This is pretty neat. Follow the link to to see more videos of the Reactable in action.

To continue the wholesale destruction of mankind. Eh, maybe that’s not as good as McSweeny’s list of jokes made by robots, for robots: “Waiter! Waiter! What’s this robot doing in my soup?” “It looks like he’s performing human tasks twice as well, because he knows no fear or pain.”

feline-computer interaction Yes, I added to a very boring YouTube trend. Sue me.

From xkcd

From Heidegger Cartoons. Thanks ejdickso

From Wired: 6 word science fiction It cost too much, staying human. – Bruce Sterling

From “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” (PDF) by Henry Jenkins for the MacArthur Foundation. Link courtesy of Sivacracy. Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Gitelman, 1999).The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools. That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity (H. Jenkins, 2006a) is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends. We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative […]

So I haven’t checked my site stats in a few months, but tonight I am busy procrastinating, so I decided to see whats up. The only thing really interesting to get out of the statcounter I use is the ‘came from’ stats that show exactly where people were before they entered my site. Most of it comes from the friendly blogs in the sidebar, though a significant majority are people leeching images from my webspace (Columbo is hot shit, apparently). But I also get quite a few clicks from search engines and other random pages. Lets see: Computer World linked to my page last December, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. The post they linked to is my fawning over Asimo, which has nothing to do with the article in which it is linked. Eh, it helps my PageRank, so I wont complain. This is kind of interesting. That’s definitely my post, but its hosted on another server. In fact, it looks like every post I made on my blogspot page has been mirrored in inblogs.net, which seems to be a gateway that hosts a bunch of blogspot blogs and other pages inaccessible to certain countries (India, Iran, Pakistan, China). My statcounter says that no one’s been here from any of those countries, but maybe thats just hidden by the gateway. A little over 1% of my readership comes from Lithuania, so I assume its not out of the question. Apparently someone linked to my site from Tulane Uni’s blackboard system. I don’t have access to the system, and I can’t see the course as a guest, so I can only imagine why I got linked. If anyone can break into the system, here is the incoming link Ted Kennedy (D-MA) insists that, and I […]

And the Spiders from Mars  David Bowie says: “Ziggy, particularly, was created out of a certain arrogance. But, remember, at that time I was young and I was full of life, and that seemed like a very positive artistic statement. I thought that was a beautiful piece of art, I really did. I thought that was a grand kitsch painting. The whole guy. Then that fucker would not leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to sour. And it soured so quickly you wouldn’t believe it. And it took me an awful time to level out. My whole personality was affected. Again I brought that upon myself. I can’t say I’m sorry when I look back, because it provoked such an extraordinary set of circumstances in my life. I thought I might as well take Ziggy to interviews as well. Why leave him on stage? Looking back it was completely absurd. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity. I can’t deny that the experience affected me in a very exaggerated and marked manner. I think I put myself very dangerously near the line. Not in physical sense but definitively in mental sense. I played mental games with myself to such an extent that I’m very relieved and happy to be back in Europe and feeling very well. But, then, you see I was always the lucky one.”

Set Players = 0. DNA computing targets West Nile Virus, other deadly diseases These DNA computers won’t compete with silicon computing in terms of speed, but their advantage is that they can be used in fluids, such as a sample of blood or in the body, and make decisions at the level of a single cell,” says the researcher, whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation. .. Scientists have tried for years to build computers out of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), nature’s chemical blueprint for life. But getting nano-sized pieces of DNA to act as electrical circuits capable of problem-solving like their silicon counterparts has remained a major challenge. In a series of laboratory demonstrations over a two-year period, Macdonald and her associates showcased the computer’s potential by engaging MAYA-II in a complete game of tic-tac-toe against human opponents, winning every time except in the rare event of a tie.