We nerds are the whipping boys (and girls) of society. Just like when we were in school, everybody feels free to pick on and abuse us. We are easy targets. Everyone knows we are fat socially awkward virgins who live our parents’ basements and wear our Spock ears to bed every night. We get kicked down all the time. We even do it to ourselves.

So why, then, should a self-respecting media star court such an audience? After all, stars are like everyone else. They don’t understand those nerdy types and never had anything to do with them growing up and going to school. And being celebrities who make their money largely on their public image and who are extremely sensitive to how they are perceived, so why on Earth would they want to associate with the social lepers and risk contracting their socially awkward disease?

Plus, they have likely heard that as a group, we are weird, embarrassing, demanding, and frighteningly knowledgeable about the shows they like, and expect you to be the same. Otherwise, they mock you and make you a laughingstock of the Internet.

Wouldn’t they just be better off leaving us well alone? Like everyone else?

Some of those rumours have a grain of truth to them. Others are total misapprehensions based on bad information and people interpreting our actions and reactions through the dark and dirty lens of their own prejudices and jaundiced judgements. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this article.

Instead, I want to talk about the great advantages we have as a fan base. A smart star looks past the prejudices and tries to find the fans that others haven’t claimed. And having nerds as your fans has a lot of advantages.

For one, there are a lot of us. Granted, we are not the majority of the population. But there are a lot more of us than people think. And we are amongst the highest consumers of media out there. Movies, television shows, video games, DVDs, music, and of course merchandise… we nerds spend a great deal of our considerable disposable incomes on the very industries that let a star be a star.

And we are also a highly intelligent and surprisingly influential group. It may not seem it when you see the stock footage of us dressed up like Klingons at a Star Trek convention, but being an academically gifted demographic, an awful lot of us are doctors, lawyers, computer professionals, scientists, and so on. We wield great influence on media via the Internet, and increasingly, we are the taste-testers and king-makers of society. Where nerds go, society is sure to follow. Odds are, we were there first.

But of all our assets as a fan base, perhaps none other outstrips our least obvious one :

When nerds like you, we like you for life.

If you make it into the hearts of nerds by being in something that appeals to us, you will be there forever. You will be part of our lives till the day you die, and beyond. We might not have social approval, but we have excellent memories, and what we lack in numbers we more than compensate for in longevity.

No matter how far your career slumps, you will still be a big star to us. It might just be for one thing you did many years ago just to pay the rent, something most people in fact have completely forgotten, but that won’t matter to us. You will still be, in our excellent minds, that person who was in that thing we liked, and we will be eternally loyal to you for that very reason.

If you appeal to us, there will always be a minimum to how non-famous you can get. Even if the rest of the media world has abandoned you, we will still be there, welcoming you to our conventions, lining up to get our copies of your book signed, treating you like a great big star, because to us, you are, and you always will be.

There is only one caveat : you can’t say anything against us. Being the victims of abuse all our lives, we are intensely sensitive to disparagement, so if you want to keep our good favour (and you do), simply refrain from participating in public nerd-bashing. Otherwise, our eternal love can turn in a moment to eternal hate, and our sharp minds and long memories will no longer be your friends.

But really, how hard is it to just not participate in the hate?

And in return, you get millions of lifelong fans who will always love you.

Doesn’t that sound good?

More random stuff from my Internet peregrinations, which I have nicknamed “foobles” in a move I hope you will find charmingly eccentric and whimsical, as opposed to, say, frighteningly imbalanced and certifiable.

First up, a comic some person put together on a subject near and dear to my heart : Disney’s The Lion King.

Click the picture to see it full sized and readable!

Sadly, it is also about the heartbreak of childhood disillusionment, which is why, in my mind, I have labeled this comic “The Truth About Lions”.

That’s just how lions are, kid. Most lion prides are a single family group, all related, and they don’t exactly have an Africa-wide dating network in order to meet up with other lion prides and trade genetic information, if ya know what I mean.

So a single rogue male might entice a lioness out of an existing pride and found a pride with her, and when his female offspring come of age…. well, it’s him, or her brothers, and you know what?

Lions just don’t give a shit.

And if his daughters have daughter, he will jungle bang them too, when they come of age. And so forth and so on, until he’s an old mangy elder who doesn’t get real excited by anything any more, and one of his sons had taken over the pride and harem.

Of course, the real explanation, if you want to be wanky about it, is that, if you watch the Lion King closely, you will see that it is at least implied that there are a lot more lionesses than the two in the comic. They are just never named.

