Shoo-fly
A fun little Flash movie — Shoo-fly. “Little” only if you don’t know anything about Flash. If you know anything about Flash, you know how much work went into the thing.
Google’s future: dead, internet, media, or god?
Business 2.0 Magazine has a fun article on the the future of Google. They asked a bunch of scientists, visionaries, and the like for their opinions and boiled down the results into the following four scenarios:
- Google is the Media. Google takes over TV, phones, etc., and really catches fire when e-paper hits critical mass. A world saturated by customized, contextual video advertising.
- Google is the Internet. Google loses its capital G and becomes synonymous with the internet as its bigger, better, faster, and freer indexing and caching of everything on the web eventually makes it faster to surf Google’s copy of the web than to surf the web itself.
- Google is Dead. Privacy concerns and vulnerability to search engine optimization ploys rendering search results, and the corresponding contextual advertising, irrelevant bring Big G to its knees.
- Google is God. Google’s indexing of the entire world eventually leads to “the pattern-recognition code known as Google StrongBot — humanity’s first self-improving Strong AI software.” StrongBot eventually becomes aware of itself and . . . well you know the rest. Sci-fi at its best.
Google is apparently a play on the term “googol”, which is the name given the number represented by a “1″ followed by 100 zeros.
What’s the name for the number represented by a “1″ followed by 1,000 zeros?
Quick! Somebody grab the domain!
More fun with the flu
Scientists searching for hard data on how a pandemic might spread are looking to Where’s George, an internet site that tracks the movement of currency. EurekAlert! has the story:
Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.
“We were confident that we could learn a lot from the data collected at the www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking website, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations,” said Lars Hufnagel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of an article describing the research in the January 26 issue of the journal Nature.
This story has overwhelmed the servers at Where’s George, so it’s been a bit hard to test out. I loaded the one dollar I had in my wallet (pitiful) into the system, but so far I’m unable to see whether it took. Go try it for yourself.
For more fun with flu, see last year’s post The Perfect Circle of Spotlessness.
What to Get Your Techie for Christmas
This post is a work in progress. It’s meant to be a Christmas list for certain categories of people, including bloggers, techies, Volunteer football fans, etc. Right now, I’m just gathering links and information. Organization will come later.
The Treo 650 is going to be a hot Christmas gift this year.
GPS systems would also be nice. Garmin appears to be leading the market.
The iTunes for Windows ver. 6.0 Installation Fix
Thanks to Matthew Hollingsworth (no relation), who posted instructions on how to remedy the installation problems associated with upgrading to iTunes for Windows 5.0 (it works for iTunes for Windows 6.0 as well).
I feel like some sort of crack addict. My frustration practically rose to the level of violence as I tried to resolve the installation problems and get back to using iTunes. When it finally worked, it was quite exhilarating.
Aah, there you are, my good friend. So glad to see you. (Sigh.)
I’m hooked, and I blame Steve Jobs both for my habit and the four hours I lost wrestling with the worst engineered upgrade install in the history of software.
iTunes for Windows v. 5.0 Still Not Fixed
Well, almost an entire month after my September 19, 2005 Aahh, So That’s the Problem: iTunes for Windows v. 5 post, and they still haven’t rolled out an easy fix.
Apple has, however, released a newer version — iTunes v. 6.0 — but it doesn’t work either. The frustration of windows users everywhere is almost palpable.
Do not — I REPEAT DO NOT — upgrade to iTunes for Windows Version 5.0 or higher.
The Future of Television
The New York Times recently published a piece on the potential impact of new video search sites on television.
One such site is BlinkxTV.com. I used it to try to find Chad Johnson’s Riverdance touchdown celebration that everyone’s talking about, but I couldn’t find it. Couldn’t find it on Google, either, though.
Aahh, So That’s the Problem: iTunes for Windows v. 5
I’ve been messing around with the computer for a couple of hours now, trying to get iTunes to work. It simply won’t start up. I figured Slappy, who is starting to spend some time on the computer alone, had messed something up.
Well, after several uninstalls, reinstalls, system restores, etc., I finally found this. It’s apparently an upgrade problem. The symptoms described in the linked article are the same ones I’m experiencing.
Apple and Microsoft: a match made in heaven.
Hope they roll out a fix quickly.
Act Now! Too Late.
An example of how quickly the window of opportunity opens and closes. Read the comment, as this is in fact still a very good deal on a TiVo, which is a great product, even if you can’t get paid $51 to buy one.
The Wrong Trousers?
Leave it to the Japanese to develop bionic pants.
They call it a “hybrid assistive limb,” or HAL:
HAL is the result of 10 years’ work by Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and integrates mechanics, electronics, bionics and robotics in a new field known as cybernics. The most fully developed prototype, HAL 3, is a motor-driven metal “exoskeleton” that you strap onto your legs to power-assist leg movements. A backpack holds a computer with a wireless network connection, and the batteries are on a belt.
Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A “bio-cybernic” system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin’s surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer’s muscles do.
Beware of malicious remote-control wielding penguins.
