My Computer Tried to Kill Me

I may have the headline backwards - I think maybe I am killing my computer.... no wait, it's more like my computer has lost some toes in a freak accident. Or something. Bottom line - it no worky so good, me not know why.

In fact the only reason this post has appeared is my deft application of sheer force of will - and my use of an ancient series of whistles and beep noises and crossing my eyes while blinking a morse code.

Hang in there oh faithful readers.

I may need to finish incorporating myself as an offshore company headquartered in Geneva in order to finish this inter-transactional kinetic squirmish so I can save the computer and America.

The New E-Tomb

Because I could not Tweet for Death, Death kindly Tweeted me ....

One of the more popular design sites on the internet reports about the E-Tomb, powered by it's own solar panel, in great detail:



Faster and faster, we run to our digital heavens:

"We used to talk about the "digital divide" between rural and underserved communities v. the rest of the broadband-enable world. Now the digital divide is really a generational divide between younger generations raised in an electronic world of interconnected information who have no problem giving up their privacy to stay connected v. us cranky old geezers who just want to be left alone."

Atheist iPhone Apps

From the NYTimes:

"For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

"In a dozen new phone applications, whether faith-based or faith-bashing, the prospective debater is given a primer on the basic rules of engagement — how to parry the circular argument, the false dichotomy, the ad hominem attack, the straw man — and then coached on all the likely flashpoints of contention. Why Darwinism is scientifically sound, or not. The differences between intelligent design and creationism, and whether either theory has any merit. The proof that America was, or was not, founded on Christian principles."

Happiness Without Twitter

I gave up the Twitter account I had started a few years back. If I am pondering on some words to stab into place on the Internet, the place for them is here, and I prefer a bit of narrative rather than 140 characters to convey a thought. For a few months this year I was reading the brief pronouncements offered on Twitter from the hundred or so folks I was linked to, but it was not rewarding reading. So I punted the whole thing and do not miss it at all.

Still, over this past year the constant posting of bits and pieces of thoughts and actions by all manner of folks surely gained much attention and was as trendy as the front row of a Milan fashion show. But a comment or thought which is referred to as a "tweet" cannot be taken seriously. I mean, once Wolf Blitzer started saying on live television that he had just "tweeted" something seemed as superfluous as a third nipple, as inane as a billboard encouraging "Learn to Read!"

However, there is a continual shifting and micro-brewing of word choice and meaning which is likely to continue for some time. I admit I sometimes compose emails to friends and write the letter "u" instead of writing "you" even though it chafes me a bit, makes me sound like a 12 year old girl who places smiley faces over the letter i when writing.

Word elimination and reduction is a dicey but persistent thing of late -- people are no longer referred to as "hungry" but as "food insecure" (are fat people "over confident"?), and I keep hearing references via medical and/or police accounts wherein the word "unresponsive" is used instead of what they really mean, which is "dead". I guess it's better than, say, "respiratorily disinclined" or "chronic languidness" or something.

Perhaps in the future, molecular nanobots can be employed to attach to your skin and release a stream of banal impulses. We'll call it Chigger.

A Machine's Warning From The Future: Don't Build It

"For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

What might happen if a few billion dollars were spent to make a gigantic Supercollider machine, meant to create a particle called a Higgs boson (though no one knows if it really exists or has ever detected one) -- and the machine sends signals back to itself from the future to ensure that it will not work?

That's a theory being offered by a few scientists about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland since efforts to make it work have all failed. Perhaps, they say, the future machine (or maybe the scientific principle it uses) knows more than those of us in the present and are sending back a warning from the future. The machine is set to try once again to create that unique particle in December (the last time they tried to use it, a gigantic magnet in the machine melted.)

The NYTimes offered an essay on the idea of time-traveling anti-colliders this week:

"A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

Weird or not, I'm sort of intrigued that some are considering the oddity of the machine's failure.

In the meantime, other scientists, working in China, have successfully constructed a table-top sized Black Hole. Since we are all still here and not been sucked into the vast nothingness (yet) then it is a case of 'so far, so good'. But if messages start popping out of the black hole, I sure hope someone takes good notes about the message it conveys.

Trademark Battle Over 'American Fart Culture'?

A copyright dispute about farts has landed in federal court. You could say attorneys are raising quite a stink about it.

The dispute is over competing iPhone applications which both want to have the sole copyright to the phrase "pull my finger" in promoting their business of adding fart sounds to your iPhone.

Depending on how this all plays out, in the future, when your uncle, odd neighbor, or invasive co-worker says "pull my finger" prior to farting, then said individual could be charged with a copyright violation.

