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A Twittering, Flickring World

Here’s a really neat way to visualize our world in Real Time. twittervision takes the text-messages posted on twitter, and shows them on a google map as they are being posted. Watching this application with the “3D View” turned on, I was able to watch Californians planning their night as I was turning in to bed, Japanese waking up with positive affirmations about the upcoming day, and Chinese twitters that I couldn’t read at all. : )

Check it out:

Twittervision
Twittervision
(Click on 3D View for this display)

There’s also Flickrvision, which provides the same application, but shows you Flickr Photos as they are being uploaded all over the world in real time:

Flickrvision
Flickrvision

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Latest comments

I own a computer. It has television-like qualities; however, it also has much much more interactivity. : )

... read the full comment by Ryan Somma | Comment on Become a RedPill: Kill Your Television Read Become a RedPill: Kill Your Television

Macs are very pretty, and user-friendly, but I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu, user-friendly version of Linux. It’s not for everyone, but I’m working up the nerve to install it as

... read the full comment by Ryan Somma | Comment on The Joys of Windows Vista Read The Joys of Windows Vista

Oh the joys of Microsoft….

Vista has many problems when it comes to allowing the user to control their own computer. Not to mention what you discussed in the blog, Vista also allows automatic VPN from your computer to Microsoft Support. So

... read the full comment by MacAddik | Comment on The Joys of Windows Vista Read The Joys of Windows Vista

Why should I send my name to the moon. Who’s going to read it - martians from outerspace.

... read the full comment by SK | Comment on FREE: Send Your Name to the Moon Read FREE: Send Your Name to the Moon

PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

My Habits Make me a Pathmaker in PMOG
My Habits Make me a
Pathmaker in PMOG

Education is an adventure. We quest for knowledge throughout our lives, whether its the daily news, OTJ, or sitcoms. Every fact collected in our minds a tool for accessing new information and clarifying the old. Every fact is also a weapon in debate, which are battles in society’s perpetual war of ideas.

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) takes this principle and let’s you keep score. Deploy mines on websites to wreck other players’ concentration. Set up portals on websites to teleport other players to sites of similar interests (or, as is often the case, RickRoll them). Leave crates filled with treasure for other players to stumble upon (one of my favorite activities).

Indie badge for players who can go 24 hours without using google
Indie badge for players who can go
24 hours without using google

(I can’t get this badge.)

Earn badges for changing your web-surfing habits. Go 24 hours without using Google. Read xkcd once a week for four weeks. visit 100 websites in a 24 hour period (first badge I got, and wasn’t even trying). You can view the complete list of badges and archetypes here.

Create quests for other players to take by setting up a series of lightposts around the Internet for them to follow, exploring websites as they go. All the while earning datapoints, which increase your level and may be spent on new items at the shoppe.

The game is currently in the beta-testing phase, and there’s much room for improvement and expansion. Sign up now to earn your PMOG “Beta Tester” badge, but remember that, as a Beta, you will experience issues. I’ve had to scrap some missions I was building and start over from scratch because the Mission-Generator application is somewhat buggy.

Most of all, have fun. Learning is a game, and with PMOG you can keep score.

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Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought

Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” - Hobbes

The Stuff of Thought
The Stuff of Thought

I once had a conversation with a girl that went like this:

“Ryan, you’re a bama.”

“What’s a ‘bama?’”

“It’s… you know… what you are.”

“That makes no sense.”

“A bama’s a bama, and you’re a bama.”

“You can’t use a word to define itself.”

She shrugged, “Well, that’s what you are.”

The conversation went in circles like this, never making it anywhere, but it does raise questions about how new words enter our lexicon and how they derive their meanings. The semantics of language are an often debated subject in politics and law, as with the lawsuit over whether the World Trade Center attacks constituted one or two “events”, which affected the insurance pay off by billions of dollars.

This is the subject Stephen Pinker tackles in The Stuff of Thought, the third book in his trilogy on language. As with The Blank Slate, there were numerous inaccuracies in Pinker’s writing, but I was more forgiving of them as his politics were much tamer in this book. Reading Stephen Pinker is like reading spaghetti, anecdotes here, references to future chapters there, digressions abound, overly erudite at times and mind-numbingly thorough at others. But reading Pinker is an overall rewarding experience, and his style works for this subject.

