technology
Googley-goo where’s the gravy
One way to undermine social media monopolies is to refuse to contribute to the communicational economy they are based upon: don’t generate exploitable signals, stay quiet — and ask how this might be developed as a common response. Given the naturalized assumption that ‘more communication’ will automatically produce ‘more freedom’, suggestions, like this one, that are based on doing less of it might provoke hostility. However, in the case of the social media industries, communication is cultivated not in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of growth; social media wants to capture more of you through your transactions. Moreover, through this process communications are not made ‘more free’ but tend rather to become less open — certainly in the sense that they are commoditized.
photo { Hisaji Hara }
Step aside for the flex Terminator X
From assembly line robots to ATMs and self-checkout terminals, each year intelligent machines take over more jobs formerly held by humans; and experts predict this trend will not stop anytime soon. […]
“By 2015, robots should be able to assist teachers in the classroom. By 2018, they should be able to teach on their own, and this will cause many teachers to lose their jobs.” […]
The ultimate tool to replace doctors could be the nanorobot, a tiny microscopic-size machine that can whiz through veins replacing aging and damaged cells with new youthful ones. This nanowonder with expected development time of mid-to-late 2030s could eliminate nearly all need for human doctors. […]
Experts estimate by 2035, 50 million jobs will be lost to machines […] and by the end of the century, or possibly much sooner, all jobs will disappear. Some believe the final solution will take the form of a Basic Income Guarantee, made available as a fundamental right for everyone. […] America should create a $25,000 annual stipend for every U.S. adult, Brain says, which would be phased in over two-to-three decades. The payments could be paid for by ending welfare programs, taxing automated systems, adding a consumption tax, allowing ads on currency, and other creative ideas.
Some men just want to watch the world burn
Hijacking airplanes with an Android phone
By taking advantage of two new technologies for the discovery, information gathering and exploitation phases of the attack, and by creating an exploit framework (SIMON) and an Android app (PlaneSploit) that delivers attack messages to the airplanes’ Flight Management Systems (computer unit + control display unit), he demonstrated the terrifying ability to take complete control of aircrafts by making virtual planes “dance to his tune.”
art { Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1971 }
Canto III: The Gate of Hell
What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most?
In the nearer term I think various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain—you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital representation of it on their computer screen, but we’re also developing better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger that you can foresee.
For our improvement we need a mirror
Facebook released a mobile thing today. It’s not a Facebook phone. But it’s more than an app. It’s like a digital skin that you slide your phone into so that it’s covered in sticky Facebook goodness. […]
If users actually take to Home, Facebook has come up with an excellent way to get people to have Facebook running on their phones all the time. That means Facebook will be able to constantly collect location information from them, making Facebook even more attractive to advertisers looking to deliver ads based on who you are, where you are and what you’re doing.
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have more than tripled since 1999.
It’s a great business model.
Step one: buy a software patent. There are millions of them, and they’re all quite vague and impossible to understand.
Step two: FedEx a carefully crafted letter to a few thousand small software companies, iPhone app developers, and Internet startups. This is where it gets a tiny bit tricky, because the recipients of the letter need to think that it’s a threat to sue if they don’t pay up, but in court, the letter has to look like an invitation to license some exciting new technology. In other words it has to be just on this side of extortion.
Step three: wait patiently while a few thousand small software companies call their lawyers, and learn that it’s probably better just to pay off the troll, because even beginning to fight the thing using the legal system is going to cost a million dollars.
Too high their wrath has risen
A new form of corpse treatment has also been developed: freeze-drying or lyophilization. In freeze-drying the body of the deceased is cooled to -18° C. The frozen body is then immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen. The frozen body then becomes very fragile. By then subjecting it to vibrations, the body falls apart into a kind of powder from which the moisture is then extracted by means of vacuum. A dry, odourless powder with a weight in the order of 25 to 30 kg eventually remains.
art { Cady Noland , Oozewald, 1989 }
I went to a party once and there was a palm reader there. And when she looked at my hand, she just froze. And I said to her, ‘I know. My lifeline is broken.’