Yeah. This is now an issue for federal courts to decide??

The lawsuit is reported in Wired:

"The brouhaha concerns Air-O-Matic of Florida, the maker of the popular "Pull My Finger" app, which claims the maker of rival "iFart Mobile" is misappropriating the phrase "pull my finger" in its advertisements. Such an assertion, according to iFart Mobile maker InfoMedia of Colorado, reeks of an misunderstanding of American fart culture."

Really? Really???

iFartMobile?

Hell, who doesn't? And I do it without any technological assistance. Just pull my finger.

The Trust Drug

Researchers in Europe report success with clinical trials of a new "Trust drug", aka the "cuddle chemical", which soothes those who take it into trusting people even though that "trust" has been abused.

"The subjects who received oxytocin demonstrated no change in their trust behaviour, even though they were informed that their trust was not honoured in roughly 50% of cases."

No word yet if anyone is working on a Don't Abuse Trust drug.

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is!

O brave new world

That hath such people in't!

Sea Monster Attacks Internet UPDATE!

Got an update on the severed underwater cable which provides internet services - mentioned earlier this week. It seems a 5-ton ships anchor was the culprit, according to press reports. Not, apparently, nefarious aquatic monsters nor super-secret underwater hooligans of any sort. The link above even has a picture of the anchor being hauled out of the water by a FLAG Telecom repair ship. Of course, that only explains one of three mysteriously severed cables (there was another in some Arctic fjord but that was blamed on wild weather and roiling seas, according to spokesperson Marty Kuluguqtuq. No I did not make that up. And that's Mister Kuluguqtuq to you, bucko.).

Curious creature that I am, the element of the report of a repair which caught my eye was the reference to FLAG Telecom. FLAG stands for Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, a company based in India which laid the cable in the late 1990s. The cable in question is part of a worldwide creation - some 28,000 miles long and at only an inch thick, it may well be prone to slicing.

Likely the best source of info on FLAG comes from writer Neal Stephenson, in this massive article from Wired magazine in December of 1996.

"Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke's book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting."

Stephenson's detailed research reveals the links between the creation of international trade routes and treaties from the 1800s, the rise of telecoms and the current state of how information moves to the FLAG project and makes fascinating reading.

If you have time and energy, his Hugo-award-winning novel "Cryptonomicon" is a stunning tale of history and fiction on the creation of computers and lost gold, U-Boats and ISPs and how everything is connected by being connected. The book should already be in your home as proof of your inner tech Geekness.

Insect Spies and RoboBugs

Is it strange enough for you yet? If not, check out this Washington Post report on the uses and fears of spying insects.

"No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely."

I have to add this question: Are cameras and camera phones somehow unworkable now? 'Cause someone could just take a picture, ya know?

Schools like Vanderbilt, Caltech and Harvard are working on this sci-fi movie ... I mean New Frontier of Science. More info and more strange comments and rumors at PopSciBlog.

These Robotic Bears Can Rock

Wow. I am impressed and perhaps a little frightened by these videos.

This enterprising fellow got some of the old musical robotic bears (and a gorilla too) from an old Showbiz Pizza place, and now reprograms them to do modern rock songs, like this one from Evanescence. More videos of other songs are also provided.

He's even got a stage and curtains and some major programming skills. (via MetaFilter)

Strange Tech Gadgets

I think the idea of making an object which is meant to perform one function look like something utterly and totally different has been with humans a long time. I know there have been many such instances in my wee lifetime, often the weird mish-mash of objects is the selling point of the item. Such as telephones that look like ducks or footballs, a cigarette lighter that looks like an alien-head or a pistol, or even those odd household items you see like a candy dish shaped like a leaf. Why is it that people feel compelled to make a jittery plate of jello look like a Pilgrim or an art-deco ziggurat?

Techies today have been having some fun with the idea too, and a fine example is this flash-drive designed to look like, well, just what you see here: a headless teddy bear. Other items like this include little dogs that look like they are humping the computer. There is of course at least one list of the Top 10 Weirdest USB connectors, and the teddy bear isn't even on the list.

All these items were found at a blog I've been perusing for laughs, called Shallow and Tacky.

One item the blog mentioned over the weekend was the strange case in New Jersey where folks were getting liposuction done in some chick's garage. Yeah, smart idea. Just be careful when they start using that sand-blaster on yer hips.

Designers also offer a mouse for your computer which will monitor your vital health stats as you waste, I mean spend, time at your computer.