Category: Digital Culture

Google Suggest is a Google interface that “suggests” what you are looking for as you type. It does so using:

algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.

I did notice some interesting results when challenged with “naughty” language. Evidently “blow job” is a perfectly acceptable term, since as I enter “b-l-o-w” it suggests “blow job” to me. But “fuck” doesn’t give any results…contrary to expectations. Neither does “sex” or “anal,” but “f-e-l-l” gets “fellate” as a suggestion. “B-u-t-t” gets lots of suggestions for things, but “b-i-t-c-h” doesn’t. “F-e-l-t-c” gets “feltching” as a suggestion, so I can only assume that it’s the Seven Dirty Words that are somehow depreciated in the results. “M-o-t-h-e-r-f-u” gets me “Motherfunkers” as a suggestion….somehow, not the mostly likely result.

I’ve emailed Google about the limitations, and will post the result as soon as I get one.

..give me one of these things! We are inching closer and closer to real-life Anime these days. We’ve got working replicas of Kaneda’s bike from Akira…what Anime/Sci-Fi t3ch would all my readers like to see? I’ll put in one vote for hoverboards and lightsabers, but only for their Darwinist capabilities. 🙂

The Toyota iFoot This 2-legged, mountable robot was developed for three-dimensional mobility, with the ability to navigate staircases. The passenger climbs on and drives with a joystick. Toyota will present this proposal for a new type of mobility at EXPO 2005 AICHI, JAPAN.

Of course, once this is a reality, we’re only a step away from Nanny and Orphan Maker. Watch out, kids!

Paul Jones pinged me today to let me know that one of his current students is doing some research into Blogs and Ethics. While it looks like it’s pretty heavily geared towards “Blogs as Journalism” I thought that some of my esteemed readers might have something to say. Here’s the summary from the site:

I am a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I am researching ethics in the blogosphere, and I am using this blog to gather the opinions and insights of active bloggers. I invite you to answer the following questions by publicly posting your comments or by e-mailing me at mgkuhn at email dot unc dot edu.

It’s an interesting take, in that he breaks down the first three questions into the philosopher who first popularized that particular twist on ethics: Rawls (Stakeholder), Ross (prima facie Duty), or Kant(Absolute Duty). The last couple of questions are more personal, focusing on the function and purpose of blogging for you.

I’ll hold off on questioning why he stuck with those three, out of the hundreds of ethical styles, and simply say: go comment! I’ll reflect on the types, and comment in a bit, after I managed to lay aside my humanist ethics for awhile and put on these other coats.

Been a bit longer than I like since I’ve blogged…I try hard to record something every day, just for myself (and the half-dozen brave readers who keep coming back). Thanksgiving caused some of the delay, and the fact that I’ve been fighting off a chest cold for a few days hasn’t helped. Nothing makes you feel down quite like being unable to breathe.

On to more interesting matters: Slate has an interview up with my favorite scientist, Richard Dawkins. The fact that I have a favorite scientist should come as no surprise to any of you (I also have a favorite poet, a favorite fantasy author, a favorite way to eat chocolate, and a favorite Iron Chef. My life is full of judgement and hyperbole.). If readers of this blog haven’t read him, go thee forth to a library and get a copy of The Selfish Gene (a book that literally changed the way I understood the world the first time I read it) and The Blind Watchmaker (another book that caused me no end of philosophical re-thinking).

During the interview, there’s a discussion of things evolutionary, among them the role of losing hair during the course of man’s journey:

As for the hair in our armpits and pubic regions, that was probably retained because it helps disseminate “pheromones,” airborne scent signals that still play a bigger role in our sex lives than most of us realize.

I know that scientists are still arguing this, but I’ve never read any suggestion that seems the most obvious to me. Why would there still be hair only around those parts of humans that lose the largest amount of heat to the outside world? Oh…I don’t know…maybe insulation? Maybe the axiliary hair deals with heat loss/retention in ways that we don’t quite get yet. Just an idea (but it seems a good deal more likely than waving the idea of “phermones” around.).

I also appreciate the end of the article, where the interviewer asks Dawkins about his critiques of religion:

“You’ve called religion a ‘dangerous collective delusion’ and a ‘malignant infection,’ ” I said. “Don’t you think you’re underplaying it a bit?”

Dawkins turned, smiled a small fox smile, and said, “Yes!”

But for a different reason, this time not for beauty but for pangs of youth.

Behold! The wonder of the 30 in one Commodore 64 Game Joystick! Evidently QVC has purchased ALL of these that the manufacturer made, so the only place to get one is via them. The list of games is awesome though (well….there are a few crap games, but mostly): you get Impossible Mission AND Impossible Mission II, Summer Games, Winter Games…Sumo…just tons of good stuff. If I could tell you how many hours I wasted playing those first four games during my youth, I would, but I can’t currently count that high due to a turkey hangover. This is WAY up on my “cool shit for christmas” list.

EDIT: evidently QVC has completely decided to eliminate deep linking via a screwed up method of javascript redirects. In any case, if you go to qvc.com and search for Commodore it will come up. I tried a link edit above, but I’m not sure it will work.

Happy Turkey Day, in which we eat fowl, hang with our family, and try desperately not to remember that we invaded and destroyed the native cultures of this country through starvation, war, and disease. Oh, and we watch football. But not that football, this football.

🙂 Happy Thanksgiving 🙂

You got a rollercoaster in my industrial robot! No, you got an industrial robot in my rollercoaster!

Those that know me know my love of the adrenaline. That leads me to do stupid things like this and this and this. However, this new coaster concept looks….insane. A fully operational robotic arm extended from the track attachment, with a full range of motion, which means that at any one time you could be moving on the track, being moved side-to-side or forward or backward, all the while spinning on a horizontal axis. That’s something I’d stand in line for.

Check the wicked looking photo of the “car”:

This site has a list of very amusing alternatives for people who wish to sticker textbooks, in reaction to this news piece about the neverending battle of evolution vs idiots. Very amusing. My favorite:

Don’t know if anyone else has become addicted to this site, but if you haven’t, take a look.

Kong is King

It’s the production blog for the Peter Jackson remake of Kong. Included are incredible video shorts about what they’ve done each day (doesn’t quite count as a vidblog, but there’s an incredible amount of both video and text on here). Fascinating to see behind the scenes of such a huge production.

The many-storied making of the film Watchmen evidently took another turn today. Darren Aronofsky was attached to the film, which I thought was brilliant. Now it appears that he has some conflict and Paul Greengrass has taken over. Greengrass directed The Bourne Supremacy, which was a fine action film, but didn’t convince me that he can do Noir Superhero.

That said, I do sincerely hope that whoever makes this film does it some justice. Hollywood has gotten better at the superhero movie (see: Spiderman I & II, Hellboy, and hopefully the upcoming Batman Begins) in recent years, but Watchmen is a different beast. For anyone who hasn’t read it, go pick it up. It’s one of the most compelling stories ever told in the comic medium, full of darkness and despair and real characters rather than archetypes (ok…we’ve still got archetypes in Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias).

In a related note, I just checked the Wikipedia entry on Watchmen, and the director had already been changed. Amazing.