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I'm going to relaunch my website in Spring 2008; part of that initiative will involve retiring this weblog, which has been moribund lately anyway. This material will all be archived and available, hopefully in more accessible form than it is now. Ironically, I am even more interested in the issues and subjects discussed here than I was when at the peak of this weblog's life; the problem is I'm working on this stuff now, both in my fiction and in my consulting. I can focus only on one thing at a time, so it's the real work rather than this blog. Sad for you, dear reader; but not for long, as all of this stuff will burst out in other forms.
Here's a case of the future arriving 'too soon and in the wrong order': Emotiv Systems is demonstrating a mind-reading helmet for computer gamers. This device is designed specifically to read both conscious and unconscious (affective, or emotional) responses from the player and allow the game to react accordingly.
Salon has done an interview with Barbara J. King, author of Evolving God. What caught my eye immediately was this exchange: Salon: I understand you don't want to get caught up in modern debates over belief and what we think about God. But isn't the core of religion the sense that there is some transcendent realm out there -- something that's separate from our world of everyday experience? King:Oh yes, definitely. But the emotional connection to that transcendent realm is what I'm looking for, rather than a mental or rational formulating of beliefs about such a realm. A word that's so important to me is "embodied." It's an embodied religion. Religion is based in our senses, in our emotions.
I've known about this for a while now: John Cramer is going to try to send a signal backwards in time sometime this year. (Apparently he decided that merely sending a signal instantaneously wasn't good enough.) There's a highly lucid description of what he's up to in the San Franciso Chronicle. 1 comment
The British director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken MacDonald, has blasted the notion of a "war on terror." What he has said is relevant not only to British culture, but to any democracy that faces the threat of terrorism. His message is very simple: terrorism is not warfare, it is a crime.
If you're agonizing about whether to upgrade to Microsoft Vista (and feeling faintly depressed about the apparently stagnant state of current computing) then take a look at this video. It's pretty rare that computing presentations are jaw-droppingly cool these days (Jobs's introduction of the iPhone came close, but didn't quite make it)--and rarer still that they make computers look easy.
Since I've never believed that physical infinities exist, it's come as no surprise to me that it now appears the universe is only 43 billion light years across. Astronomers have typically viewed the universe as infinite in all directions, but recent studies of the cosmic background radiation suggest that it's finite, but unbounded, the way the surface of a sphere is finite, but has no edge. Who cares? Well, there are some implications... 1 comment
Now note that I'm not in this book and won't make a dime from it: WorldChanging is just cool, important and an endlessly fascinating read. Its production also has zero environmental impact thanks to the purchase of carbon offsets and other measures by the publisher.
I've joined the team of bloggers at WorldChanging, as part of the new WorldChanging Canada site. In case you don't know, WorldChanging is a tremendously popular (half a million+ readers) weblog dedicated to publicizing solutions to real-world problems, as well as bringing together under one roof a diverse range of talents, ideas, new initiatives etc. This is the site Bruce Sterling calls "the most important website in the world." 1 comment
An interesting article in New Scientist talks about recent experiments in embodied cognition. This is the idea that our physical environment is part of the system we use to think with--in contradiction to the old idea that we think by "recording" inputs from the environment, then processing them internally as a separate operation. 1 comment |
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"Even if I should learn that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant this apple tree today." -- Martin Luther | |
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