Month: February 2012

The smartest people are pointing us to games

Reginald Braithwaite shares my sentiment about a tragedy in technology. 

What makes me sad is that the pinnacle of our computing power, the massive behavioural engine that is Google Adwords/Adsense, has decided that when someone is reading about dinosaurs, the most profitable thing to do is show them ads for games. Not books about dinosaurs, or even dinosaur games, but games.

We take a generation of incredibly smart people who have been rigorously trained to deliver amazing code, running on a massive computing engine, and when confronted with a human being trying to learn something, they try to distract him with games. Can you imagine Google in charge of textbooks? In my children’s time, textbooks will be immersive experiences, complete with Google’s avatars whispering “Psst! Math is hard, let’s play games instead of studying.” Can you imagine Google making eyeglasses? They would obscure anything educational with virtual billboards for dating sites.

Thank goodness for apps like AdBlock that make the web a more beautiful place. I’m not robbing any website publishers any revenue because I wouldn’t be clicking on the ads anyway. I’d just be leaving the site in disgust and finding somewhere else to go. 

by Jonathan Frei

Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done




(by wesolveforx).

I’m not a sy-fi geek, but this video has something for everyone. It has a few things to agree with and a few things to disagree with.

by Jonathan Frei

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIX3ntiTV-g?feature=oembed&w=250&h=140%5D
Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Snowboarder (by tb303meets606).

Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes. The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
by Jonathan Frei

There’s a place to go if you’re paranoid

I’m not paranoid on the web (yet), but if I were I’m happy to know there’s a place to go. DuckDuckGo, the anonymous web browser, has an illustrated guide called Google tracks you. We don’t that explains their philosophy of the web.

DuckDuckGo has also published a guide to Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! which is helpful to understanding how your search history eventually filters web results to fit your world view.

If you’re curious to know what Google knows about you, you can view your Google web history.

by Jonathan Frei

Breaking an addiction to Equasy or banning it entirely

of Reason Magazine, in his essay Modern-Day Prohibition, shared the story of psychopharmacologist David Nutt, who didn’t think Ecstasy and LSD should be categorized among the most dangerous drugs. Instead of backing down to critics and detractors, he wrote a satirical article, analyzing another addiction.

He analyzed “an addiction called ‘Equasy’ that kills ten people a year, causes brain damage and has been linked to the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.” Nut added that Equasy “releases endorphins, can create dependence and is responsible for over 100 road traffic accidents every year.” Had Nutt not revealed that Equasy was simply the time-honored sport of horseback riding, activists certainly would have rushed to introduce a ban. Nutt pointed out that since Equasy causes acute harm to one out of 350 riders, it is far riskier than Ecstasy, for which the fraction is one out of 10,000.

The point in all of this is that prohibitions and bans are more based on the perception of risk, rather than statistics. Stier continues:

It is hard to miss the similarities between current prohibition campaigns and their historical predecessors. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s “stated desire was to ‘reform, so far as possible, by religious, ethical, and scientific means the drinking classes.’ ” Likewise today, says Snowdon, self-righteous activists and their allies in government do not seek to improve public health by following the dictates of science but rather use pseudoscientific arguments and “subtle deceit” to advance laws that dictate how we live.

by Jonathan Frei