I come away from Pinker’s books with a plethora of new anecdotes. In TSoT I learned that the Turkish language has an inferential tense, which communicates whether something was learned firsthand or as hearsay, a proof for the theorem that a horse has an infinite number of legs, and all the Beatles symbolism surrounding the death of Paul McCartney. In English we describe time as forward and backwards, the Chinese phrase it as up and down, and the Aymara describe the future as coming up from behind us, which makes sense metaphorically. Creationists and Evolutionists have a very different definition of the word “species,” with Creationists taking a view that includes strict boundaries between different animal types, and Evolutionists seeing a blending of characteristics from one form to another.

All of these anecdotes raise interesting questions about language. Does a culture’s language restrict what it may think about? If Paul McCartney died in 1966, and someone else took his place, then what does the name “Paul McCartney” refer to? Were the WTC attacks one or two events? Are the differences between Evolutionists and Creationists a reflection of a relative worldview butting heads with a dichotomous one?

A section on baby name fads was fascinating, as people try to choose uncommon names, and, in doing so, inadvertently choose a name that will be common. Consider all the brainiacs named “Steve” in science literature (Hawking, Gould, Pinker, Project Steve), or consider how names like Ethel, Ruth, and Agnes make us think of old people, but these names were simply popular when these people were born. You can check with the Social Security Administration to find out what names will be the “old people” names of the future.

Pinker explores how much of our language is programmed, with examples like the fact that swearing in our own language is more cathartic and that there is an instinctive basis for swearing. An entire chapter on swear words both defends the fact that swear words aren’t intrinsically worse than any other, and upholds the restriction on their use, as their cathartic effect would be dampened and language cheapened if everyone started using them all the time. I also learned the origins of words like “jerk” and “scumbag,” which are no longer considered especially offensive, but would be if people knew what they refer to.

Then there’s the part I personally find confusing, the way people speak indirectly. How, instead of telling someone to pass the green beans, we ask them if they could pass the green beans. Or how it is considered completely offensive to request a sexual encounter with someone, so the appropriate thing to do is ask them in for coffee or a nightcap. A year after my “bama” conversation, I was in a clothing store and overheard the following:

“What’s a ‘bama?’”

“It’s what you are.”

“I don’t get it.”

The young couple paused when they noticed me smiling knowingly at their exchange before moving on. It had finally clicked with me what a “bama” was.

It was an excuse to flirt.


Note: The UrbanDictionary has several definitions for “bama”, one of them mentions the phrase being local to Washington DC, where both of these conversations took place.

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The Top 10 Human Genes

As the purposes for various genes are identified on a weekly basis in the news, this list will be obsolete in a few months, but I wanted to post this. There aren’t enough plain-English reviews of human genes out there. I apologize if I bullox up something. My criteria was based on the importance of the gene to human beings specifically, novelty, and how well we know the gene does what we think it does.

Click the links for any of the genes listed to learn about how the gene appears to work:

1. FOXP2: This gene may be the most important of all in separating the humans from other primates. FOXP2 is crucial to our ability to talk to the elaborate degree we humans are able. A British family with an abnormal copy of FOXP2 has “immobility of the lips, tongue, and mouth, which makes their speech garbled.”

2. OT: The oxytocin gene is what makes mothers motherly, lovers snuggly, and housepets cuddly. It’s a chemical reward our bodies give us for forming social bonds with one another through physical contact.

Oxytocin
Oxytocin
Image by Fvasconcellos

3. AVPR1a: One of Homo Sapiens’ strongest adaptations for survival is our social-bonding, our willingness to sacrifice our own well-being for the community and work together for common goals. A variant of AVPR1a appears to have a strong influence on this behavior. Nicknamed the “altruism gene,” it is also found in other species that exhibit strong social bonds. (Another variation of this same gene leads to ruthless behavior, earning it a “ruthless gene” nickname.

