Archive for January, 2009

Truth and fiction, memoirs and meaning

I recently went to a talk by Stephen Kimber at The University Club of Toronto, where he spoke about the blurred lines between truth and fiction in written works – for example, a memoir filled with unverified (or unverifiable) ‘truths’, or narrative non-fiction that tweaks the facts a little. Kimber put forward the interesting idea [...]

Po’ Lucy

The Seattle Times’ sad tale of how our favorite Australopithecus Afarensis failed to attract enough visitors to her exhibit. Some of the commenters – other than some creationist-vs-evolutionist wranglings – put it down to bad advertising and steep prices…
Does Lucy need better branding? She seems to invoke a certain wistfulness or sadness… Maybe it’s [...]

“Unsupervised thinking”? Nothing new.

I was looking at some promo blurbs for marketing and web-analytics, discussing how to formalise testing for optimal conversion rates on order forms. (‘Conversion’ usually means the completion of an e-commerce transaction, resulting in a sale).
One phrase in particular tickled me when I came across it: “unsupervised thinking”. As in, we really don’t want the [...]

Jobs for futurists

[updated 2010-02-02]-version 03
Ever dreamed of a job that simply doesn’t exist yet? Or a career in an unheard-of field or discipline? You might just be a generalist/futurist-in-waiting, born centuries too soon (or into the wrong branch of the multiverse).
But titter ye not. You don’t have to be a life coach or motivational speaker to create [...]

A ‘ghetto’ magazine layout

Well here it is… an initial stab at a pseudo magazine layout.
I resorted to this layout because I wanted to keep 10 posts on the frontpage but that meant the page just ran on and on… this way it is a bit more vertically compact. Have been burning the midnight oil on a poxy ‘headers [...]

Space Suits… (chuckle)

What is up with these costumes?
The 4 Space presenters on friday night were very brave… Were they forced to wear these atrocious outfits?  Or did they actually think it looked good? Well it was a good laugh, either way…
As far as costume design goes, Battlestar Galactica’s officers barely get away with the muscle-tee-pinafore look themselves. [...]

memes: mimicry vs replication

[updated 2009-03-03]
The core thrust of making memetics a respectable science with falsifiable claims and other tell-tale signs of ‘rigour’ has been the idea of replication.
As I wrote in a much older post about memes, there have already been some interesting replicators posited as possible memes. Unfortunately, this path hasn’t yielded the big breakthroughs that would [...]

People augmenting machines : WIRED article misses the point.

Nosing through @tmbchr’s post on the WIRED post about humans augmenting AI, I have only 2 things to say:
1) humans being a helpful extension sounds like a nice idea… especially as presented in the article, but
2) Those “helpful” tasks stand a high chance of being crappy, drudge-filled exercises of boredom.
Picking out ‘what’s beautiful’ from a [...]

Zazen Blogido Fu

In an ass-backwards sort of way, blogging has certain meditative qualities that can help you plod your way towards your own personal enlightenment. That’s what’s started to dawn on me. Deciding to rise (recently, and perhaps foolishly) to a challenge dare to grow my blog, I started to learn more about blogging in general. Here are [...]

My Cool Cosmos Day of Astronomy

My ‘Cool Cosmos’ day at the Ontario Science Center started with Ivan Semeniuk’s talk, titled ‘The Future of Cosmic Exploration‘. He explained how the 2009 is the ‘International Year of Astronomy‘ because 400 years ago, in 1609, Galileo perfected the telescope as a device for studying the heavens, subsequently discovering Jupiters moons and their orbits.
From [...]

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