But honestly, realistically?

Lions just don’t give a shit.

Next up, a video that makes for perfect Internet fodder, in that it is relatively short, has a lot of entertainment value, and is awesome.

When I first watched it, I didn’t get why the reporter didn’t react to having made a spectacular over the shoulder half-court basket, and his expression was so strange that I wondered if something else was happening to him. Something bad.

But then I figured it out : he has no idea he scored the basket, and that weird expression is actually him looking at his crew and wondering what the hell they are freaking out about. So in reality, it’s him that is thinking something weird is going on.

That, to me, makes the clip all the more charming on repeated viewings.

And of course, being a guy, his immediate reaction when learning he just did something very awesome in front of a camera is “Did you get that?”.

I would be enjoying the glory of that for days and days! And I don’t even give a shit about sports. But come on! That was killer awesome.

I think it is important, in life, to enjoy what good fortune comes your way, and that includes having the sense to milk dumb luck for all it’s worth.

Last up, check this wacky place out : it’s called the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. .

Sounds pretty psychedelic, right? And it is. It is a private garden in Scotland, near Dumfries, and it is theme around science and mathematics.

And, presumably, at least a little bit of drugs.

Just ask Alice. When she's ten feet... tall.

Most of the pics in the article are pretty, in a kind of Alice In Wonderland meets Tim Burton but not like in the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland way, but there is one image that I absolutely love.

It is this here staircase.

That is just so beautiful

I absolutely love how that looks. The effect is one of the stairs flowing down the side of the hill just like a banked river. The rest of it is nothing I have not seen before. That sort of art, the geometrical explorations and the stretched grids, became quite common in the psychedelic sixties.

Although this curlicue into the water is pretty cool.

See what I mean about Tim Burton?

But that staircase…. that is just gorgeous to my eyes. I love how it conforms to the landscape in a way that seems natural and yet is also quite unique.

More ideas for my all too commodious mental “things to do when I am an eccentric billionaire” file. So many weird things to do before I die.

My bucket list is written on an actual bucket.

One thing I have noticed in discussing life, growing up, depression and other mental problems, and other issues with people of my generation is that there is a distinctive pattern of dualism in how we view our parents.

Namely, one parent is the Good Parent and the other is the Bad Parent.

Now I don’t mean this in terms of parenting skill, exactly, although there is a very heavy overlap between the two interpretations.

It is more like one parent is the villain and the other the hero. In extreme cases, it is almost like one parent is an all-loving God and the other is the sum of all that is evil and wrong in the form of Satan.

I have found that the hero role is more often filled by the mother and it is the father who plays the role of the villain, but there are plenty of cases of the opposite as well.

But hero and villain don’t even begin to describe the nature of the duality. What is seems to be most often is a case of the Good But Weak parent versus the Strong But Angry parent.

And the stronger and more divergent this duality is, the more psychologically damaged the children will be, in my opinion.

Let us talk about the two types. We will call them Parent A and Parent B.

Parent A is kind, loving, nurturing, and benevolent. The love they offer is broad and unconditional. They are always sympathetic and patient, and rarely say anything harsh or upsetting. As a result, they are rarely the disciplinarian and offer their support without condition or force.

But they are passive. They do not initiate much of anything, they do not take on responsibility voluntarily (although they are diligent about what they do take on) and they are not very likely to deal with their children honestly and clearly when they feel the truth may hurt their children.

Parent B is impatient, angry, demanding, and often abusive, at least verbally. They rarely ever show approval or acceptance, and indeed, often seem to be working hard to give their children the impression that they hate them. They are often very critical and withholding of their children, and as a result, they are cast in the role of villain.

But they are assertive. They might not do all the work, but they almost always take all or most of the responsibility. They look after household finance, they make the tough decisions, they bear the burden of providing discipline and enforcing the rules.

This duality forms the bedrock basis for the children’s entire view of reality. As they grow, their entire world view becomes polarized. Naturally, they gravitate toward the accepting parent, Parent A, and become avoidant of Parent B.

Parent B senses their children pulling away from them, but so caught up in their role that they can’t react by becoming more loving. Instead, this only reinforces the sort of angry and impatient behaviours that have them playing the villain in the first place.

For you see, these roles reinforce one another strongly. Inside the mind of each parent is the deep conviction that they have to be how they are in response to the other.

