Posts from — May 2003

Red vs. Blue: kickass short movies made with video-games. Sez Cory:

The two most astonishing things about the Red vs. Blue shorts are:

• How convulsively funny they are
• How emotive, expressive and inherently comedic game-avatars can be

Check 'em out yourself at Red Versus Blue. [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

the appropriation of games and their inherent usefulness in creative and educational endeavors has yet to be explored to my satisfaction….

The Revolution will be telestreamed.

Here are the Adbusters Epiphany finalists. My fave: Human branding.

These are great! more anti-commercials more of the time….

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Fedora – Digitial object repository management system. Quote: “The Fedora project was established under the auspices of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build a digital object repository management system based on the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora). The new system, designed to be a foundation upon which interoperable web-based digital libraries, institutional repositories and other information management systems can be built, demonstrates how distributed digital library architecture can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and Web services”

Comment: via Raymond Yee. [Serious Instructional Technology]

This is somewhat related to a project that I'm working on, though my project had nothing to do with theirs….

LYNCH A.A.R.. Donald Sensing links a WaTi report that the Army's CID is investigating the circumstances of the ambush in which PFC Jessica Lynch was initially captured…. [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

watch that 'wag the dog' action, isn't it pretty.

EINSTEIN SYNDROME. Thomas Sowell has an interesting column on a syndrome with which I had been largely unfamiliar: geniuses who are labeled autistic or mentally retarded because… [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

This is an interesting phenomena, but i wonder how many of those who develop language later are geniuses….

Second Lowest Form of Wit.

Jean Baudrillard (Apologetic): I’m sorry I’m so late for dinner, dear, I got stuck at the office. Have I missed everything?

Mrs Baudrillard (Annoyed): Welcome to the dessert of the meal.

I know there’s a genre of these jokes waiting to be born.

[Kieran Healy's Weblog]

but there is no mrs. baudrillard, which makes this even funnier.

Bursty Community Formation in Blogspace. Absolutely fascinating paper on community formation in blogspace, by Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Jasmine Novak, and Andrew Tomkins, called On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace. (Free ACM account required — it's so worth it, just for this article.) [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

This is an itneresting read, but i'm wondering why this is different from say the irc community around certain events, etc. i don't think blogging is anymore bursty or really that bursty at all in comparison..

Now that's small.

No that's not dust they're prototype RDIF tags from Hitachi

[Micah's Weblog]

Wow – that is small. About 10 years ago I met with the head of strategic planning at Loblaws, Rob Almeida, who then went on to set up President's Choice Banking. We were talking about the future of supermarkets. At the time, he forecast two things: that supermarkets would scale up to 80,000 square feet. Which they have done. And then, that a maximum size would be reached and the strategy of bigger is better would have to be rethought.  His other big idea was that, at some point, inventory management technology may advance to the point where it would be possible to go the other way. To have a small mart that would have everything you needed because it would be able  to track everything so well that it would only carry what we wanted. I wonder are we in sight of Rob's second prediction?

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

These are going to change a lot of things. If items, or people, can be tracked by specks almost too small to see, what will happen to our expectation of privacy? WHat will happen to our constitutional rights against search and seizure when we can really have no reasonable expectation of privacy? But then, we could use the same technology and follow politicians everywhere. Oh, this is going to be a fine kettle of fish. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

These are small enough to inhale, spread across clothes, etc. with powerful enough transceivers you could very much track a person doing just about anything with the proper application of these. In short, this needs regulated.

my proposition is that any device that can be used to identify and track human beings, being intended for that or not, should be labelled as such with a warning label that is readable to the unaided human eye.

in short, that would prevent rfid dusting. i mean these things can be inhaled or theoretically injected in a wide variety of ways.

Dream Tournament: Annika vs. Vijay. Sid Meier designed a virtual golf course that pits Vijay Singh against Annika Sorenstam. By Sid Meier. [New York Times: Technology]

Simulations are fine, but lets put some tournaments together with mixed membership. Since I worked on a golf course as a kid, I've seen that the equality in this sport is quite easy to see, it is all about the set-up of the holes.

Probe into 'happy pill' after suicides. Government bows to pressure over Prozac and Seroxat. [Guardian Unlimited]

It's about time.