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It seems the internet has yet to make its most significant contribution to our lives. Screwing up our reputations. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has suggested that everyone will change their name as a rite of passage because of what they have done on line on Facebook and tweets etc. so they can leave their youthful mistakes behind them.
Of course its firms like Google that actually make this data easily accessible and able to be searched and collated so readily. So it’s actually a problem that is exasperated by their software. I would suspect that they are looking at expanding into the identity market. They can sell a name change service to you and to then they can sell all the information they have collected on you to anyone with the money.
Basically, it’s a niche market. Many others are in there and Google will have to buy out one of the established business link it with the Google databases and it would become the biggest in the world and with Google propensity to just take what they want I wouldn’t be surprised to find them trawling your machines pulling data for their databases.
I bet we would all be surprised by the amount of data Google has on each and every one of us now when the proper algorithms are applied. Once they turn their skills and access their databases for that use it will be a massive invasion of Privacy. Helped of course by our own useless governments giving them free updates of our data on a regular basis because they are so inept.
Something needs to be done all right. I’m sure though that the proper solution won’t be acceptable to the government and thus I think we should end up changing our name every few years. You can do it here cheaply enough here. One question, don’t tell the missus, does it invalidate a marriage license?
I always liked Maths at school. It was a subject that was not subject to opinion and if you could do the basics then you could build on that to do almost anyting. Unlike art where a big blob painted on was boring and lacked imagination but a blob put on a canvas by your bottom shows imagination and a new outlook on life. Life was good and understandable and the basic maths I was taught has lasted me well and even now after all these years 1 + 1 = 2. Bliss. I’m still up to date….. or am I?
Along comes modern mathematics, and like physics, it starts looking outside the real world and suddenly they turn everything on its head. They go all 11th dimension on me and now they are not so sure 1 + 1 = 2 and long known truths are now considered invalid. Who the hell has ever worked outside our normal 4 dimensions where 1 + 1 = 2? Do we ever think we will need to work in the 8th dimension? Where exactly are these dimensions anyway? How relevant is it to the real world really?
This is the problem nowadays. Everything that was so simple now seems so complicated in a theoretical way, a way that will never be of interest in the real world. Yet my real world practical understanding of everything is being mauled by theoretical constructs which 99.999% of the population don’t understand and 99.9999% of the world have no real practical use for.
I only hope it leads to a warp drive or something. In the meantime I’m sticking to my 1 + 1 = 2 and thats what I’ll be using in all my real world stuff.
Porn is and always has been an trigger for innovation. Never mind what you think of the contents porn has driven several technological innovations to prominance where it would have taken much longer for them to rise on their own. Cameras, Video, Digital, DVD, Multi-Angle and the Internet have all been utilised by the porn industry. Porn has provided a reason for many people to buy technology to enjoy themselves. Not forgetting of course that despite Porn films being copied time and time again, certainly much more than normal films, the porn industry is still bigger than Hollywood.
Yet, in one area porn seems to be behind the times. 3D movies. Although since the success of Avatar 3D movies are now the big thing and the race is on to produce the first 3D porn film. The mind boggles. I wonder what innovations this will spawn.
Personally, I’m still awaiting the total immersion system, self cleaning model of course, myself.
I hate exercise. My lifestyle is such that I never get much real exercise and since I left my teens a long way behind I’ve been more into minimal sweating.
I do have a few items of gym equipment though although it took me a while to work out the claims made by the manufacturers is rubbish. Buy this item and in six weeks you will have six pack abs. Here I am ten years later still the same. The Trades Description Acts doesn’t seem to apply to these scammers. A fitness expert I consulted said that it wasn’t owning the item that gave you the six pack it was by using it regularly. Oh! I thought that building the thing up was exercise enough.
Anyway, I did try to use them but I found it really boring. Simply listening to music was not keeping me from getting bored and I found that although I didn’t mind the thirty minutes or on the machine I found it so monotonous that I come to hate it. What I did want was a DVD player. Something that I could watch an episode of something or a film while I exercised.
The latest though is to play games or watch TV on the machines. Better I suppose but not quite what I had in mind. Maybe next time we will have a DVD player until, of course, we get the ultimate system. One that puts you into a dream state which will count towards your nightly quota of sleep and exercises your body all at the same time. If we can then add one of those sleep training machines so we could learn something as well then we would have a winner.
Seems we have a new invisibility cloak. Not quite Harry Potter cloaking as it doesn’t work on visible light.
