I'll admit, I'm kind of a Google fanboy. Of course, they make some mistakes (the Buzz rollout that exposed some private information of Gmail users) and engage in practices I'm not completely in favor of (lobbying for net neutrality legislation), but in spite of that, Google is pretty awesome. They support open source. They provide [...]
Author Archive for Eric
Google’s not perfect, but they’re not evil
Published by February 19th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsMy first experience at In-N-Out Burger
Published by February 19th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsLas Vegas. Double-double and fries, Animal Style. Everything I hoped it would be.
Posted via email from Tatrocalypse!
Posted via email from Tatrocalypse!
Post on questioning the “uncanny valley”
Published by January 21st, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsOver at my transhumanist blog, HumanPl.us, I've got a post up on questioning the "uncanny valley" – the idea that the more human-like robots appear, the creepier they get. (The concept also applies to CG characters in movies and video games. Abstract characters? Cuuute! More "realistic" characters? Not so much.) Interestingly, there's no research supporting [...]
New York Times profiles “modern cavemen”
Published by January 12th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsAs far as diet goes, I've done a complete one-eighty in terms of beliefs and action. In college, I was a vegan. Now animal meat makes up a large part of my diet, and I can even be found, on occasion, pigging out on organ meats my friends think are absolutely gross.
Part of this [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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; [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