We are approaching the time when we will be able to communicate faster than the speed of light. It is well known that as we approach the speed of light, time slows down. Logically, it is reasonable to assume that as we go faster than the speed of light, time will reverse. The major consequence of this for Internet protocols is that packets will arrive before they are sent.
image { Dustin Arnold | Thanks Tim }
‘Can’t wait until phones become waterproof so pushing people in pools becomes funny again.’ –Will Ferrell
Spending so much time texting and updating, tweeting and watching, calling and playing at every free moment, from every location, never alone with our thoughts, never allowing our thoughts to drift, impacts our creativity, which in turn can limit our full potential. […]
Edward de Bono, business consultant and self-described “father of lateral thinking” has authored numerous works on creative thinking. de Bono calls moments of boredom “creative pauses,” which allows the mind to drift, and avails the person to new forms of input and understanding.
Boredom may be even more important for children than adults. Spending so much time on gadgets may “short circuit the development of creative capacity” in children, according to educational expert Dr. Teresa Belton. […]
A study last year by UK carrier O2 examined the amount of time the typical user spends each day on their smartphone. It’s a lot - more than two hours a day, everyday. Most of that is spent browsing the Internet, on social networking sites, playing games, listening to music, calling, emailing and texting - and not, for example, learning a new language.
Death is a sickness
Quantum Archaeology (QA) is the controversial science of resurrecting the dead including their memories. It assumes the universe is made of events and the laws that govern them, and seeks to make maps of brain/body states to the instant of death for everyone in history.
Anticipating process technologies due in 20 – 40 years, it involves construction of the Quantum Archaeology Grid to plot known events filling the gaps by cross-referencing heuristically within the laws of science. Specialist grids already exist waiting to be merged, including cosmic ones with trillions of moving evolution points. The result will be a mega-matrix good enough to describe and simulate the past. Quantum computers and super-recursive algorithms both in their infancy may allow vast calculation into the quantum world, and artificial intelligence has no upper limit to what it might do.
photo { Erwin Olaf }
‘Check out this list of thirty million unfuckable men in technology.’ –Paul Ford
Imagine a team at a ski company that’s faced with a big problem: When skiers make sharp turns at high speeds, the edges of their skis lift from the snow, causing the skiers to sometimes lose control. The team needed to lessen the vibrations of its skis. But how? Eventually, they found a great solution in an unlikely place: the music industry. In some violins, they discovered, there’s a special layer — a metal grid — that helps to stabilize the instrument, and reduce unwanted vibrations. Problem solved. The ski company adapted the metal grid idea into its ski design. This type of solution is called an analogous solution, and it’s more common than you may think. In fact, I’d estimate that nearly 90% of new solutions are really just adaptations from solutions that already exist — and they’re often taken from fields outside the problem solver’s expertise.
Analogous solutions are extremely beneficial to businesses because they reduce time to market, and they can get stalled projects moving again. But for a long time they weren’t easy to find. If you didn’t accidentally happen upon a solution, you were simply out of luck.
This is why I wanted to develop a system that could make accidental discoveries a more predictable and regular occurrence […] which resulted in Analogy Finder, a program that mines the U.S. Patent Database for analogous solutions.
Caught you looking for the same thing, it’s a new thing
According to the studies he cited, 7 percent of people’s twitter followers are actually spambots; 30 percent of social media users are deceived by spambots and chatbots; and 20 percent of social media users accept friend requests from unknown people, 51 percent of which are not human. […] When it comes to “astroturfing” — the practice of creating fake grassroots movements to influence opinions — the hit ratio on email spams is about 12.5 million to 1. In order to create an astroturf movement on the scale of the anti-SOPA movement in 2011, every person on earth would have to receive the same spam message 8 times.
