Category — General

Inside the Mind of Gloria Brame: Eclipse with bird:

Eclipse with bird

A bird sits on a tree during a solar eclipse in Islamabad…

This is the best picture i’ve seen from the eclipse…. art still lives in islamabad.

Multitasking less efficient, easier for young people:

TIME magazine covers what they call “Generation M” – M for multitasking – made up of overstimulated teenagers who constantly split their time and attention between instant messaging, Facebook, Myspace, their iPods, cell phone and blogs.

Psychologists say this kind of multitasking is easier for young adults than children or older people because of development in a certain area of the brain, and is also a lot less efficient than focusing on one task at a time.

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if human brains adapt or can be habituated to certain mental conditions, which in my experience is clearly true, within certain frameworks of capacity, then it seems clear to me that if you train a brain to multitask efficiently, it could become less efficient at other things, that is… if there is a trajectory model of adaption which is implied by limited capacities. Thoughts?

AxisofLogic/ Economy:

March 23rd is more than a normal day. A release from DownsizeDC serves as a reminder that today the Federal Reserve stops publishing a statistic known as M3 – the best information available on how much new currency is being created and held around the world. The release points out that “The Federal Reserve can create new dollars out of thin air. … When more dollars are created prices rise and the value of your savings fall.”

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isn’t this sort of like what happened in weimar germany before hyper inflation?

Clapton Miller Sanburn :

Clapton Miller Sanburn

End hunger in a video game:

Not all video games are horrible. Just try out the simulation called Food Force, in which players take on six missions to help feed millions of hungry people in a place called Sheylan in the Indian Ocean. 

The game, freely downloadable off of Yahoo, was created by, of all groups, the United Nations. The UN has a sub-organization called the World Food Programme (WFP) whose mission is “halving the proportion of hungry people in the world.” The game is mostly educational, representing to players what the day to day tasks of the WFP are: from determining a what a balanced diet for the people of Sheylan would be to figuring out they best way to distribute aid. No guns, no shooting, but there are a few helicopter rides.

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interesting simulation….

‘Party in your pants’ iPod accessory ships Stateside [printer-friendly] | The Register :

‘Party in your pants’ iPod accessory ships StatesideBy ‘ard RegPublished Tuesday 28th March 2006 12:41 GMTThe iBuzz, the infamous iPod-enhanced vibrator, has…er…come to the US. Already on sale in the UK, the device has now gone one sale to North Americans keen to really ‘feel’ the music, movies or even video games…

Dubbed the “music-activated orgasm machine”, the iBuzz connects to an iPod or any other digital music player, using its audio output to drive a vibrating bullet. The pack contains a set of his’n'hers spikey latex sleeves for “extra excitement”.

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the cultural replacement of pair-bonding relationships with ipods…. continues! heh

California Town Installs
Stockades for Smokers > The LaLa Times:

CALABASAS, Calif. – Thinking of lighting up in California? Think again. A new shaming law here takes effect this month will put smokers in publicly placed stockades for up to 30 days as part of legislation intended to shame smokers and cut health care costs.

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Civilization is grand

computerworks:

follow the pink ball.

Stanislaw Lem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Stanisław Lem (September 12, 1921 – March 27, 2006) was a Polish science fiction, philosophical, and satirical writer. His books have been translated into 41 languages and sold over 27 million copies. At one point he was the most widely read science fiction author in the world. Lem’s writing is full of intelligent humor, puns, and neologisms, and Michael Kandel’s translations into English have been praised by many for capturing Lem’s style.

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Stanislaw Lem passed on today. The world is at a great loss.

Critical Information Studies: Everybody's doin' it:

Some interesting reactions around the blogosphere to my Critical Information Studies paper over the past few days. Most of it seems to be to Cory’s summary over at Boing Boing rather than to the paper itself. Such are blogs. Sigh.

One consistent theme is “we are already doing all that over here in my discipline.” Insert discipline. Yes. That is my point exactly. Everyone is thinking about this stuff. But what is cool and unique about CIS is that EVERYONE IS THINKING ABOUT IT! Computer scientists and anthropologists and poets are all concerned about DRM and TRIPS! Isn’t that something very cool?

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I had posted a nice bit of text exemplifying the philosophical history of the critique of information systems taking the critical element back through about 4 periods as a comment to this article….. it disappeared probably spam catcher of some sort. suxxors. in any case, yeah, critical information studies. it isn’t new, but it is interesting.