Mars

4. SRY: Carried on the The Y Chromosome (often considered a “genetic deadzone”), this is the gene responsible for the masculinization process. Mammals lacking the SRY gene are female; therefore, men are the mutation. This gene is important for sexual dimorphism, as the evolutionary adaptation known as “sex” may allow species to diversify their genes and evolve more quickly.

5. OPN1LW: The Gene for Color Vision is found in the retina, and people with color blindness probably have a defective OPN1LW. The evolutionary importance of OPN1NW has downgraded the importance of olfactory genes (the genes for our sense of smell), which have been going dead in our recent evolutionary history, because smell is not as important for survival when you can see in color.

6. RB1: this was the first of the Tumor suppressor genes discovered. The entire Human Apoptosis Gene Array is responsible for killing cells in your body that have gone cancerous before they are able to spread. These genes are like the enforcers for the police-state that makes up your multi-cellular existence.

7. FIT2: This is a gene that many of us would like to knock out the way researchers have knocked it out in animals to prevent fat storage; however, without this gene it’s doubtful humans would have survived this long as fat storage is crucial to surviving times of famine.

adult neural stem cells
In culture, the number of
adult neural stem cells triples
in the presence of the
Sonic hedgehog protein.

8. Sonic the Hedgehog: Cool for being named after a Sega Genesis video game character, but also cool for its importance. Part of the hedgehog family of genes, which are regulators of animal development, Sonic is crucial to the development of neural stem cells.

(Not part of this list is the POKemon gene, found to cause cancer, had to be renamed after a lawsuit by Nintendo.)

9. HAR1F: An important gene separating us from other animals, HAR1 has mutated at an accelerated pace since we split off from other primates a few million years ago. The gene is believed to affect brain development, but more research is needed to understand what it does exactly.

10. Noncoding or “Junk” DNA: It appears that about 80-90 percent of the human genome serves no purpose, and we don’t know why. Are we carrying the “extinct genes” of our ancient ancestors? Are there messages from god written in our DNA, as some creationists want to believe? Are these great genetic deserts a way of preserving our good genes, protecting them by diluting their chance of mutation? There is a genetics joke that Junk DNA actually reads, “this space intentionally left blank.” Junk DNA makes the list for inspiring so much controversy and speculation.

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Earn a Nobel Prize Playing Video Games

No joke. This free software, FoldIt, turns protein folding into a competitive sport. More on the art of protein folding here.

Check out this demo:

I mentioned it’s FREE (as in beer) and well-made, so go download it now.

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Attention Flickr Users

Hat Tip to Clint for pointing me to this. If you have a flickr account, you can view all of your photos sorted by popular/most interesting. Just click on this link and replace my username (“ideonexus”) with your own. Very neat feature.

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Suicide Online

A recent study in the BMJ Suicide and the Internet, found that results for suicide-related search terms most frequently support or encourage suicide.

I like to think of the Internet as one big ecosystem of ideas, or memes, where our minds naturally select out the good ones. Obviously, if most sites are pro-suicide, then we need to get some better memes online.

So if you’ve stumbled across this blog post after googling “how to commit suicide” or “should I kill myself?” or seeking other suicide advice, please take a moment to consider the following reasons not to logout of this great big game of life:

Don’t you want to know what happens next? Like what’s that show Lost all about? I mean, really, what’s the deal with that freaky island? Is it a crazy scientific experiment, a paranormal limbo, or the imagination of some four-year-old girl playing dollies in a sandbox somewhere? If you kill yourself, you’ll never find out! And there’s a lot of other stuff you’ll miss out on too, like movie sequels and xkcd comics and the end of George Bush’s Presidency!

Do some charity work! Giving to others has been scientifically proven to make people happier. Suicide might end you, but everyone else has to live with the burden of your death. Instead of transferring your pain to others, work to easy their pain, and improve your own outlook on life in the process.

Puppies! Ending yourself denies you the opportunity to meet all the puppies still to come into this world!

Kittens don't want you to commit suicide
Puppies
Just another reason not to commit suicide.
Photo by ehecatzin

Pain isn’t forever. It only feels that way. Death is forever. That means it lasts longer than high school, bankruptcy, heartbreak, and the extended director’s cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

People will make fun of you. (Q: How does Kurt Cobain collect his thoughts? A: With a dust buster.)

