showed me at Maker Faire last May. It's on Kickstarter now.
Ant sez, "Cory kindly posted about Dimensions, a 1920s/30s sci-fi drama
filmed in Cambridge, England, when we were in pre-production. At
the time we were trying to round up steampunk props for our main
character's workshop. We are incredibly excited to announce our U.S. premiere!
Dimensions screens on Saturday 18th February as the Closing Film
for the 37th Boston Science Fiction Film Festival." Here's the trailer.
Today Cartoon Movement launches the first monthly installment of Army Of God, an ambitious 100 page work of comics journalism by David Axe and Tim Hamilton focusing on the Lord's Resistance Army in the Congo, the people they've terrorized, and the people fighting back.
Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin shoots buildings around his town of Ghent and then mashes them up into impossible (and beautiful) structures he calls "Fictions."
Dujardin's website is a bit cumbersome (all Flash, all the time), but Freshome has a flat gallery of the photos.
"When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden."
Rudy Rucker has had an exhaustingly full life. He helped define cyberpunk with a series of novels beginning in the early '80s. He earned a Ph.D in mathematics and has taught computer science for over twenty years. He's written over thirty books, both SF and nonfiction focusing on computation, the fourth dimension, and infinity. In his new memoir, Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, he details these accomplishments, as well as their attendant travails.
You state in Nested Scrolls that, as a kid, you learned a lot about the craft of story-telling from comic books, specifically Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.
Yes, those Carl Barks comics were the first things I ever read that seemed truly unfiltered, with no traces of goody-goody grown-up lecturing mixed in. They were clever stories, really well designed, and Donald Duck was a true anti-hero: selfish, lazy, greedy, irascible, and not overly kind to his three nephews. I loved him as a boy, he was the kind of adult I could see myself becoming. And those comics told me it was okay to be like that. When I became a father I got reprints of the Carl Barks comics for our three children, and they of course enjoyed thinking of me as the bumbling Donald Duck, while they were the clever ducklings. In my own fiction, I'd say that I like writing about characters who aren't in any way idealized. People whom you can see as being like yourself. Another important thing about those old-school cartoons is that the characters in them are rubbery. Here I'm thinking particularly of the black-and-white 1940s and 1950s toons that I'd see on that weekly Cartoon Circus TV show in Louisville. I've always liked things that are curved and soft, as opposed to hard, rectilinear things. So when I began writing science-fiction about robots, I immediately found ways to make them snaky like Silly Symphony cartoons or like Dali's melting watches.
There are similarities to your favorite painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Bruegel's my main man. The one non-SF novel that I've published is a novelized version of Bruegel's life. I called it As Above, So Below. That's the book of mine that I give to, like, friends or relatives who say they can't possibly read SF. One of these days I'd like to write a life of Bosch as well. A first thing about Bruegel is that his style is very bright and poster-like. And I like my writing to be like that. Everything clear and easy to see. A second thing with Bruegel is that the characters in his paintings seem to be modeled on actual people. Nothing is idealized or stereotyped, it all feels real. This shades into a writing practice that I call transrealism -- where I try and base my fictional characters on people I've actually met, sometimes folding several people into one character. A third aspect of Bruegel is that his pictures evoke a sense of the divine nature of the physical world. Everything is alive. We're in paradise, if only we pay attention.
Julian Oliver's "Transparency Grenade" is a surveillance device shaped like a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, stuffed with network sniffers and other technology. It is intended to be hidden in smoke-filled rooms where secretive and corrupt meetings are taking place, so that all the material therein can be widely viewed.
Most importantly however it is the hyperbole and fear around containing these volatile records, of the cyber burglary, that increasingly yields assumptive logics that ultimately shape how we use networks and think about the right to information. Just as record companies claim billions in losses due to file sharing, the fear of the leak is being actively exploited by law makers to afford organisations greater opacity and thus control.
This anxiety, this 'network insecurity', impacts not just upon the freedom of speech but the felt instinct to speak at all. All of a sudden letting public know what's going on inside a publicly funded organisation is somehow 'wrong' -Bradley Manning a sacrificial lamb to that effect. Meanwhile civil servants and publicly-owned companies continue to make decisions behind guarded doors that impact the lives of many, whether human or other animal.
[Video Link] Neal Stephenson talks about "our society's inability to execute on big stuff, to get big stuff done. In the first two thirds of the 20th century we went from not believing that heavier-than-air-flight was possible to walking on the moon."
