May 07
It seems that not everyone who claims to detect your aura is a fraud or a flake. Some of them may have synesthesia. (But a lot of them are probably frauds or flakes. Or hitting on you.) Synesthesia is a brain condition that allows people to taste shapes, hear colours and that sort of thing. It’s …
May 06
A newish paper called “Robots, Men and Sex Tourism” published in the journal Futures, examines the impact that robots will have on the sex industry by looking at life in a brothel in the year 2050. I haven’t read it because, well, I’ve read too much of this nonsense over the years. And, if you …
Apr 28
Two new studies out of The Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems (HINTS) Lab in Seatle show that humans view robots as moral entities. The resulting paper is entitled Do People Hold a Humanoid Robot Morally Accountable for the Harm It Causes. The answer seems to be yes. To test this, the humans were set …
Apr 21
For Earth Day, the Toronto Star asked 15 science fiction writers, including me, how we’d tackle climate change. To save some space, my answer was edited down. Here’s my full reply: The environment is something I watch on TV. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, it’s a pristine world free of human interference. But it’s also …
Apr 16
Pretty much everyone has covered this but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it — Just in case you didn’t hear, a hologram of Tupac performed at Coachella. I don’t have much to add. It looked good. It’s neat. But, I dunno, this just seems kinda like that version of Unforgettable or Fred Astaire …
Apr 09
Popular stand-up philosopher, Slavoj Žižek has an interesting little essay on Corporate Rule of Cyberspace. My favourite part: There are two tell-tale words here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus …
Apr 02
Epson glasses that project images on their lenses are here. We all know Google (GOOG) is secretly building a super-advanced version of real-life Google Goggles at Google X Labs, but it looks as though Epson — the company behind printers and projectors — may have beaten Google to the punch. The Epson Moverio promises to bring …
Mar 29
Using a beam of light, MIT researchers have turned on a memory in a mouse. Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same …
Mar 24
Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today has built an argus of flying, file-sharing drones. Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, but it became much more than that. “Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own …
Mar 17
MIT’s Media Lab has hooked up a huge, homemade 1970s synthesizer to the Internet, allowing people to remotely control its machine parts and listen to the results. You can do both here. Patchwerk lets you control a massive analog synthesizer from your browser, and streams the results back to you and everyone connected. The interface …