Kittens! Awwww… Wookie da wittle kee-kees! Aren’t they just adorable? Go pick one up from the SPCA today!

Kittens don't want you to commit suicide
Kittens
They don’t want you to commit suicide
Photo by Ruskis

Stop taking life so seriously! Look, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in a computer simulation and Brian Whitworth at Massey University has even got a pretty good explanation of how our physical world is a virtual reality. And I’ve got a short story online exploring the implications of this hypothesis. Go spend some time in Second Life to get some perspective.

Do you know what happens to Super Mario every time he dies trying to complete a level? He has to go back to the beginning and start all over again. If life’s a video game, then you’re gonna have to relive all this until you get it right.

Don’t log out of the game, get into it!

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Follow Up On Vista

Hat Tip to Chriggy, who sent me this link of a microsoft manager explaining that aggravating the heck out of me with Windows Vista was by design. Incredible.

Hat Tip to TGAW for sending the following PC vs Mac commercial:

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The Joys of Windows Vista

Microsoft has come up with a novel solution to the issue of security in Windows Vista. The basic principle is don’t let the user do anything. You see, if users are prevented from any productivity whatsoever, they can’t screw things up right?

Take for instance User Account Control. This is a new “feature” (note the scarequotes), which asks the user for permission every time they try to do something:

Vista also disables screenshots when this dialog appears, so I had to get this photo with my digital camera
Vista also disables screenshots when this dialog appears,
so I had to get this photo with my digital camera.

It works like this: When you double click on Firefox, you get this pop-up stating that it appears Firefox is trying to run. Do you wish to allow it? You click OK. You try to share a folder, and you get this pop-up stating that it appears something is trying to share a folder. Do you wish to allow it? You click OK. You double click an MP3 and get a warning that Windows Media Player is trying to run. You click OK.

Turning off this “feature” walks you through the depraved sadism that must exist in the minds of Microsoft Developers. I could really feel their contempt for me as a user when I first went to the Windows Security Center and found User Account Control listed there, set to “ON,” with no way to modify it.

There was, however, an unhelpful link below this meaningless status indicator reading, “How does User Account Control help protect my computer?

How indeed. The help topic unhelpfully explained that User Account Control protects my computer by making me click “OK” every time I want to do something.

Truly fascinating, but as Benjamin Franklin wisely cautioned, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” So despite the immense security clicking all these “OK” buttons was affording me, I decided I would trade security for freedom and efficiency by turning them off.

The help topic on this “feature” had nothing to say about how to do that.

So, of course, I consulted that great oracle of how to’s for usurping Microsoft’s bureaucracy, Google, and found this article, which directed me to “User Accounts and Family Safety.” Where I was able to disable the feature, after, of course, being informed that something was trying to disable User Account Control and clicking OK.

Now every time I start Windows Vista, I get a helpful alert message warning me that User Account Control is turned off.

Windows Vista is extremely pretty though.

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One of a Kind

If you are reading this, then you are a member of the human race.

You are a member of Kingdom Animalia, meaning you are multicellular, but, unlike plants, your cells do not have a cell wall. You are a member of Phylum Chordata, meaning you have a central nervous system, and Subphylum Vertebrata, meaning you also have a backbone to protect your dorsal nerve cord.

Your warm bloodedness and mammary glands put you in Class Mammalia. Your Subclass, Placentalia, means you were fully gestated inside your mother before birth, as opposed to being grown in a pouch like kangaroos.

Modern and fossil hominid skulls
Modern and fossil hominid skulls:
modern chimp in the upper left-hand corner, then a
chronologic sequence of hominids ending with modern humans.

Image courtesy NSF
(Click for Larger Image)

Like other members of the Order Primates, you have grasping hands, fingers, and both incisors and molars for teeth. Being in the Family Hominidae, you stand upright, have a large brain, stereoscopic vision, and a flat face. Your Genus, Homo, defines you as having an s-curved spine, and your Species, Homo Sapiens, means you have a well-developed chin and high forehead, which provides room for your brain’s frontal lobe, giving you cognitive ability to imagine the future and plan ahead.

