In the summer of 2009, I was in San Francisco for the first time and on my way to meet Alexis Madrigal and Sarah Rich for a drink. Equipped with only a photocopied map and a dumb cellphone, I got off at the appointed BART stop with instructions to head south and no idea which way that was. Ever the intrepid explorer, I worked out the solution using ( Read more... )

When it comes to video games, creating enemy artificial intelligence for a stealth-action game tends to be much harder than creating the AI for a plain shooter. One reason is a more complex sensory system. Another is the sheer amount of time that you spend in their presence.

In a shooter, the AI is unlikely to spend more than a few seconds alive ( Read more... )

There is an arms race in progress between humans and bacteria. It started in earnest just before World War 1 with Salvarsan and really got going during World War 2 with the wide-spread use of Penicillin. In response to human aggression, resistant strains of bacteria evolved. Superbugs.


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There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An ( Read more... )

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A few years ago, I spent most of the summer sleeping on the floor of a friend’s kitchen. It was a lots-of-time, not-much-money sort of summer so everyone was pretty excited when the set of lockpicks that he’d ordered off the Internet arrived. We went down to the hardware store and bought a vise, some wood, and 6 random locks. Brought the whole ( Read more... )

Full text of “Drone Army descends on New Orleans” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).
Drone Army descends on New Orleans

Contact with drones lost during drug wars, swarm slowly migrating north.


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This has been a weird week. I’ve spent much of it reading things by people smarter than me who have - for want of a better word - scooped me on ideas that I’ve been tossing around for awhile.

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Excerpts from “Ashphalt Veins - The Freeway States” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).


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When he was still running the Viridian Movement, Bruce Sterling introduced the idea of involuntary parks. Spaces in the world that have become so polluted or otherwise unusable by humans, that they’ve been left to nature (or, at least, savagery).

Involuntary Parks are very Viridian. They are not representatives of untouched nature, but of * ( Read more... )

Excerpts from “Floatopia: The Rise and Decline of a Libertarian Experiment” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).


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