Talk without speaking

Posted: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 1:37 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under: Games

I'm not sure if I'm more impressed with "telepathic" communication or afraid of the idea that our nerves carry signals for actions we aren't actually taking. It makes more sense to me that they've found a code that turns muscle signals into words, but in the video demo the guy actually says "capture what a person wants to say before they actually say it."  What if you confess to a crime on this thing? Here's the official site.

Speaking of disquieting technology, "New video of BigDog Quadruped robot is so stunning it's spooky." Spooky is an understatement. Watching this thing (this is not the same video we saw of it a few months ago) triggers some kind of instinctual reaction that makes me have to concentrate to keep from seeing it as an animal. Watch it slip on the ice around half way through the clip. I also can't watch this without imagining it without that motor noise and with a compact, long lasting power source... and me riding to work on it. It looks more likely that it'll be fitted with cameras and firepower. Run Sarah Connor! Run!

Speaking of technology having a personality, Laptop Sleeves, Skins and Stickers - When you think about it, it's pretty amazing that we're still walking around with gray or black plastic slabs when laptops can be so much more attractive. I'll spare you my rant about natural materials but check these out for a sense of how much more friendly technology can be look.

I guess I haven't been paying very close attention because I hadn't heard about growing tent cities outside L.A. Seeing them on a foreign-produced news clip is pretty shaming. That's America?

The Worth1000 folks have done some fun things with the challenge to put modern products in old-style ads.

40% of all spam comes from just one source

The crackdown on protesting monks in Tibet has many people questioning the wisdom of holding the Olympics in China. Previously we've seen athletes concerned that the air in China is so polluted they're afraid to breathe it - and that's not to mention the food. As I recall, there was some sense that putting the Olympics in China would force China to clean up its act in the glare of global public attention. I wonder if it's working.

Questionaut - Great fun for kids, part of the BBC's Bitesize series of games for kids. It looks familiar because it's from Amanita Design.

I mentioned on that Obama speech post that I happened to be on Andrew Sullivan's blog. I was there looking for something I read last week about Hillary Clinton inspiring irrational hatred in some people. That was brought to mind by this business of the Clinton bloggers going "on strike" because of abuse from Obama supporters and generally angry essay in Sunday's Times about America not being as post-feminist as we thought.

"Rumors are flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks."

Speaking of Yahoo encroaching on the territory of successful sites, "Yahoo Buzz is a Digg killer." There's not much of a case made for Yahoo Buzz actually killing Digg. The real message is "Social news is going mainstream." Right now the focus is on how much traffic a link from Yahoo brings to a site. The real test will be what happens when Yahoo Buzz opens to the whole Web instead of an exclusive list of content sources. Part of the problem with Digg's rise in popularity and reputation for delivering valuable traffic is that the front page content has become more populist and more sites try to game the system. The result is a lot of wacky photo collections from linkjack sites. How Yahoo will avoid this remains to be seen.

"Woman files lawsuit against AMR because passenger next to her masturbated while she slept." A gross, horrible story. The question: Does this warrant a civil suit? NOTE: This is safe for work as far as imagery goes, but while I included this link in part because of the liveliness of the discussion in the comments, the subject matter is such that you should make sure you can handle reading some off color remarks before going there.

Why bother having a resume? This employs a somewhat awkward trick of being directed toward remarkable/amazing/spectacular people, but it's a good outside the box exercise. What are the best terms on which to sell yourself and how are you building a presentation of those terms? It reminds me of my question the other day, how ready are you for the lightning bolt of fame?

Speaking of "why bother" and follow-ups thoughts to last week's item, Indie labels bypass iTunes, give digital sales a shot - Why bother going through iTunes? I remember reading early concept idea about the Semantic Web and the possibility that in the future everyone will have a site of their own and if, for example, you have something to sell, you put it on your site and tag it a certain way and the web will find it and feed your listing into aggregators. No Craigslist as it is. Similarly, it's not hard to imagine labels and individual artists maintaining their own online sales and marking them for inclusion in whatever app wants to pull them in. Is that so different from what Seeqpod and mp3gle are doing -at least in terms of results? As the article points out, there's some work in maintaining an online store.

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