There are presently 6.5 Billion beings in this club we call the Human Race. Even though we all share this taxonomic classification, we still exhibit a tremendous amount of diversity in our genes. Unless you have an identical twin, the chances of someone else having the exact same DNA sequence as you is 1 in 6 million, meaning there are in the area of 1083 people on this planet genetically identical to you.

Despite sharing this identical internal genetic code, known as your genotype, your outward expression of this code, your phenotype, is very different. Our DNA gives our bodies a great deal of plasticity when it comes to growing into our environments. All sorts of environmental factors, such as nutrition, climate, your mother’s womb, and physical experiences have all made your personal DNA expression unique.

Even if your genes did express themselves in the exact same way, as they almost do in identical twins, your personal experiences would be unique. Only you occupy the precise space and time in which you currently exist. No one else can occupy your space-time coordinates, and experience the world the way you do.

You will glimpse less than a century of the Universe’s projected googolplex years of life in your own lifetime (one followed by 100 zeros). The atoms that currently make up your body, atoms forged in the centers of stars millions of light years away and billions of years ago, will disassemble. Some of these will find their way into other living things, all of them will continue to venture throughout the Universe in one form or another until the end of time.

But nothing exactly like you will ever experience this Universe the way you are now. You are the Universe observing itself in this momentary flash of consciousness. Savor it.

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RL Iron Man

So I saw Iron Man this weekend. Totally rocked. I loved the whole superhero as inventor meme. Very exciting. Very DIY (Do It Yourself).

But something hit me as I was driving home from the theater, we can build Iron Man right now. We have the technology.

First take one of Cyberdyne’s1 Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) exosuit, the suit increases the strength of its user and has a multitude of other applications:

Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)
Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)

Then strap on Yves Rossy’s kerosene-powered jetpack:

Kerosene-Powered Jetpack
Kerosene-Powered Jetpack

Then purchase a whole bunch of ThinkGeek’s Titanium Sporks, and melt them down for the body armor! Voila!


1 Yes, named after the fictional company from the Terminator movies. I don’t know if HAL is named after the computer in 2001, which is an acronym play on “I.B.M.” (H->I A->B L->M).

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Roller-Coaster Physics Game

  • Flash Game teaches physics: Roller-Coaster Designer
  • Roller-Coaster Designer
    Roller-Coaster Designer

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    FREE: Send Your Name to the Moon

  • Free opportunity to send your name to the moon.
  • Certificate of Participation in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Send Your Name to the Moon Project
    Certificate of Participation in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
    Send Your Name to the Moon Project

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    Free Comic Book Day, Saturnday May 3rd

    Drop into Earth 383 tommorrow and pick up some free comics for yourself and the kids. Comics are a great way to get children into reading and the many games at Earth 383 promote imagination, intelligent thought, and creative problem solving.

    Earth 383 is located around the corner from Levels at 212 N. Martin Luther King St. The phone number is 252.331.7686.

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    Let the Phytoremediation Begin!

    The Environmental Compliance Division at the Coast Guard base where I work is tasked with cleaning up decades worth of environmental problem areas on base and instituting sustainable operating procedures in the way the Coast Guard serves America. According to ARSC’s newsletter, we “recycled (kept out of landfills) 1330 pounds of toner cartridges in 2007” and kept 1005 pounds of alkaline batteries from landfills by recycling, five times the amount of batteries recycled in 20061.

    To clean up past bad practices, the ECD has started planting trees in contaminated areas, which draw pollutants out of the ground and prevent them from contaminating the water table. The fans on short poles visible amid the trees in these photos are drawing petroleum hydrocarbons out of the soil and atomizing them into the air.

