The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.'Spiritual Laws', Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 21, 2009
Does this apply to the Kindle?
The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.'Spiritual Laws', Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 20, 2009
Let's get Google on that right away!
From Pink Tentacle:
More from Pink Tentacle
Can GPS tracking technology prevent a swine flu pandemic? Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications hopes to find out this autumn by testing a mobile phone-based GPS tracking system that constantly monitors each individual’s location and sends text alerts to participants if they cross paths with anyone who is later identified as a flu victim.
The primary purpose of the test, which will involve about 2,000 volunteers in both urban and rural areas, is to verify the precision of GPS tracking technology, estimate the potential costs of operating such a system, and determine whether or not such a system can be put into practical use.
More from Pink Tentacle
For Whom the Google Tolls
Nicholas Carr writes:
More from Nicholas Carr
It's amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company's Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google's ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind's extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the "more likely we all are to die." (This is a particularly sensitive issue for Page, as he's a big backer of the Singularitarians' attempts to secure human immortality.)
More from Nicholas Carr
May 19, 2009
Ethical Guide for Robot Warriors in the Works
Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones, currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own?
Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an "ethical governor," a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots," comes out this month.
He argues not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers.
May 18, 2009
Jed The Humanoid-Grandaddy
Last night something pretty bad happened.
We lost a friend,
All shocked and broken,
Shut down, exploded.
JED-E3 is what we first called him.
Then it was "Jed,"
But Jed's system's dead.
Therefore, so's Jed.
We assembled him in the Kitchen,
Made out of this and
Made out of that and
Whatever was at hand.
When we finished Jed we were so proud.
We celebrated,
We congratulated,
At what we'd created.
Jed could run or walk, sing or talk, and
Compile thoughts, and
Solve lots of problems.
We learned so much from him.
A couple years went by and something happened.
We gave Jed less attention.
We had new inventions.
We left for a convention.
Jed had found our booze and drank every drop.
He fizzled and popped,
He rattled and knocked,
Finally he just stopped.
In memory of Jed Bulla.
The House of Memory and Automata
BLDG BLOG:
"...In some ways, though, I also had the distinct feeling that I had stepped into a variant screenplay for Blade Runner, as directed by Stanley Kubrick: Blade Runner's wounded maker of surrogates incorrectly edited into the penultimate scene from 2001, in which astronaut Dave Bowman awakens to a bedroom full of Louis XVI furnishings, with all of his friends and family transformed into mythic wax figures and talking machines."
More from BLDG BLOG
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
