While few people will admit to it, just about everyone I've ever met seems to hold one sort of myth or another close to their hearts. Some are die-hard fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and decorate their homes with memorabelia from the show. Others have the full set of (kind of crappy) Babylon-5 action figures in the packaging, and have a habit of asking people what they want. Some find their muse in fantasy rather than science fiction, and are known to dress as medusae, sprites, dryads, or Sidhe nobles at festivals for fun. Steampunk has brought a whole …
Now that I've got a little time to breathe, here are the pictures I took at the showing of The Transcendent Man two weekends ago. Not yet scanned is the piece of memorabelia Ray Kurzweil was kind enough to autograph for me.
As a late birthday gift, AJ (who flew into DC last night) gave me a gimmicked chocolate bar that rickrolled me the moment I tore the wrapper open. If you look carefully you can see a speaker glued to the foil. The circuitry consists of a solid-state audio chip that can record a few minutes of sound, the necessary driving circuitry for the recording chip, and a miniature amplifier that boosts the recording to audible levels. A cleverly placed nonconductive tab was pulled out of position when the wrapper was peeled back, closing the circuit and dropping the bomb on …
I didn't get a chance to post about it at the time, but Lyssa, Keely, and I went to Washington, DC's Chinese New Year Celebration downtown. Once again, I went in cold because I was curious about the experience, mostly because barely-remembered memories of television shows about Chinese New Years from my childhood aren't really anything to go on. I knew in some hazy fashion that fireworks were involved, but I hadn't realized that they'd be unrolling gigantic strings of firecrackers - Black Cats, we used to call them. Specifically, they were strings that, when coiled up, were about three feet …
EDITED: 20110318 @ 0955 EST5EDT. See end of article.
A few weekends ago at HacDC a small team of highly skilled hackers gathered to work on practical solutions to a problem which has risen its ugly head time and again in the past few months: a lack of connectivity. Most of the time, when your DSL line goes dead for a couple of hours it's no big deal. If your phone service is tied into DSL (e.g., you're a voice-over-IP customer or the line is physically damaged) it's a bit more of a problem if you don't have an alternate …
Some months ago I caught word that somebody had made a documentary about possibly the most high profile transhumanist in the history of the movement/subculture/distributed multicellular mass of hackers, geeks, and technologists, Ray Kurzweil. He was the first to not only speculate seriously but write at length about the possibility of what Verner Vinge dubbed the technological singularity, a hypothetical point in human history at which the rate of change goes asymptotic. Which, so the hypothesis goes, could either go weakly godlike or pear-shaped, the jury's still out on that particular point. I've kept a sensor array peeled …
Seeing as how I have a limited amount of bandwidth where I live for various reasons (most of all Verizon halting deployment of residential fibre) I've been making use of VPS companies and pushing certain tasks off of my network and onto …
For nearly twenty years in the United States a law called CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994) has been on the books. To summarize, CALEA set the federal requirement that telecommunications companies (phone companies, long distance companies, cellular carriers, and so forth) had to modify their infrastructures such that various forms of wiretapping of customers had to be possible upon presentation of a warrant. Contrary to popular belief, there are methods of surveillance other than recording a conversation. The simplest involves making a list of every phone number that a particular number calls, when the calls were …
A dream many of us over the years had involve having head computers of one kind or another implanted. Augmentations of our existing capabilities, replacements for damaged sectors, direct neural interface with other computers, encrypted partitions for carrying data, brand new functionality - you name it, chances are there's a geek out there who'd love to beta test it. One of the problems at the moment, however, is a distinct lack of space inside the cranium. When you get right down to it there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room inside your skull. Layering circuitry on the surface of the …