Parent A thinks “I have to be soft and supportive and passively protective in order to balance out the aggression, anger, impatience, and harshness of Parent B. ”

Parent B thinks “I have to be the harsh one in order to compensate for the passivity and lack of structure and abdication of responsibility of Parent A. And I very much resent the role I have been cast in, but I don’t understand how to change it. Somebody has to do these things and I know it won’t be Parent A. ”

And over time, Parent A will become more Parent A in response to a perceived increase in Parent B’s Parent B-like activities, and then Parent B responds by becoming more Parent B, and the whole family moves a little further out towards the ends of the teeter totter.

And because this duality naturally expresses itself in ethical terms, it is nearly impossible for anyone involved, whether they be parent, child, or innocent bystander, to see that that problem is not the Bad Parent, but the duality itself, and the roles said duality force upon the parents involved.

The true villain might well be Parent A’s unwillingness to accept any part of Parent B’s role, or vice verse.

And of course, it’s the children in between who suffer the most. They invariably pick sides, and suffer from the fallout of their hopelessly unbalanced childhoods for their entire lives. Often, they even repeat this same dualistic mistake when they, themselves, become parents, because they know no better.

It is only by accepting the need for both ends of the scale and cooperating as parents so that neither parent plays villain or hero all the time that we can resolve this problem and keep it from echoing down the ages.

The opposite of insanity is not the opposite insanity.

The opposite of insanity is sanity, and that means meeting somewhere in the middle.

Here we are at yet another Friday Science roundup, with still more hot and juicy exciting science news for all us big time science fans!

And there’s a lot to cover this week, so we’d best just tuck in and go at it.

It’s a great week for science fiction becoming fact. Take this development : a find and replace mechanism for the human genome.

Yes, with this technique, scientists can perform large scale edits to the genome of a cell in much the same way you would do “find and replace” in your favorite text editor or word processing program. Is something in that genome TAG when it should be TAA? No problem, just load the two strings into this process and ZIP. Fixed!

Now this is not going to be useful for therapy any time soon. Science fiction visions of rewriting every cell in your body to make improvements are still just that, science fiction. But what it will do is speed up genetic research by making testing a new genome for a cell that much faster.

Besides, I am not sure how a human being would survive having their genome rewritten. The transition phase, as the body slowly replaces each cell (and some replace way faster that others) would likely kill you.

So until we can put ourselves into suspended animation, it’s not going to happen.

But that’s just boring old biology. How about some freaky bending of the laws of nature and the rules of reality itself?

Scientists at Cornell have (believe it or not) built a little amusing gizmo called a space-time invisibility cloak.

They created conditions in which time and space were suspended. The physics is slightly beyond me (in the sense that the Andromeda Galaxy is slightly beyond the city limits of Waco, Texas) but according to the article, the Cornell team managed to compress light in such a way that they created a space-time nonevent.

Granted, it was only 110 nanoseconds long. But hey, it’s a start.

And of course, you know what I am thinking, right? STASIS PODS.

Stasis, the idea of being able to freeze a thing or a volume in time, has been a favorite science fiction trope of mine for a long time. Imagine being able to order food that had been frozen not in a freezer but in time right after it was made. Imagine donor organs (while we still need them) frozen the moment they were removed.

And of course, imagine “time travel” by having yourself put into stasis for ten years.

Who knows, this might be the start of all that.

But even that pales in comparison to another science fiction idea bursting into reality : the 3D scanning and reconstruction of crime scenes.

The British, always on the forefront of law enforcement, are the first big power to adopt this system. The 3D laser scanner gathers up to 30 million data points per sweep, with each sweep taking four minutes. They plan to make four sweeps per scene.

Then the information can be loaded into a computer and used to create a highly accurate 3D reconstruction of the scene.

Right now, it is planned mostly for auto accident scenes. That way, they can streamline all the complicated insurance and liability issues and clear the wreckage off the scene earlier, and restore proper traffic flow.

All very practical and cool. But what blows my mind is that this is a real thing, and not just a science fiction idea that I have had in my head for the longest time.

Not that I am the only one, of course. Once computers had scanners of any sort, the idea of something that could digitally record every detail of a crime scene for later investigation via virtual reality is a natural one. I have been envisioning such a system in my mind for a long time, with bored looking cops waiting outside the door of a crime scene while the scanning team does their work.

I find it interesting that they are beginning with auto accident scenes. At first blush, you would think indoor crime scenes would be easier to scan.

