Post on questioning the “uncanny valley”
Published by January 21st, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsNew York Times profiles “modern cavemen”
Published by January 12th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsThe caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.
I also found this interesting:
Most of the cavemen at Mr. Durant’s gatherings are lean and well-muscled, and have glowing skin. A few wear trim beards. Some claim that they no longer get sick. Several identify themselves as libertarians.
This isn't an easy diet or lifestyle, but people who embrace it do tend to lose a ton of weight, keep muscle, and generally look awesome. Could this be the start of a trend that flies in the face of 50 years of dietary advice?
Questions about the nature of artificial intelligence and the singularity
Published by October 8th, 2009 in Artificial Intelligence. 0 CommentsThe Singularity Summit that took place last week has a lot of people thinking about emerging technologies that will one day radically change human life as we know it. I believe that I’ll see true artificial machine intelligence in my lifetime, but at this point, nobody knows exactly what form that intelligence might take.
Popular Science poses ten good questions they would like to ask this future theoretical artificial intelligence.
Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by science fiction, but we tend to assume that intelligent machines will want something to do with us – either destroy/enslave us (the “Terminator” and “The Matrix”) work with us as partners (“Star Trek,” “Aliens”) or be used to serve us as, essentially, robot slaves (“Star Wars”). One of the more interesting points PopSci brings up is, if a super-intelligent machine is created, will we be able to relate to it? What if the nature of its intelligence is absolutely foreign to us?
I hope that one day within my lifetime humans can use AI to exponentially increase technological development in a relatively short period of time, which will theoretically lead to incredible advancements that will greatly enhance human lives. However, there’s always the chance that a super-intelligent AI will want nothing to do with helping us solve our problems. Can we play God and create them “in our own image?” Time will tell.
Update: Facebook is popular. Like 300 million users popular.
Published by September 16th, 2009 in Social Networking. 2 CommentsFor a site that just a few years ago was exclusively the domain of college students, Facebook has experienced phenomenal growth to the point where it now counts 300 million users as members – roughly the population of the United States. Even better for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, investors, and potential future shareholders, the world’s largest social networking site is making enough money to cover its costs and keep up with growth.
Analysts said this shows the financial viability of Facebook, which has faced questions about its underlying business model, despite its popularity, and was a good sign for a potential initial public offering.
“It’s certainly meaningful to show that this is absolutely the real deal,” said Broadpoint Amtech analyst Ben Schachter. “They are executing. People are spending money on the site.”
Since its creation in a Harvard dorm room five years ago, Facebook has emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular destinations and is increasingly challenging the Web’s established powerhouses like Yahoo Inc and Google Inc.
Facebook unveiled a revamped search engine last month and is currently testing an online payment system. Facebook users have tripled from about 100 million a year ago.
In related Facebook news, yesterday the company announced “Facebook Prototypes,” which has been described as its version of Google Labs, where developers can test out beta versions of various applications that may still have “some kinks to work out.” Nonetheless, if you’re interested to see how Facebook expects to stay ahead of its competitors, it’s a good way to see what they’ve got up their sleeves.
“Traditional” reality too boring? Five mind-blowing applications of augmented reality
Published by September 15th, 2009 in Advertising and Augmented Reality. 0 CommentsIn William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Country, artist/programmers create massive virtual art exhibits tied to real-world locations. These “installments” are only visible through GPS-enabled visors that access the data via the Internet and then display the information to the wearer. One artist places virtual bodies at sites where historical figures were murdered or committed suicide; another creates virtual fields of wildflowers where none exist; a third uses his talents to create a 90 foot floating giant squid.
While Gibson’s novel appears to be set in the near-future, the technology he describes is widely available today. “Augmented reality” has found its way to video games, product marketing, and social media applications. And while no companies have ponied up to market a dedicated visor for viewing AR, most of us have a device with a camera and an Internet connection that makes viewing AR possible. Camera-equipped laptops and game consoles are responsible for introducing most consumers to the possibilities of AR, but the latest generation of camera and GPS-enabled mobile phones will really enable this technology to become both ubiquitous and useful.
Here are five applications of AR that will make you re-think the way you perceive the world around you.
AHhrrr – AR zombie shooter
AHhrrr is a tech demo for NVIDIA hardware that uses its screen and camera to create a fully three-dimensional shooting game that requires players to move around in “real space” to access different parts of the tabletop city before them.
Layar Reality Browser
Layar is a browser for Android-powered mobile phones that enables users to view “layers” that show points of interest using information from services like Wikipedia, Yelp, Twitter and more.