Now I think they may be missing the point here. If I want to be invisible to infrared I wear some silver foil. Makes me stand out a bit to real live humans but it will fool the PIR on an alarm system. To actually work on visible light and be effective is going to be some trick.
To bend light round an object like a Romulan Warbird or James Bond’s Aston Martin ‘Vanish’ is going to take some doing. You see by creating a light hole humans, and computers, can see it and investigate. It’s one of those things that sounds easy but is in fact going to be difficult. To put it in context it’s going to be harder than getting an honest politician in Westminster.
You see our eyes spot movement and anomalies easily and you might be able to set up a scene where something is hidden easy enough but then view that scene from a different angle or even by moving a few inches [Spit to metric] you have an entirely different picture. No cloak can do that nor is it likely to do so in the near future. Now making a space ship invisible in the dark of space or a man invisible on an artic plain. Providing that the stars were nicely placed or there was very little movement But Harry Potter in the library with or without a candlestick not for a long time yet I suspect.
So the claim that we have an Invisibility Cloak needs to be taken with a big pinch of salt or as I like to say a big porky.
Looks like the Iranian people are being helped to access the Internet by the development of a new tool called Haystack. Haystack works by hiding the real destination by encrypting the traffic between the client and Haystacks servers. This stops the Iranian government monitoring the clients browsing habits and then using the recorded sites to break down his door and arrest him, killing him if he resists, and keeping him in a dark prison where his rights do not exist. Clearly they don’t deserve that and so we must help them.
One of lifes ironies is that the US state department is helping the developer of Haystack.
Now if you don’t understand what I mean think about the fact that the US government is currently collecting data from all its allies around the world. All their browsing habits and URLs are being stored and analysed by the US so they can go and break down our doors and arrest us, killing us if we resists, and keeping us in a dark prison where our rights do not exist. Clearly we must do what we can to stop these traitors.
So they are helping fund a tool to stop another country doing exactly what they do.
Once Haystack has gone live can we look to the Iranian goverment funding a Western version to enable us to bypass the monitoring by our governments. I hope so. I even think that we would get more use out of it because there must be more of us in the West wanting to bypass monitoring than in Iran. So the Government that may have the most to lose is funding the development of a tool that will be used against it in the future.
Governments do this sort of thing all the time but they never learn. Just think about the stinger missiles given to the Taliban in Afghanistan so they could shoot down Russian helicopters and planes in the 80s. The Taliban were a proxy for us against those evil Russians so we trained and armed them. Fast forward 25 years and those same stingers are shooting down our helicopters and planes and killing our troops while they prosecute a war to put a free government in that hell hole of a country. There is real irony for you.
Researchers have found a new way of repairing damaged nerve connections in mice. OK, still a long way from human use but never the less still a step forward which will bring hope to millions as well as opening new avenues of research in prosthetics and augmentation.
Now it seems to me that there are several techniques recently that are based on rejuvenation of something or more accurately tricking something into thinking it is part of a baby. I wonder if this could be used as a way to regenerate lost digits by making the stump think it is still in embryonic stage. Taking it further could we regenerate an eye or an inner ear. What about a limb? A kidney or liver would be nice. Think of the millions of lives that would enhance.
It sounds ridiculous imaging a small finger or eye growing whilst attached to a person but I would envisage that there would be advantages in doing that. Sure, it sounds easier to grow a cloned appendage but attaching it later would require linking the nerve cells. Growing a new one would have all that already sorted. More of an issue with eyes and ears than with fingers, appendages and organs. Swings and roundabouts.
Of course if we try and graft on new appendages like a third arm for parcel wrappers or something that will require linking into the nervous system. Will our nervous system be flexible enough to handle that? I think so because we are adaptable but only time will tell.
We could have two hearts installed, two livers. In fact two of everything. It would boost our immune systems. Make us handle accidental poisoning and more robust to accidents overall. In fact when we finally manage to isolate biological functions in other life forms maybe we could add them on to us. Gills anyone? Or knowing our species it would be more like poisoned claws.
In case you are wondering if anyone would get these changes done. Look at this.
Now bearing in mind that all that requires surgery. How many people do you think will do this if it can be done with simple injections and grown in situ? More than I care to think about. It will be the new fashion.
It seems Google has quite a challenge on its hands with its project to digitise every book on the internet. I thought that it could simple put an entry for every ISBN number and then digitise them like that until it was up to date and was simply digitising new books. Books without an ISBN number would simply have one generated and it would then be scanned. Silly me. It seems that many things have ISBN numbers, including for some reason turkey probes, so it’s not so simple.