But in reality, a room in a modern house is far, far more complex than a scene involving a few cars and a stretch of highway. Just look around the room you are in right now and try to count the number of surfaces, reflections, objects, and so on.

No way a scanner is going to be able to handle all of that, not at this early stage in the advent of the technology.

But just think of where this all could go in the future!

What am I saying…. the future is now.

I have not indulged my love of the cute fuzzy animals on this here blog in a while, and I came across some great animal pictures recently, so I figured, what the heck.

Throw open the Ark doors, pop the locks on all the cages in the Zoo, let all of God’s creatures wander free today, and let the animals come out to play.

First up, a personal favorite of mine, the red fox.

Everyone knows foxes are clever, elusive, and of course, downright adorable.

But did you know they are also heavily into Eastern religions, including meditation?

Here’s the proof :

Ommmmmmmmm..... arf. Ommmmmmmmm..... arf.

When reached for comment, a spokesfox, going only by the name “Mister Fox” (obviously an alias… elusive, remember?), said, in a soothing and rich yet accessible baritone, “We foxes, as a rule, find traditional Western religions too restrictive and oppressive. Only the ancient disciplines of Eastern religion offer the combination of freedom and spirituality that fits with a modern, urban fox’s busy and complex lifestyle. ”

“Mister Fox” then danced a happy, carefree, freeform dance in a small suburban supermarket that was closed for the night, while the credits rolled.

Next up, a picture taken candidly by one of our secret agents, who spent months under deep, deep cover to get us this tantalizing picture of an inter-animal conference in progress :

So this year, it's going to be potbellied pigs, but next year, the new hit pet will be.... are you ready for this?.... porcupines.

Our hearts go out to the friends and family of our brave photographer, who is recovering in a local pet grooming center after being nearly fatally fluffed in the line of duty.

Judging by the deep look of concentration on the dog’s face, we can safely assume that this is a conference of deep international significance and, had the audio recording not been interrupted by our brave journalist being apprehended by the tiny-little-jackbooted thus of the International Pet Conspiracy, no doubt we would know even more.

Still, remember : buy shares in porcupines. They are only pricks on the outside.

Our intrepid reporter was also able to take this picture, but I think from the expression of exaggerated innocence on one of the participants’ faces, it is clear they were only too aware that they were being photographed.

Still, here it is :

Kitten : Nothing weird happening here! Dog : I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL.

Just look at that menacing glower on the muzzle of the canine participant. Clearly, this cabal does not take kindly to the innocent intrusions of the forces of truth and accountability into their shadowy world of secret deals, international skullduggery, and Friskies-fueled sex orgies.

Or was it sex-fueled Friskies orgies? Either way. Scandalous!

You just have to take one look at that dog to know that he’s a Killer.

Or maybe a Rex, or a Prince, or possibly even a Fido, if he’s owned by a comic strip artist.

And just look at what they did to one of their numbers when he made the mistake of talking to the press, or as they call it, “barking out of turn” :

I don't know what's worse, the punishment, or the pun

Truly, we are dealing with savage, powerful individuals who will stop at nothing in order to protect their secret world of power, privilege, and Purina. Who knows what sinister actions they take under the cloak of secrecy?

Must be something pretty juicy for them to go to all that trouble, right?

And for the truly dirty work, the real black-ops bag-over-the-head wetworks kind of stuff, they have their elite team of super deadly agents who pack an unbelievable arsenal of high tech devices and master any number of bizarre and deadly skills :

Seen here : one of their deadlist assassins, fleeing the scene of another nefarious deed

So clearly, we are dealing with powerful forces when we stick our noses into the crotches of the great and powerful and take a hearty and informative sniff.

Still, we shall not be intimidated by their Gestapo tactics, nor tempted by their offers of free international travel and enormous wads of untraceable international currencies….

Wait, they are seriously offering that? Is the travel first class? CHARTERED? Hmmm….

Actually, never mind anything I just said. There is no international pet conspiracy and there never has been, and this article has been merely the product of a bored comedy writer inventing a ridiculously over the top context for a bunch of random cute animal photos he found on the Internet.

Now if you need me, I will be in Monte Carlo.

We’re still calling these random links foobles, right? Right? Cool.

Hi there Sunday readers, and welcome to that thing I do every Sunday, which is shovel whatever links I have kicking around at you in lieu of coherent content.

I call them “foobles” to make the whole thing seem cute.