photo { Todd Fisher }
‘Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon, il n’y a rien de sa faute.’ –Rimbaud
All seems to indicate that the next decade, the 20s, will be the magic decade of the brain, with amazing science but also amazing applications. With the development of nanoscale neural probes and high speed, two-way Brain-Computer interfaces (BCI), by the end of the next decade we may have our iPhones implanted in our brains and become a telepathic species. […]
Last month the New York Times revealed that the Obama Administration may soon seek billions of dollars from Congress for a Brain Activity Map (BAM) project. […] The project may be partly based on the paper “The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics” (Neuron, June 2012) by six well-known neuroscientists. […]
A new paper “The Brain Activity Map” (Science, March 2013), written as an executive summary by the same six neuroscientists and five more, is more explicit: “The Brain Activity Map (BAM), could put neuroscientists in a position to understand how the brain produces perception, action, memories, thoughts, and consciousness… Within 5 years, it should be possible to monitor and/or to control tens of thousands of neurons, and by year 10 that number will increase at least 10-fold. By year 15, observing 1 million neurons with markedly reduced invasiveness should be possible. With 1 million neurons, scientists will be able to evaluate the function of the entire brain of the zebrafish or several areas from the cerebral cortex of the mouse. In parallel, we envision developing nanoscale neural probes that can locally acquire, process, and store accumulated data. Networks of “intelligent” nanosystems would be capable of providing specific responses to externally applied signals, or to their own readings of brain activity.”
photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }
Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge!
For the last six months, Cody Wilson and his non-profit group Defense Distributed have worked towards a controversial goal: To make as many firearm components as possible into 3D-printable, downloadable files. Now they’re seeking to make those files searchable, too–and to make a profit while they’re at it.
In a talk at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas Monday afternoon, Wilson plans to announce a new, for-profit spinoff of his gun-printing project that will serve as both a repository and search engine for CAD files aimed at allowing anyone to 3D-print gun parts in their own garage.
related links posted between april 2012 and today in every day, the same, again:
The world’s first 3D-printed gun.
Airbus designer hopes to see planes roll out of hangar-sized 3D printers by 2050.
MIT students reveal PopFab, a 3D printer that fits inside a briefcase.
Japanese company will 3D print your fetus for $1,275.
PayPal Founder Backs Synthetic Meat Printing Company.
3D print glove is a wearable mobile phone.
The Pirate Bay launches crazy Physibles category for printing 3D objects.
Which 3D printers should you buy?
China’s first 3D printing museum opens.
“3D pen” can write in the air.
An Artificial Ear Built By a 3D Printer and Living Cartilage Cells.
The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported
Nanoparticles carrying a toxin found in bee venom can destroy human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while leaving surrounding cells unharmed.
The finding is an important step toward developing a vaginal gel that may prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
photo { Dan Winters, Dead Bees, Oakdale, California, March 11-15, 2006 }
She likes my tone, my cologne, and the way I roll
Click by click, Facebook users are building a surprisingly nuanced picture of themselves, even without filling out their social networking profiles. […] Researchers found that they could, for example, correctly guess a man’s sexual orientation 88 percent of the time by analyzing the kinds of TV shows and movies he liked. It also found that few gay men — less than 5 percent in the study — identify with groups that openly declare their sexual orientation, so a man’s preference for “Britney Spears” or “Desperate Housewives” was more useful in predictions.
Similarly, the researchers also found that they could figure out if a Facebook user used drugs with about 65 percent accuracy based on their expressed public preferences.
The study even included “like” predictors that could tell whether users’ parents had separated when they were young vs. whether they had not.
Researchers told the British paper that they hope this study raises users’ awareness about the kind of information they may not realize they’re sharing with a wider audience.
Find what you love and let it kill you
3D printing technology has helped replace 75 percent of a patient’s skull with the approval of U.S. regulators. […]
3D printing’s advantage comes from taking the digitally scanned model of a patient’s skull and “printing” out a matching 3D object layer by layer. The precise manufacturing technique can even make tiny surface or edge details on the replacement part that encourage the growth of cells and allow bone to attach more easily.
1/2 litro di rosso per il Conte Dracula
Designed for Google’s forthcoming Glass headset, it recognises people by the clothes they are wearing. Their name is then overlaid on the headset’s video.
Obscenity is never far away
Standard resolution for a digital camera these days is about eight megapixels. And each one of those eight million pixels has the potential to be thousands or even millions of different colors. […] By raising the number of available colors to the eight-millionth power, you can come up with the total number of different photographs that could possibly ever exist.
Which is just what artist Jeff Thompson of Lincoln, Nebraska is trying to do. He has created an installation titled “Every Possible Photograph” that, well, is on pace to display every possible photograph that could be taken.
