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I just read a bunch of posts from 2005
Is this thing still on? Who's reading? -
Crossroads
As you've probably noticed, I've more or less abandoned LiveJournal. I still come read the entries of those of you left writing them, but I haven't much felt the need to post here directly.
I feed in Quiet Babylon, but I remain uneasy about that. The more time I spend thinking about social networks like LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, etc, the ( Read more... ) -
Intelligence with a data plan
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... ) -
B-List Holy Grail: Wristphones
Wristphones
The wristwatch/phone hybrid used to be the way forward. Now it’d be considered clunky or annoying to use - either a case of too much bulk or no room for buttons - and associated with all sorts of bizarre RSI. The delicious irony is that today most people use mobile phones to tell the time.
Written by: Andrey Pissantchev
Poster Child:
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B-List Holy Grail Contest Winners
In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more instances.
The entries were fantastic and after a long and occasionally contentious dinner-meeting with my gracious panel of judges, it’s time ( Read more... ) -
Woven Spaces
In the Pearson International Airport in Toronto, there’s a walkway that fascinates me. The walkway in question runs from where you get off the plane to the exit. If you get off the plane and have luggage, you proceed down the stairs to the carousels and the herd of humanity. If you don’t have luggage to collect, you can bypass the whole thing and ( Read more... ) -
Killing with a personal touch
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... ) -
Units of Selection
A recurring puzzle of evolution is the persistence of certain entities or behaviours that - at first glance - seem to harm the reproductive fitness of individuals. From the naive standpoint, an individual worker ant makes a mockery of evolution. They’re sterile; a reproductive dead-end.
One way of conceptualizing the answer is the unit of ( Read more... ) -
Haiti
I'm sure you all heard that the CDN Gov't is offering to match donations up to $50 million. A classy move and a great way to expand the level of our assistance ( Read more... ) -
Re-skinning Reality
On January 12th, Google announced that they’d been the target of a series of cyber attacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Their response was to stop censoring Google.cn effective immediately. In the same week, Google was granted a patent that would enable them to replace real billboards with virtual ones in ( Read more... )