And speaking of cute, I have recently discovered a webcomic I would love to share with you. It’s called Housepets and I have been going through the whole archive of it lately, and having a great old time.

But confessions first : for the most part, it’s more charming than funny. This is not the strip you go to expecting razor sharp cutting edge pointy comedy. It’s not that kind of comic. It is a different kind.

And try not to hurt your brain trying to figures out how their particular funny animals type universe “works”. Yes, it appears to be a world where humans keep animals as pets even though said animals walk, talk, and use tools just like human beings do. And the human beings can hear them talk too, none of the Garfield dodge. Sure, by rights, that opens a whole universe of awkward questions, but come on, the comic is fun, just roll with it.

Caveats aside, it is just plain wonderful. It has a big cast of adorable, lovable characters with their own personalities and quirks who get into a lot of pretty creative situations and in general, reading the strip is like wandering around a fun, silly universe with a bunch of fuzzy little friends.

Next, some left over science stuff : coming as no surprise to me, researchers find link between creative genius and mental illness.

I could quibble about the methodology of the study, but I won’t. I can dig it. To me, the link between creativity and insanity is intuitively obvious.

After all, to be creative, you have to listen very closely to your own inner voices and be willing to have ideas and solutions burst into your head, seemingly out of nowhere, and then follow those visions wherever they lead.

That already sounds half crazy from word one, doesn’t it?

And honestly, sometimes my own creativity and insight feels a little like insanity. I am always carrying around a non-stop madcap circus-laboratory of incandescent creativity in this here battered old noggin of mine, and while I would not trade it away for the world as it is the wild and chaotic reactor core to the whole merry mad machine that is me. I get a lot of out my untamed intelligence and chaotic creativity, but it takes a lot out of me in the process, and while I would never want to be rid of it, there are times I dearly wish this crazy clunky contraption of mine had an OFF switch.

Part of the problem is that, for both good and bad, creativity lets a person simply see through and hence ignore or bypass the sorts of narrow intellectual constrictions that both keep less creative people from growing or learning, but also keep them sane.

It is cold and lonely outside the box.

Lastly, we have me nattering on about Google Plus.

For those who do not know, Google Plus (or, more properly, Google+) is a new social network service from the fine people at Google.

It is obviously meant to be a Facebook killer, something to give people the same core functionality without all the chaos and noise drowning out the signal over at the FB.

Right now, it is invite-only, and still under testing and adjustment, so being in on it is not exactly a thrillfest quite yet.

Still, I like what I see so far. You make “circles” of contacts and then you can share links, images, videos, and so on with said circles.

It is all very simple and clean and effective, which means it is pretty much like Facebook was back when it started, before things got way too crazy.

Judging by the reports of the network’s explosive growth over the last few days (and that is WITH the limiting factor of being invite-only, it’s going to be a success.

After all, people have been wondering what is the thing that will do to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace for a long time now. Discontent with Facebook has been growing increasingly stiff and strident lately, and the time seems right to try to launch a successor. And if anyone can do it, Google the Mighty can do it.

If you want an invite or want to connect on Google+, drop me a line.

You are a monkey. And so am I.

And so is everyone else. Every human being, past, present, and future, is a monkey. Your parents are monkeys. Your children are, or will be, monkeys. Abraham Lincoln was a monkey, as was Ghandi, Pol Pot, and the Bay City Rollers.

In fact, if you are reading these words and you live on planet Earth, you are a monkey. ^[1]

Now being very clever monkeys, you and I, we do not like to think about what monkeys we are. After all, we have invented a lot of very impressive things, transforming the planet in the process, and to be fair, it is pretty clear who is running the place.

But being the head monkeys does not in any way free us of our monkey nature. The very drive to explore and create and innovate that has lead us to this heady place in such a relatively short period of time (10,000 years or so) is a fundamentally monkey thing. The difference between a monkey poking a stick into a termite hill to get termites and a human being poking around in a laboratory to get a new fuel additive is a matter of time and scale, not a matter of some transcendent quality that only we humans possess at all.

In fact, the very idea that we somehow think we have stopped being monkeys simply because we have gotten so good at this social and technological evolution is, in many ways, the most simian conceit of them all.

It is like a monkey who climbs to the top of a very tall tree, and looks down at all the other monkeys, and scoffs “Boy, am I glad I am not one of you monkeys any more!”.

A monkey you are, my friend, and a monkey you will always be.

