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!

Time to face the facts : you are not an alpha male. You look nothing like the sort of men that women drool over. You are not a tower of finely honed muscle and sinew the likes of which make women stare at you like it’s a hot day in July and you are the last glass of ice cold lemonade on Earth. You are not a super competent professional with an air of authority and a sleek automobile. And you are not a dashingly handsome man of action that would make James Bond seem like Jerry Lewis by comparison.

You are just a regular guy, with regular looks, a normal job, a average car, and no more flash or panache than the next guy. You may wonder, then, how on Earth are you ever going to attract a mate in the competitive world of modern dating?

But you may have an asset that you have not considered and which can be just the edge you need to get a good woman to pay attention to you and maybe even get her into your life, your bed, and even into a life of wedded bliss with you as her Man of Life.

You might be adorable.

Now hear me out before you get upset.

It is true that in modern society, being cute is simply not a virtue men are taught to value about themselves. It does not map to any of the usual ways that men are raised to seek. It is not impressive, or manly, or strong, or dangerous, or dignified, or any of the other “typically male” attributes that modern society tells us are what gets the girls.

It is, however, effective.

Granted, it’s not the sure fire, user friendly asset that rugged good looks or fabulous wealth can be, but you might be surprised at how many girls you can attract when you stop trying to be someone you are not, which is at best pathetic and at worst downright grating and obnoxious, and start emphasizing your genuine assets instead.

In other words, don’t try to compete on the levels in which other men excel. Try for something that you don’t see around as much.

Try for cute.

And I am not talking “cute” in the way a teenage girl moons on about a “cute boy”.

I am talking puppy dog cute. Kitten cute. Baby animal cute in general. The sort of cute that makes women go “Aww!” and want to pet and hug and nurture.

Beginning to get my drift?

The first problem with the cute approach will be your own natural inborn resistance to it because men are trained by society to defend their male status and dignity at all times and from all attacks, and embracing cuteness seems like you are jettisoning your credibility, integrity, and dignity all at once.

And it cannot be denied that there is some truth to that. If you are going to appeal to women by being puppy dog cute, you are fairly unlikely at the same time to be convincing them that you are a macho stud god who will make all their dreams come true.

But by the same token, you will also be appealing to women down an avenue that very few men pursue. All men are trying to strut their stuff and impress women with their flashy display of traditional male attributes. Very few men are choosing instead to seem friendly, nonthreatening, vulnerable, and yes, downright adorable.

Think of it this way : many a woman who is very guarded against all those wannabe Prince Charmings out there will think nothing of scooping up a cute puppy dog and petting him and cuddling him and lavishing him with attention and affection.

Wouldn’t you like that to be you

Now of course, this is purely about attracting a lady (or laddie) and making a connection with them. What happens after you start to get to know each other is still up to you. You still have to be a good boyfriend, lover, or husband in order to keep her and love her right.

But just remember that evolution has provided a lot more ways for two human beings to find each other and live happily ever after than the obvious ones that society is more than happy to tell you about.

Look around you, and you will see plenty of couples where neither of them look like movie stars and yet they are as happy as anyone has ever been in love.

Maybe that’s because they stopped look for perfection, or expecting it in themselves, and you should do the same thing.

After all, you might just be adorable.