    Memristor
    Active Phytoremediation Project Area
    Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City
    (Click for Larger Image)

    From the information sign in front of this field:

    From 1941 until 1991, the surrounding area was used as a fuel farm for aircraft refueling. The fuel farm consisted of multiple underground and above-ground storage tanks which were decommissioned and removed from the site. Evidence of a release was observed during the tank removal activities, resulting in impacts on subsurface soils and groundwater by petroleum hydrocarbons. Phytoremediation was the selected remedy to control and contain contaminated groundwater migration and to remediate impacted soil and groundwater. Phytoremediation is an innovative and cost-effective technology that refers to the use of plant-based systems to remove, degrade, or stabilize environmental contaminants present in soil and/or groundwater.
    Memristor
    Active Phytoremediation Project Area
    Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City
    (Click for Larger Image)
    Both poplar and willow trees have been planted across the site to remediate subsurface soils and groundwater. The use of both poplar and willow trees within a phytoremediation plot can capitalize on the favorable phytoremediation potential specific to each species. The phytoremediation project is being performed in a combined effort with the United States Coast Guard, ARCADIS, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, United States Geological Survey, and North Carolina State University.

    Wikipedia entry for Phytoremediation.


    1“ARSC Environmental Goals,” The Flyer Volume 1, Issue 2, Feburary 2008.

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    Sitcoms are “Cognitive Heatsinks”

    Here Comes Everybody
    Here Comes Everybody

    Clay Shirkyon, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has an excellent post up, titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, where he calls television sitcoms a “cognitive heat sink,” which dissipate our thought potential, preventing us from putting our over-abundance of free time to use in intellectually-productive activities. (Don’t have an “over-abundance of free time?” If you watch TV you do.)

    Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. … However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

    Shirkyon does the math on how many human-hours have gone into writing Wikipedia, and discovers that, for the amount of time we spend watching television, we could produce “2,000 Wikipedia projects a year.” Collective enterprises like Wikipedia and the intertwingularity of Web 2.0 activities are all part of the emerging “Participation Culture,” which values inclusive media over hierarchical mediums, and it’s not just a fad:

    Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

    Those of use who grew up without computers and the Internet have an excuse for the way we struggle to break our old-media habits. There’s no excuse for constraining our children with them too.

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    Become a RedPill: Kill Your Television

    I get funny looks when I admit to people I don’t own a TV. I get the impression they think I’m some kind of flaky activist. In fact, people have even told me as much.

    They seem to think it’s unnatural not to spend more than four hours a day on an activity that burns just five calories more an hour than sleeping.

    Likewise, I don’t get people who own televisions. TVs are big dumb conversational bullies that don’t care about you, what you want, or what you think. Television doesn’t care what time you want to watch a show, it’s going to show things according to it’s schedule and you will conform if you want to know what everyone’s talking about around the water-cooler tomorrow. Television is great for promoting inane small talk about its fantasy world, a completely unproductive exercise. It’s like Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” People do the same with TV.

    Television is virtual reality. Sports fans in bars scream at projection-screen TV’s all over the world, despite the fact that the football players can’t hear them. Faux News describes the world outside as nothing but car chases and violence, but the reality is that America is safer than it’s ever been. African Americans are not just thugs and whores as Black Entertainment Television (BET) wants us to believe.

    To quote Ron Kaufman, “Why do you think they call it programming?”

    So join the RedPills, and kill your television. You could go outside, you could join an MMORP, you could jump into a chat room, start your own blog, contribute to Wikipedia, join a social network, start a flash mob, make an LOLCat, or just MAKE. Whatever you do, engage, don’t be a passive receptacle for advertising sponsors.

    Who’s going to win the next American Idol? I am, because I’m not going to watch it.

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    Humans Aren’t the Only Ones…

  • Posted to the Rocketboom blog, was this photo of an orangutan using a spear to catch fish:
  • Oranguatan Tool Use
    Oranguatan Tool Use

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    When Galaxies Collide

    NASA has released 59 new images of colliding galaxies. w00t!

    When Galaxies Collide
    When Galaxies Collide Image courtesy of NASA

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    Attractors Flash Game

    It didn’t take me long to figure this puzzle out (HINT: It’s not something you figure out), but I did enjoy the attractors flash game more than the commenters.

    Attractors Flash Game
    Attractors Flash Game

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    Free E-Book: Programming Through Natural Selection

    A Field Guide to Genetic Programming
    A Field Guide to
    Genetic Programming

    I’ve heard this field referred to as “Emergent Programming,” but there’s a Free E-Book on Genetic Programming available for download, which covers the method of using natural selection to evolve computer programs (HT Oranchak). The method has been used to find more efficient algorithms and programming methodologies.

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