Solve for X is a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork. G+.
For thousands of years the imagination of storytellers has been a guiding light for people trying to change the world. In the last decade or two science fiction has almost fallen behind the work of technologists and entrepreneurs. For the sake of a more interesting tomorrow, we need to get the proverbial horse back out in front of the cart with our imagination professionals building a vision of the future to inspire the builders of the new world.
Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic "The Baroque Cycle" (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac.
Writing in The Atlantic, Megan McArdle analyzes the societal cost of requiring a doctor's visit to get a prescription for Sudafed, in order to make it harder to acquire materials used in fabricating meth. She makes a compelling case that, as bad as meth labs are, and as much as they cost society, cracking down on basic, useful medicine also entails horrendous expense.
But this is sort of a side issue. What really bothers me is the way that Humphreys--and others who show up in the comments--regard the rather extraordinary cost of making PSE prescription-only as too trivial to mention.
Let's return to those 15 million cold sufferers. Assume that on average, they want one box a year. That's going to require a visit to the doctor. At an average copay of $20, their costs alone would be $300 million a year, but of course, the health care system is also paying a substantial amount for the doctor's visit. The average reimbursement from private insurance is $130; for Medicare, it's about $60. Medicaid pays less, but that's why people on Medicaid have such a hard time finding a doctor. So average those two together, and add the copays, and you've got at least $1.5 billion in direct costs to obtain a simple decongestant. But that doesn't include the hassle and possibly lost wages for the doctor's visits. Nor the possible secondary effects of putting more demands on an already none-too-plentiful supply of primary care physicians.
Of course, those wouldn't be the real costs, because lots of people wouldn't be able to take the time for a doctor's visit. So they'd just be more miserable while their colds last. What's the cost of that--in suffering, in lost productivity?
Perhaps it would be simpler to just raise the price of a box of Sudafed to $100. Surely that would make meth labs unprofitable--and save us the annoyance of a doctor's visit.
"Large group of smiling business people. Teamwork." by Kurhan. Courtesy of Shutterstock
If you want to understand why Silicon Valley startups keep tripping into privacy-related PR disasters, you could not do better than reading this attack on online privacy from Silicon Alley Insider editor Matt Rosoff.
Each time [a data breach] happens, bloggers and privacy zealots scream and yell and pull their hair out. In some cases, the companies are forced to apologize and cancel the offending feature. Sometimes, a few politicians grandstand so they can look like they're solving real problems and maybe the government gets involved and forces the companies to change a little bit.
But these flaps had exactly zero effect on Facebook's and Google's business. No effect. None. Nada. User growth, engagement, revenue -- all kept going up without a blip. Normal people don't care.
By "normal" people, Rosoff means people like him, who must endure rather than hope for obscurity. But the assumptions clouding his rather privileged viewpoint expose themselves at once, as he embarks upon a classical dialogue between himself and a straw-man interlocutor angry at a hypothetical data breach.
More dominoes are falling in the global fight to kill ACTA -- Bulgaria and the Netherlands have joined Germany and many other EU nations in refusing to move further on the secretive copyright treaty that was negotiated without transparency, oversight, or civil society participation.
"I will table a proposal to the Council of Ministers to stop the procedure of Bulgaria's signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," Traikov said.
The decision means Bulgaria will not take any action concerning Acta before European Union member states come up with a unified position.
Meanwhile, the Dutch Lower House has backed a motion from the Green Left party which says the Netherlands should, for the time being, refrain from signing Acta, according to a report at Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
The RNW report says that the parliament is seeking clarity about whether the treaty threatens the rights and the privacy of internet users.
On a related note, Redjade submitteratored this video shot at Saturday's anti-ACTA march in Budapest.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
So. That happened.
Interesting tidbit for those of you too horrified to watch: Hissing cockroaches apparently give birth upside down with their lady parts up in the air.
Another thing I learned: Animals giving birth is apparently a fairly popular YouTube genre. Check out the sidebar for cats, snakes, and more cockroaches.
Bruegel's my main man. The one non-SF novel that I've published is a novelized version of Bruegel's life. I called it 
Most importantly however it is the hyperbole and fear around containing these volatile records, of the cyber burglary, that increasingly yields assumptive logics that ultimately shape how we use networks and think about the right to information. Just as record companies claim billions in losses due to file sharing, the fear of the leak is being actively exploited by law makers to afford organisations greater opacity and thus control.
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.