The problem is that evolution is not revolution. It is impossible for evolution to produce something entirely new, except at the unicellular level. Everything else will be based on a previous model, and incorporate everything about that previous model along with the new features that make this year’s model better than the last.

So when we evolved into human beings, we kept being monkeys. A lion is still a cat, after all, and a tuna is still a fish. Specialization in evolution might modify things a little (a flipper becomes a paw, a tail becomes a stump) but all the basics remain the same.

We are special monkeys, with abilities no monkey has ever had before. But it does not stop us from being, basically, very clever monkeys.

And it is only through understanding and accepting our monkey nature that we can hope to ever overcome it and become something more.

For instance, as monkeys, we are inherently hierarchical. Despite all our progress in freedom, democracy, tolerance, and individualism, we are still a socially hierarchical species who is happiest when there is a strong alpha male leading us, assuring us that we will be protected from danger by a fierce and aggressive male who is scarier than all the threats of the world and who projects confidence and control.

We take our cues from our dominant alphas, and mirror their mood, for they are our link to the world outside our little local tribe. Just as a baby animal knows to be quiet when its mother is quiet and to run when its mother runs, so do we, as tribe building monkeys, instinctively adopt the same emotional stance as our leaders, whether they are the head of our office at work or the head of our nation on the news.

Also, as social monkeys, we are greatly influence by all the other monkeys around us. This also flies in the face of modern individualism and the notion of total individual autonomy, but study after study shows this to nevertheless remain true.

So, for example, it is very difficult to resist peer pressure. Our urge to conform to our tribe and blend in is very strong. Usually, the only ones who can do so with complete success are the monkeys on the periphery, who do not really belong to any one tribe.

In these and many other ways, we remain basically the same sort of monkey that we were when we first stumbled out onto the Serengeti.

So own your monkey nature. Be proud to be a simian and a monkey and an animal as well as a human being. Don’t consider it a demotion, think of it as an embracing of the full richness of what it means to be a human being.

We might still be monkeys, but we are special monkeys indeed.

This week finds me even more surprised that it’s already Friday again than usual. My, how the time flies when you are bone idle and spend all your time inside your own skull.

First up, let’s deal with the cool new wave of robotics innovation : zoobotics.

No, it’s not a brand of antibiotics for zookeepers, it’s a new wave of an old idea : making robots that attempt to mimic animal life, in whole or in part.

It’s an idea that has been around for a long time, from the clockwork beasts of the Age of the Clockmaker to the more modern era where, for instance, the inventor of Velcro based his design on observing how burrs stick to your clothing.

And people have attempted to make robotic animals that mimic the real thing many times before, but the technological and behavioral barriers were just too high.

The technological barriers largely had to do with scale. Nature can pack an enormous degree of complexity into a very small space. Compared to nature, even the very best miniaturized parts and printed circuits of the previous era are clunky, slow, complicated, and incredibly hungry for energy.

But now that we have the beginnings of nanotechnology, the first glimmers of the post-silicon computing world, and a brand new wave of extremely attractively priced and user friendly robotics parts for the amateur roboticist to tinker with, the idea is back, and we can concentrate on the more interesing (to me) part : behaviour.

The thing is, we don’t really get what makes, say, an ant tick ^[1]. They seem like simple creatures and yet they exhibit complex behaviours without even having something you could call a brain. So obviously, they must be operating on an extremely simple set of instructions. But what are those instructions?

We haven’t the faintest idea. We try building virtual ants in simulation, and they don’t behave like the real ants at all.

The only solution is to build robotic programmable ants and tinker with them a while.

I look forward to the results of such tinkering!

Next up : if you are looking for a more domestic version of the virtual restaurant, why not try some virtual shopping while you wait for your train in South Korea?

I mean, check this shit out :

While you wait for your commuter train, you can wander the photorealistic virtual aisle, shopping by pointing your cell phone’s camera at the QR code at the product, and that adds it to your virtual shopping cart. Then you check out when you are getting on the train, the money is deducted from your online account, and you pick a time for the groceries to be delivered that evening.

Imagine that : coming home from a long day at work, and your groceries just arrive like magic. The idea holds much appeal to me.

In fact, if they have an efficient business model for home grocery delivery, that in and of itself is revolutionary, and could quite easily extend to online.

People have been trying to do internet grocery shopping for years, but nobody has been able to put it together and make it work. Maybe it will take a giant like Tesco (think Wal-mart but from the UK) to do it.

