Pablo Defendini RSS

Here’s an oldie but a goodie. I’d read this before, but came across it again last night while reading the comments on a BoingBoing post. Charles Stross on the future of history, the future of lifelogging, and the future of privacy. Utterly fascinating stuff.

EDIT: And by ‘Tuesday’, I mean ‘Wednesday’, of course. Slow down, week! I’m not done with you yet!

Wait till they put this in glasses, and combine it with cheap, wearable computing devices… Imagine walking down the street and getting real-time contextual info about the people, buildings, landmarks, shops, etc. you see. Fantastic.

Yesterday Liz and I cut out early from work (shhhhh.) to catch the Dave Eggers-curated exhibit at apexart, Lots of Things Like This. It was a short, fun little show featuring humorous combinations of words and pictures (or ‘cartoons and prints’, to the less pretentious among us) by people such as David Mamet, Shel Silverstein, Ralph Steadman, R. Crumb, and Art Speigelman, among others. It was a wonderfully funny, precious, and well-put-together show, precisely what one expects from Eggers and co.

Lex caught up with us at the gallery, and we then made our way to Union Hall in Park Slope, where we finally caught one of their Secret Science Clubs. Up on stage was Dr. Wallace Broecker, Columbia professor and author of Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat–and How to Counter It. Dr. Broecker spent some time talking about his research into climate change, and his opinions about what we could do about the situation, on a large, pan-national scale. No compact fluorescent light bulb initiatives here: the man proposes taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and ‘burying’ it in saline aquifers, or the deep sea, among other methods. Unfortunately, though, these solutions cost lots of money and equipment, money that governments are traditionally very reluctant to spend. Because then they couldn’t pay for, you know, their war machines and shit.

Anyway, in all: a very stimulating and informing afternoon and early evening.

From The Telegraph:

Two blind patients underwent the procedure, which surgeons say ‘is straight out of science fiction’, at Moorfields Eye Hospital in central London last week and are said to be “doing well”.

…

The device works with a tiny camera mounted in a pair of glasses which transmits a wireless signal via a small processor on a belt into a receiver and a panel of electrodes placed in the back of the eye.

I can’t wait for the Spider Jerusalem-style live-shades. . . . 

Lawrence Lessig –founder of the Creative Commons, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all around kickass dude, and one of my heroes–has just climbed like fifteen hundred notches on my scale of awesome by turning his attentions from fighting for copyright reform, to fighting for government reform. From Wired.com:

“The problem we face is … the problem of crony capitalism using money to capture government,” he said on Monday during the launch of his project in Washington, DC. “The challenge is whether in fact we can change this. The political experts tell you that it can’t be done, that process always win over substance.”  

As such, he and Joe Trippi have founded The Change Congress Project, which aims to bring an unprecedented degree of transparency to politics. A short piece by Lessig himself, outlining his intentions with this project, can be found here. This is a perfect example of how technology, properly wielded in the hands of many, can and will bring transparency and accountability to the opaque back-room-deal-type of politics that we’re unfortunately used to, and which so many of us abhor. I think one of the biggest trends of the coming decade or so is going to be the disruptive effect of technology and communications on politics in the US and worldwide, an analogous situation to how technology has disrupted the entertainment industry over the past ten years or so. We’re going to start seeing a lot more politicians being on the up-and-up, because they won’t have a choice, they will be under too much scrutiny. 

From the New Scientist:

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.

This is what Geogre Dvorsky over at Sentient Developments calls ‘Techlepathy’: the simulating of telepathic communication brought about via technological means. Bring it on: anything that will cut down on people incessantly yapping into their mobile phones in public spaces–thereby inflicting the mundanity of their everyday lives upon any and all hapless bystanders–I’m all for.