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 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 …
Mar 02
This gun, created by Japanese researchers, is capable of stopping speech at a range of 30 metres (100ft). I’m sure we could all think of a use for it. The dystopian, silence the protesters, angle jumps right out at ya. But I would remind people that the police already have used bullets, batons, tear gas and tazers. …
Feb 15
Last March the Elfoid P1 phone was unveiled. From Pink Tentacle: The Elfoid phone is a miniature version of the Telenoid R1 robot developed last year by a research team led by Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. The current prototype measures 20 centimeters (8 in) long, is covered in a soft fleshy urethane skin, and has the …
Feb 13
Here’s an interesting one from The Verge: A user of The Pirate Bay has demonstrated how efficient the use of magnet links is for the site. Last month we reported that The Pirate Bay had begun the move to using magnet links as the default method to begin downloads, an initiative designed to make it easier for …
Feb 10
Looks like this drone fad is catching on. From Singularity Hub: According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, nearly one in three US warplanes are drones…and those machines are changing the way the world wages war. US soldiers in Afghanistan rely more and more upon intelligence gathered from drones, and President Obama recently …
Feb 09
“Are you depressed?” begins every article on this subject. I’m just going to go ahead and assume you are. But don’t kill yourself yet. Scientists from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have invented a smartphone that’s sure to annoy as well as depress you. A smart phone spots symptoms of depression by harnessing all the sensor …
Feb 09
Since m1k3y just declared flâneur to be the word of the week and thinking on that very subject helped inspire me to quit Facebook, I thought I’d share another old essay that, once upon a time, helped define some of the sensibility of this blog. Allow me to introduce, The Data Dandy. The data dandy collects …