Last up : in another of my favorite fields, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, there has been another breakthrough : they created an artificial but fully functional and entirely organic small intestine in mice.

It is just like the real thing. They built it up layer by later with lab grown cells, and were able to reproduce what before only nature could make : a small intestine.

This is yet another small step towards a world where all parts of a human being are replaceable, and nobody has to suffer and die simply because a part stopped working.

We are a long ways from that future now, but who knows what the next decade will bring? There are already a few people walking around with vat grown organs in them right now. And the speed of innovation increases every year.

Perhaps some day having major organs replaced will be a routine surgery, and smaller replacements like a finger or a toe would be done on an outpatient basis.

And imagine being able to get rid of the need for organ banks and their attendant waiting lists? No more waiting and hoping someone gets in a horrible accident, with all the attendant guilt and karma.

Instead, you would just have to wait long enough for them to grow a new organ for you, or possibly just get one “out of the box” that is guaranteed to be rejection-proof.

I hope I live long enough to see this come true.

Of all the pastimes that human beings have sought and enjoyed over the millennia, the second most popular and enduring one has always been drinking to excess.

As long as humanity has had civilization, we have had alcohol. It is fair to say that humanity is a drinking species, Muslim and Mormon territories aside. Whether it’s ouzo in a Greek taverna, hot sake in a karaoke bar in Japan, or a six pack of beer in front of the television here in North America, people all over the world relax by drinking.

Why? What makes this such a persistent vice?

Of course, we are all familiar with the more obvious effects of alcohol. It relaxes people, lowers their inhibitions, makes them feel more confident and calm, and greatly reduces their levels of bodily stress.

It also gives most people nasty hangovers, greatly distorts their motor skills and sense of judgement, suppresses their good judgement and proper decision making, and quite often leads to nausea, vomiting, and feeling very ill indeed, not to mention leading to countless fatal accidents and cases of alcohol related illnesses like cirrhosis and renal failure per year.

Obviously, people as individuals and society in general must be getting something fairly profound out of alcohol in order for people to feel that, overall, it is worth it.

Arguably, one could get a lot of the same benefits from any number of healthier things. What does alcohol, and in particular drinking heavily, have that other things do not?

Apart from convenience?

The answer, I think, lies in electroshock therapy. Or rather, as is it more properly called, electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT.

It may surprise you to know that a form of electroshock therapy still exists in the world, and that far from being a dim relic of far less enlightened times rightly relegated to the dust bun of history along with hydrotherapy and the lobotomy, it is still practiced till this very day, albeit only in very specific circumstances.

In ECT, the patient is put under general anesthetic and convulsions are induced via the precise application of a small amount of electrical current to the brain via electrodes attached to the patients’ forehead. It it used primarily in cases of very severe depression that has not responded to any other treatment.

Now one might ask, how on Earth can a zap to the brain that makes you go into convulsions help treat depression? And truth be told, science does not really know. That is one of the reason ECT remains a controversial treatment used only in extremis. ^[1]

But there are various theories, and the one that I subscribe to is that ECT essentially acts as a reset button for the brain.

Normally, our brain are never truly “off”. Even when we sleep, the brain carries on. In fact, in many ways, the brain is even more active when we sleep than when we wake. It simply does not have consciousness.

But with ECT, the brain is truly rebooted. It has to bring all its various functions online one at a time again, just like your computer has to when you reboot it.

And just like your computer, the brain functions much better after it has been rebooted. All the incomplete thoughts, suppressed emotions, long forgotten mental processes, and other junk has been flushed out and your mind can function at maximum capacity, fast and lean and strong and powerful. Confusion, doubt, the fog of the mind, all gone.

No wonder it counters depression, at least for a time.

And I think that is what drinking to excess, or specifically drinking until you pass out, does for people. It provides a chemical way to reboot the brain.

I think this is also what people get from other methods of inducing extreme mental states. Whether you are a prophet wandering in the desert for days until hunger and dehydration make you hallucinate or a jogger who keeps going until you drop, people around the world have discovered ways of overwhelming their minds and forcing them to shut down and start again.

This is also why people value being “in the zone” so much. When your task absorbs every little bit of your attention, forcing you to focus entirely on the here and now, this brings the great joy of having one’s mind all in one place for once… just like after a reboot.

Even some forms of meditation work on this principle, although in that case, the process is more akin to defragmenting your computer’s memory while it is running rather than a completely cold rebooting.

