Daily Archives: February 2, 2004


Doing Your Work?

The Speculist suggests that:

Thinking Machines…Maybe closer than we think.
Maybe already here:

This is one time you do need to go read Phil’s post as well as the original article. Thaler’s work appears to be pretty amazing and very interesting.
And for you folks a little concerned about what kind of work you will be doing 20-30 years from now here are some thoughts about what you might not be doing:

All of the possible applications for Creativity Machines make some people uneasy. The machines could easily supplant people for many mundane jobs, and Thaler predicts that some traditionally human-only jobs, including laboratory scientist, could be up for grabs. Computer chemists could soon design new compounds and figure out how to make them.

While a ‘leisure’ culture is a long way off it appears to be time for serious work on what it means to be human in a world where work, if it exists at all, is very different from today.


One more on the ‘Superbowl’

I wasn’t going to say more about yesterdays marketing event that had a football game scattered through it but then I read Andrew Cline’s post and thought I’d just react to it. First:

I believe my nine-year-old daughter should be able to watch the Super Bowl with me without being exposed to Janet Jackson’s boob or Kid Rock’s desecration of an American Flag.

Yep, we should have been warned and all this talk of the boob baring being an accident…I don’t buy it one bit. Why else did he reach across her chest and grab on? On the other hand, we did not have young children in the house at the time and were more surprised then anything else.
We also were not amused or entertained when Kid Rock appeared wearing a flag. It did not lend anything to his, for us, mostly unintelligible performance and seemed to only serve to insult a large part of the audience.
Next:

The game was boring until the end.

I enjoyed the game and think it would have been much better if I’d used a TIVO or some such and watched it without the commercials. And they did seem to create more then the usual number of opportunities for commercials.
Yes, the commercials. I didn’t pay enough attention to them. My laptop was open and I was working on some financial statements that needed to be done yesterday. However, I did kind of listen and Andrew sums up the high point of the event nicely:

The funniest line of the entire evening wasn’t meant to be funny. In the list of side effects for the erectile dysfunction drug Cilas was this dire warning (paraphrased): If an erection lasts more than four hours, seek immediate medical attention.

My wife and I were both ears only at this time but it got our attention, our laughs and several minutes of amusing discussion.
Update: Tegan has a complete rundown of all the ads. Counting the ad package at the end of the game there were 29 breaks. Somewhere there was an American football game….


January’s Top Referrers

On the right side bar is the updated roll of Modulator’s 20 top referrers . Number 20 produced 12 referrals compared to 9 in December. Statistics are culled from AWStats running on Modulator’s server at Hosting Matters.
There was less churn in January then in December as 5 blogs dropped off and 4 new ones have been added .
Oh, and January was a record month for Modulator! Thank you one and all!
Also, I’d like to acknowledge significant referrals from some of the blogosphere’s ‘service’ sites: Technorati, weblogs.com, blogrolling.com, MovableType, Blogdex, blogoshpere.us, Sitemeter, NZ Bear’s Ecosystem, Bloogz and Daypop.
All of the blog rolls except the Base Roll are ordered by most recently updated so be sure to ping weblogs.com or blogrolling.com to push to the top of the rolls. These are certainly the sites I tend to look at first and visitors will see you at the top of the roll as well.
For a brief discussion of Modulator’s blog rolls look here.