Swibbles

Another Chinese earthquake in Chengdu the boom town, makes one wonder just how many of these recent werid earthquakes are linked up to some sub-tectonic movements, some kind of underground movement… but in china, who can really tell one way or the other. seems to have created a big thing in the twitter scene tho.

A recent advance in electronic technology called the Memristor apparently will be able to mimic human brain structure in an analog type of way. One word: Swibbles! Soon, we will all be able to welcome our own swibble overlord into our homes. In fact, I think I hear the doorbell…

the game I couldnt remember in my last post about the Experiment game is called Ankh, not Metareal, and the author has made emulator files available… may have to try this one out.

Browsing the noosphere I found out over at TerraNova that an old book of which ive only read excerpts is now freeasinfree so I took the time to read it during last weeks slew of travel around Europe to various conferences [which were a blast]. The one thing that had stuck with me way back in the when was first of course the story of Bungle. But the second and stronger impression I carried with me the last decade or so was the movement between the voice of “The_Author” in its now retro screenfont and the rest of the exposition. I have thought for awhile that the old list of literary tropes might have to be updated or reexamined a little more in the light of such moo-ly and mud-ly constructed texts. For example, it could be merely an allegory, but its more as if it is a logfile of a conversation. So do we have to make the actual conversation between the entities in the text the focus of any comparative literary analysis, or is a logfile its own? Ala Joyce, is he modern because of his choice of a logfile format to describe mr blooms daze?

Plants can now talk back to humans. Bloody hell! Good Morning America!

Radio interview today about the Ticking Time Bomb effect in real life. A common mythological trope, it was stated, it is the motivating force behind most television and movie dramas, or “page turners” to us more literary afflicted. It is also the one position that will make people support torture. “You mean, if someone is ogling to blow up the city with nanotech goo, would I kill them? I guess, in that case, I would have to!” The problem comes, it seems, in the fact that there hardly ever is a ticking time bomb, and if there is, its damage is so much more localized than the damage caused by overreacting to the time bomb: in terms of authoritative crackdowmns, smackdowns, etc etc. Unfortunately, our current administration is currently in the drivers seat of the country using this technically fictional effect. Boom.

Explosively Formed Penetrators. I knew as soon as the story came out on BBC Worldservice last night that I was going to annoy my girlfreind today, because I just cant help saying it. Explosively Formed Penetrators. Even worse than the trouble unrestrained verbiage will cause is the fact that over 170 of our Troops have been killed by them. Thats 170 families who have to say, my son or daughter was killed by an Explosively Formed Penetrator. Time to stop.

With the advent of such small, low power consumption, computing chips, what can I say… the problem is, these things arent going to make my life easier. Someones gotta make the chips, so theyll make a living, but my job, customer support, is just going to get algorythmically more complex. Not to mention that at a certain point, the chips themselves are going to start complaining. I was at a conference at Yale university years ago, maybe 1998? I think it was called the hybrid theory conference, and there was a talk given on something like Marketing Allen Ginsburg where the panel talked about when computer chips were going to demand to be labelled workers so they could get the rights to unionize and ask for benefits based on CPU cycles… utter trope-i-fication…

Found this awesome yet threatening tech movement from the Walker Art and Technology Center blog. Its always hard to tell if things like this are art or actually work? This looks like it may work though. Plants that call people. That just generates too much thought in the old flesh brain. I wont even begin to go down that road.