Read here to see how they went about their calculations that there are 129,864,880 books that need to be in their database.
Anyway, I think that that number seems low. In saying that I have no idea how many books there are missing. I would guess that over the last 50 years, around where ISBN came into being, was the start of cheap printing and the pulp fiction explosion so I would suspect that most of the books would have ISBN numbers. Subtract all the odd documents, and the turkey probes, and you must have a good proportion of the written works since man started putting pen to paper. Add a couple of million for books that have been hand written and stored in some dark library somewhere and that should be it. But that makes it much less. Maybe I overestimated the written creativity in our species.
No matter how you add them up it’s a hell of a lot of books. More than I will ever read and I like books. I have only read about 0.001% of the books available to me. How many fantastic books have I missed? With a bit of luck they will make the books downloadable so we can build our own databases of books based on our favourite subjects or themes. I would love a cookbook version that had all the cookbooks and recopies in and then you could search by whatever criteria you want.
I wonder what versions of boos will they be putting in there? Will they put the orginal Grimms fairy tales in for example or go for the nice version.
An ambitious project that still has many legal issues to overcome before it is complete. So many actually that I wonder if they will make it. We will see. With so many things that could happen to our species I suspect a doomsday vault is a good idea. If we did bite the bullet like the dinosaurs and some other species finds the database with everything in it I wonder what they would make of our fictional entertainment. Books like the Koran, the Bible and Gordon Browns books on Courage.
A wall climbing robot with a difference. ROCR is designed to use a pendalum effect to climb walls. Swinging as a human does from toe hold to toe hold using its tail as a balance and a lever.
It can only climb carpeted walls at the moment but plans are afoot to make it climb brick or sandstone which should be easy enough. Let’s see how well it does on marble or glass though. It will need other feet for those.
The long term intention is to built a unit to make a tool for inspection, maintenance and surveillance. Personally, I can’t see it being useful for inspectiion and maintenance as it clearly will be for surveillance. I can envisage smaller versions of this loaded with micro cameras and climbing any surface to spy on people. Every spy will have a few of these in their toolkit
Scientists are strange creatures. Able to look at things in ways that ordinary mortals do not. In some cases it can lead to great advancement and we have nuclear power and in others it leads to some sort of insanity and we have the climate change concensus.
In this case we have scientists who have developed an eye that can be used on UAVs which will enable them to ‘see’. Based on this scientists think they can unlock the secrets of the insects’ sensing, processing and navigational skills.
Now making a camera that can see what a bee sees and linking it to a computer programmed to visualise the input, analyse and then act I can understand. It will be a massive step forward in our quest for intelligent robotic devices. Using the input to replicate the navigation skills of a bee sound like something that sounds so unrealistic that I can actually see it working. After all if the bees eye is used for navigation, and all books seems to support navigation by the sun with the bee adjusting for time changes, and a bees brain is so simple that we could replicate it with simple visual inputs then it could actually be replicated by simply programmed responces to visual cues. It will either be a breakthrough or a drone just changing course erratically. It’ll be worth watching although I wouldn’t imagine the Air Force looking at replacing all their GPS systems with one of these and having it recognise one path in and out and during daylight hours as well.
Even if it works I wonder what the uses of this system will be.
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Identity crisis
It seems the internet has yet to make its most significant contribution to our lives. Screwing up our reputations. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has suggested that everyone will change their name as a rite of passage because of what they have done on line on Facebook and tweets etc. so they can leave their youthful mistakes behind them.
Of course its firms like Google that actually make this data easily accessible and able to be searched and collated so readily. So it’s actually a problem that is exasperated by their software. I would suspect that they are looking at expanding into the identity market. They can sell a name change service to you and to then they can sell all the information they have collected on you to anyone with the money.
Basically, it’s a niche market. Many others are in there and Google will have to buy out one of the established business link it with the Google databases and it would become the biggest in the world and with Google propensity to just take what they want I wouldn’t be surprised to find them trawling your machines pulling data for their databases.
I bet we would all be surprised by the amount of data Google has on each and every one of us now when the proper algorithms are applied. Once they turn their skills and access their databases for that use it will be a massive invasion of Privacy. Helped of course by our own useless governments giving them free updates of our data on a regular basis because they are so inept.
Something needs to be done all right. I’m sure though that the proper solution won’t be acceptable to the government and thus I think we should end up changing our name every few years. You can do it here cheaply enough here. One question, don’t tell the missus, does it invalidate a marriage license?