Raiding Eternity is a beautiful and touching piece on life, loss, flickr, and the cloud:

I sit in my living room, thumbing through a notebook full of her poems. They’re old poems, from back when she was going through that first really awful breakup. Themes repeat. Learn to live in the moment, she writes to herself. Then its corollary: Who will remember me?

“Why did you want me to read those?” I ask her later. “Because you asked why I have a fear of commitment,” she says.

Now I look out the window at my neighbor’s two tall pines. The top of one comes to a point, then goes on for another ten scrubby feet, as if a smaller tree is growing from the crown of a larger one.

“Do you know how your ears pop at altitude?” says her poem. “Sometimes I can feel the change of pressure in my heart.”

Surprising to find writing like this on Gizmodo. It’s all part of their week-long feature on the ramifications of digital storage, Memory Forever.

Posted in Tech on Friday March 19, 2010. Shoutouts.

lets get suspect
lets get wrecked
every little defect gets respect
just protect
what you expect
quicker on the reflex
hit the deck

i know i’d rather complain…

- Nisker

Incredible that a song about casual sex can be pigeonholed into the SDLC so easily. Until you think about dongles. Dongles explain everything. Life is better with a dongle, UAT is better with Peaches. Q.E.D.

Posted in Tech on Tuesday November 3, 2009. Shoutouts.

Today, google launches social search, a service that returns contextual information from friends in your search results. They can do this because they already know everything about you through your google profile and they can use the social graph API to map those connections.

A quick search for Kobe, Japan on my social search uncovered this photo:

Charming, isn’t it. Particularly when taken out of context. According to flickr, almost 400,000 people have seen that photo.

The thing is, you have no control over what other people link to, title, and share. With the increasing ease of uncovering these links it’s so important to make sure your side of the house is in order.

So, a reminder:

1. Kill any links to things you don’t want discovered. From your side, but also from the source if you’re able to. If your friend has a photo or story of you don’t want public, ask them to make it private, or to remove your name.
2. Use privacy filters to control what people can and can’t see. Here’s an awesome one for facebook.
3. Map connections to things you do want public in something google indexes quickly (like their profiles) to push those results above others.
4. Understand how services like social search work so you can be mindful of what’s going to happen when you’re creating content or linking to stuff.

This isn’t about being paranoid, or changing what you share with friends, or the services you use. It’s about understanding how the web hangs together, and that everything you put on it will be there for pretty much forever. With the increasing ease of mapping connections between content you or your friends create, it’s important to make sure that this won’t come back and haunt you.

Posted in Tech on Tuesday October 27, 2009. Shoutouts.

Dear Facebook, what exactly are you trying to tell me?

Posted in Tech on Thursday August 13, 2009. Shoutouts.

New Scientist wins the best article title this week with their effort: Do gravity holes harbour planetary assassins?

It’s about Lagrangian points, or fixed gravity-neutral points in space:

They are the places gravity forgot. Vast regions of space, millions of kilometres across, in which celestial forces conspire to cancel out gravity and so trap anything that falls into them. They sit in the Earth’s orbit, one marching ahead of our planet, the other trailing along behind. Astronomers call them Lagrangian points, or L4 and L5 for short. The best way to think of them, though, is as celestial flypaper.

Wikipedia also has a tops article explaining the five points relating to earth with some neat diagrams. Ooeer, that’s about enough Sunday morning science, I think.

Posted in Tech on Sunday February 22, 2009. Shoutouts.

Juan Enriquez gives a fascinating TED talk on how mindboggling science will outlast the crisis:

Even as mega-banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don’t look for it on your ballot — or in the stock exchange. It’ll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be … different.

Posted in Tech on Thursday February 19, 2009. Shoutouts.

A bullet-proof plan to ensure those IT people passing you in the corridor are laughing at you, not with you:

1. Hold large meeting
2. Invite IT people
3. Begin spittle-flecked rant
4. Insinuate IT people are overpaid
5. Use the word “Logarithm” in the place of “Algorithm”
6. Do it again
7. And again
8. Now storm out

Brilliant, you’re well on your way!

Posted in Tech on Thursday May 8, 2008. Shoutouts.

Fake Steve on Facebook:

Kids, let’s face it. Facebook is Webkinz for adults. Facebook is a Ponzi scheme. A handful of VCs have created the illusion of an actual market by funding apps companies and then doing deals with each other — passing cash back and forth among to make it look as if money is being made.

Funwall anyone?

Posted in Tech on Saturday May 3, 2008. Shoutouts.

This weekend I’ve promised myself I’ll fix three years of neglect to the blogging backend that powers Tin Ear. Initially, I will probably more break things than I fix. If you turn up and the lights are out, someone’s drunk all the beer and the doorbell isn’t working, you’ll know who to blame. Who? I can think of no better candidate than Peter Cavelevic.

Posted in Tech on Saturday April 5, 2008. Shoutouts.

I’ve been reading a lot about the concept of a technological singularity recently. This is an idea that, while I had come across it fairly frequently in fiction, was not something I had translated to the real-world. It still seems enormously sci-fi:

A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

Some poking around turns up the fact that there’s an institute devoted to it, several foundations writing about it and even people popping pills to prepare for it.

So, what will having smarter than human masters allow us to do? Catch rabies and die, apparently.

Posted in Tech on Monday March 31, 2008. Shoutouts.