So that’s it. That’s why people drink till they pass out and call it a good time. That is why they endure the nausea and hangovers and bad judgement and incidental injuries, all for an experience they might not even remember later.

The hangover is temporary, but the clearing of the mind lingers on.

It pays to reboot your brain now and then.

I have come across some rather whiz bang neato keen technology type news lately, and once more I did not feel like waiting till Friday to share, so here they are, fresh from the cutting edge of tomorrow.

First up, we have this rather enticing press release about a game called DUST 514.

It’s by CCP, the people behind one of the Internet’s great secrets, the wide-ranging science fiction MMORPG EVE Online, and is meant to (optionally) blend seamlessly with that persistent environment, essentially acting as an extension of it into FPS territory.

But that’s not what intrigues me about it. This is : the battles in DUST 514 matter. The whole world is persistent and so you are not simply fighting relatively pointless battles for temporary bragging rights on some tournament server someplace in Korea.

No, if your side wins, you get territory. If you gain territory, you get money and power and, not to put too fine a point on it, the other people’s stuff. If you are part of a faction or work for a government, that faction or government advances its agenda. If you lose, of course, the opposite happens.

In short, it’s not just battles, it’s war, and all I can say is “finally!”.

I have barely wetted the bottom of one toe in the waters of the MMORPG world, but part of the reason for that is that I find them pointless. Even when they have a plot, the plot is individually instanced. No matter how hard I work to beat a big bad boss…. he is still there afterward, waiting for the NEXT player or group to come along and defeat him. In the grand scheme of things, I have accomplished absolutely nothing.

In single player games, there is the feeling of progress. If I kill the Snake Master of Black Mamba Swamp, that son of a bitch stays dead. I can feel good about it for the rest of the game. But not so with MMPORPGs. At least, not until now.

In short, this will be an MMORPG that I might actually play and find worthwhile. Score, achievements, levels… none of those matter enough to me to keep me interested.

But whether or not the good guys win the war…. that I can get behind.

Moving on! Next up, we have the next wave in streamlining the restaurant experience.

Seriously leveraging the modern one-two punch of extremely high detail projectors with use-anywhere touch sensing, the restaurant operates entirely by a touch menu projected right onto your table. Each person just touches here and there to select options, and when they are done, the information goes to the kitchen directly, and before you know it, there is a waiter with your food.

Does that not sound awesome?

And the best part, in terms of sheer techno-gasm capacity, is that the projectors project life-sized images of the food you are thinking of ordering directly onto the table. You can see exactly what you are getting (more or less), exactly where you will be getting it, life sized and interactive.

Sounds downright appetizing, honestly.

Of course, this begs the question : does these mean we are looking at a future without human servers? You walk in, order, and the only time you see a person is when they bring your food? ^[1]

I hope not. Don’t get me wrong, I am mostly all for this. A restaurant like that would not only be more efficient and have faster service, it could also in theory be a lot cheaper. Labour is a major portion of the operating costs of a restaurant, and if you could reduce the amount of labour needed, it could create a very attractive opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur to create a chain of restaurants with highly competitive pricing. And nobody to tip, either.

But I would not like to lose the option of going to an “old-fashioned” restaurant, with waiters and so on. There is really no substitute for being waited on, and the quality of the staff in terms of personality and efficiency is often the difference between a restaurant I will frequent and one I will only occasional.

Finally, a quick note : seems the European music mega-server Spotify is going to make the jump across the Atlantic to the shores of America.

It is basically a music server with millions of songs already loaded on it, and it’s free. So for absolutely no money, you get access to, as Wired put it, “a magical version of iTunes in which you have already bought every song in the world. ”

And that, I am guessing, is the problem. Giving away free what massive corps like Apple and the music industry want to sell is a great way to make very powerful enemies very fast. I am guessing that the reason the service works for Europe is that traditionally, the American big dogs have not treated European markets very seriously, and have based their entire business model on North American sales, with any money at all made from markets outside the USA seen as purely after the fact.

That will not be true if they come stomping around here. Great pressure will be brought to bear to keep that from happening, including, in all likelihood, threats of copyright lawsuits and/or exorbitant fees for the rights to play the music from the big dog record music companies. After all, they are still trying to cope with the idea of selling on iTunes.

Wrapping their brains around “free” is probably beyond them.

Sadly, we here in Canada are not included in this American invasion play anyhow (typical!), so it is all academic from out point of view.

We really are America’s redheaded stepchild when it comes to all this cool Net stuff!