Canon “Mixed Reality” Aquarium
Canon is using some specialized visors that users can wear to view interesting virtual graphics around them – in this case, users have the impression of being in the middle of an aquarium, complete with fish, sharks and sea turtles. Even cooler, they’re using this technology to bring virtual dinosaurs to “life.”
Transformers 2 Movie Promotion – “We Are Autobots”
This promotion for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen allowed users to (virtually) replace their head with that of Autobots leader Optimus Prime.
Topps 3D Live Baseball Cards
Hold a Topps 3D Live baseball card up to your computer’s camera and a model of the player on the card springs forth. The player moves with the card, and users can even interact with the 3D model to play games.
Google makes it easy to move data out of Google products
Published by September 14th, 2009 in Google and Social Media. 0 CommentsHot on the heels of Twitter affirming that yes, you own your tweets, some Chicago Google engineers have launched “The Data Liberation Front,” with the goal of making it simple to move your data in and out of Google products (Blogger, Gmail, and more, with additional services coming soon).
Enhancing options for data portability is awesome for at least two reasons. First, I can see how storing one’s data “in the cloud” could be a bit disconcerting – what happens if a particular product or service goes under and takes your data with it? Being able to move your data from service to service, or store it locally, ensures that you’ll always be able to access it.
Second, it enables users to choose the service that best meets their needs. Someday, a Webmail service might come out that blows the pants off of Gmail. Should I be forced to use Gmail simply because that’s where all of my data (like contacts and archived mail) is stored?
In a way, enabling people to easily take their data to a competitor shows how confident Google is in their products. They’re betting that giving users the option to easily take their data wherever they want will attract more users than they’ll lose through people doing just that. I think their confidence will be rewarded.
All your tweets (are) belong to you
Published by September 11th, 2009 in Microblogging, Social Media and Web/Internet. 0 CommentsI normally don’t may much attention to Web site terms of service. Usually it’s a race to get to the bottom of the terms so I can click the “agree” button and get started with whatever I’m doing. With Twitter’s TOS, however, I was glad to see they clarified the issue of “who owns your tweets?” Thankfully, as @Biz confirmed yesterday, the answer is, “you do.”
Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
Now I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that while your tweets remain your intellectual property, Twitter could still, given the terms of the TOS, publish a book of the greatest tweets and profit from it without reimbursing users. However, given the controversy over Facebook’s revised TOS earlier this year, Twitter users and those who value privacy should be able to take comfort in the fact that if they delete their account, Twitter won’t own the deleted tweets.
Ultra-niche magazines show print’s not dead
Published by August 31st, 2009 in Design/Publishing and Print Media. 2 CommentsWith the recent struggles of many of the most well-known names in print, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that printing a magazine is a path to failure. However, for many publishers, focusing on a very specific niche has enabled them to successfully put out a publication for many years.
Asylum has a nice roundup of some of the most bizarre examples. And “bizarre” is a fair assessment, because these definitely aren’t published for a mass audience. Let’s face it, “Miniature Donkey Talk” isn’t going to be displayed near the checkout counter at your local grocery store. That goes double (or triple) for “Girls and Corpses,” a horror mag that features “scantily clad young beauties posing with hideous, decaying, festering corpses.” Hey, it delivers what it claims.
As is the case with successful blogs, these magazines have been able to maintain their readership precisely because their readers have few alternatives for the information found within their pages. For people, it’s been said that “specialization equals failure” – we’re expected to possess a wide variety of skills and abilities, and that makes us more valuable. For print, however, the opposite is true. Focusing on a very specific readership where there are few to no competitors can lead to success.
(via Neatorama)
Older users responsible for Twitter’s growth
Published by August 26th, 2009 in Social Media, Social Networking and Web/Internet. 0 CommentsTwitter has experienced phenomenal growth over the last couple of years. Unlike many social media sites, however Twitter’s growth hasn’t been driven by the youth – it’s us old people that are signing up in droves.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
Sure, teenagers and college students made MySpace and Facebook what they are today, but young people also have a ton of time on their hands to customize profiles, add “about me” information, browse profiles, and so on. Older folks usually have responsibilities like careers and kids, and so they don’t (or can’t) devote the same amount of attention to keeping updated.
The great thing about Twitter, however, is that it doesn’t require much of a learning curve or time commitment to participate. Even better, it’s been built to work on mobile devices, so users can check tweets and update on the go. Given this dynamic, it’s no surprise Twitter has been embraced by older users, who are able to get a lot out of a service they don’t have to put a lot into.
