Technology

Act Now!

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Hmmm, Finn has got it wrong… we’d better get the world straightened out (rather, governments out of the world) before they get their hands on this stuff:

“Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as someone wears a cloak made of this material,” said Patanjali Parimi, a Northeastern University physicist and design engineer at Chelton Microwave Corp. in Bolton, Mass. Parimi was not involved in the research.
Such a cloak does not exist, but early versions that could mask microwaves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation could be as close as 18 months away, Pendry said. He said the study was “an invitation to come and play with these new ideas.”
“We will have a cloak after not too long,” he said.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supported the research, given the obvious military applications of such stealthy technology.

Via Unqualified Offerings.

You Are The Net

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In a few years it may well seem that the boundary between human and net has desolved:

“One expects there to be much more organic connection between people and technology,” says Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, who is widely known as one of the “fathers” of the Internet for his role in co-designing the TCP/IP protocol and the Internet’s architecture.
Crossing the Line
If Mr. Cerf and about two dozen other pundits Red Herring interviewed about the future of the Internet are right, in 10 years’ time the barriers between our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world and virtual reality.

If you want to see a future where the promise of the net is magnified beyond the wildest imagination of most living today, one where innovation drives new applications on a daily basis, then you need to work to assure that no government and no business (like the phone companies or the incumbent network providors) sets any rules for the internet beyond an open net where anyone can provide content and no carrier can censor the content or data streams that you want to access.

Hmm, Back to a MAC?!

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Looks like I will rejoin the Apple family when it is time to replace my current laptop:

Once you’ve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That’s the “alt” key for you longtime Windows users.) After starting up, your Mac runs Windows completely natively. Simply restart to come back to Mac.

Via Resurrection Song.

Update (4/6): Alex Tabarrok notes that Apple wasn’t first to the finish line in providing this functionality.


A Day in the Life…

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…of Bill Gates:

Days are often filled with meetings. It’s a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. So then it’s great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn’t get to. If the entire week is very busy, it’s the weekend when I’ll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they’ll see that I’ve been quite busy— they’ll have a lot of e-mail.

The rest of the article has some interesting comments on managing email, maintaining focus, communication and enhancing productivity.

Via Rex who thinks Bill deserves a day or two off.

What’s Controlling You?

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This is cool:

A DEVICE that can pick up on people’s emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

At least on first look it is cool.
Mark Kleiman exclaims:

But I’m less excited by the potential benefits than I am dazzled by the idea that a piece of software that runs on a computer small enough to fit in your pocket can be taught to recognize the symptoms of boredom or annoyance, as well as other emotions not expressed by a simple facial expression. The implications for social-psych and anthropology research, to say nothing of marketing studies, should be profound.

Heck, the implications for everyday interactions of many kinds could be profound or even stultifying.
Profound in the sense that anyone who is not a master of body language would find it useful to have this kind of helpful feedback.
Stultifying when everyone is interacting with others based on feedback from this or a similar device rather than directly from the people they are communicating with.

Just imagine the feedback algorithms your favorite government drone might like to have programmed into something like this. They could create a real nation of sheep.