all horse force

This is a great quiz. Not because it has any science, but because knowing which X-Man you are is the one true path to enlightenment.

I am Cyclops. Fear my deadly eyes.

evan :: Oct.30.2003 :: NetBits :: 9 Comments »

So some of you who have been in contact with me over the past couple of weeks may have noticed that I’ve been a bit subdued in general, and downright unexuberant at times. I wouldn’t want to claim I was depressed, clinically, but I felt like shit; call it what you will. Upon noticing this trend, Lisa, saint that she is, set about rectifying the situation. As she has pretty much figured me out over the past five years, she realized the problem was not my general anxiety over a lack of direction in my career or my issues about my level of physical fitness. No, rabid materialist pig that I am, the source of my ennui was a pronounced dearth of shiny new gadgets in my life. So she did the unthinkable: she ordered me a brand-new 20GB iPod, for no reason other than to cheer me up. I am now fully in good spirits and travelling in the company of 5,000 of my favorite joints. Pimpin’ ain’t easy, but it’s necessary.

I believe this makes me the first person I know to upgrade from a perfectly working original iPod to the 3rd generation. On this auspicious occasion, I would like to address the troops.

“Now hear this: all ye who would covet a lifestyle replete with gadgetry, know who ye shall follow into the breach of the bleeding edge, to do battle with the forces of good-enoughness and un-dopeness. The new hotness is a glorious burden, but ’tis not for any and all who would take it up. It is a constant struggle against those who are afear’d of that hotness. The Luddite armies are vast and mighty, yet they be fools to a man. Given naught but a bit of old paper, they will be rendered helpless with nostalgia and run off in search of a goose to pluck, so that they may scrawl on the ragged parchment in the manner of their forefathers. Scribbling thusly, they are easily dispatched by an onslaught of New Features and Performance Improvements. Though ye may win some easy battles, know that the war will continue on, until every man, woman and child is awash in power cables and rapidly blinking LEDs. Good luck and God speed.”

evan :: Oct.29.2003 :: Notices :: 4 Comments »

It’s nice to see that Google has a sense of humor beyond its cutesy holiday logo changes (via Neil Gaiman). For better or worse, those buggers are the fauna of my native land, and I love them.

evan :: Oct.27.2003 :: NetBits :: 1 Comment »

And I’m not even talking about just Bill O’Reilly here. How is it that anyone takes Fox News seriously? Even if we grant them that they are genuinely seeking to provide a “fair and balanced” middle point between left and right, two problems arise. One, their method of accomplishing this is to take the extreme right and the extreme left and let them scream at each other, never even having a rational discussion, much less agreeing on anything. Two, they specifically hire idiots to espouse conservative viewpoints and give them their own shows. I’ve heard many intelligent conservatives argue persuasively; none of them have ever been on Fox News, and I can’t imagine they ever will be.

This (via words mean things) is what got me going down this road today. I don’t think it really requires an explaination as to why this speeds from obnoxious to insulting, rolling right through ridiculous without a stop. I would like to say, though, if Fox News is the Devil, then Ann Coulter is certainly Satan’s Whore Numero Uno. She exists simply for Rupert Murdoch and his old wrinkled cronies to have some new pictures to jerk off on, now that their old glossies of Nancy Reagan have become entirely encrusted with their venomous spooj. She’s not exactly hot, but blond and not-as-wrinkled-as-Barbara-Bush will have to do, given the cows in the rest of the herd.

Some of my more astute readers may notice I’ve gotten a bit ad hominem in my argument. In the case of Ann Coulter, there are few other options; she doesn’t make arguments so much as rant and rave, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Black Hebrews who hang out around Times Square (the ones who insist I’m not human because “hue-man” means “colored man”), it’s that arguing with raving lunatics is a waste of one’s precious time.

As for Fox News, it just makes me very disappointed in Americans that they have decided it is the best news on cable. CNN isn’t perfect by a long shot, but at least they try to be objective, try to get Americans to think before they jump to conclusions most of the time. Fox News is following in the grand tradition of the Fox Network; give the people whatever will get them riled up. The problem is, with news you are working over peoples’ ideas about the real world; the bias inherent in Fox News and its abysmal level of intellectual discourse is far more dangerous than a thousand more seasons of Joe Millionaire. Besides, eventually even the pygmy women on Papua New Guinea will be on to the scam, and then Joe Millionaire will die a quiet death, alone and unmourned. Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, however, will probably have their brains transplanted into immortal baby-eating robots, sustaining themselves on the hordes of “traitorous” liberal infants roaming the streets of New York.

Weep for America, my friends. Weep for the children.

evan :: Oct.21.2003 :: Notions :: 5 Comments »

Yes they did. First thing tomorrow, I”m proposing to Aaron Boone.

evan :: Oct.17.2003 :: Notices :: 2 Comments »

From the Atlantic online:

The conspiracy geeks and Area 51 obsessives are right—the U.S. government is heavily invested in research projects that brush the borders of science fiction. But many of those ventures aren’t top secret, so long as you’re willing to wade through the latest budget statement for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which contains funding estimates for various projects, including some distinctly sinister-sounding ones. The spookiest of these is probably the “Brain Machine Interface Program,” which promises to “create new technologies for augmenting human performance through the ability to access neural codes in the brain in real time and integrate them into peripheral device or system operations.” In other words, if the project pans out (a rather large “if,” to be sure), the soldier of the future will be a functional telepath, controlling equipment from a distance and perhaps even communicating “brain-to-brain” with his fellow soldiers. This may sound implausible, but an article about the project in the journal Nature reports that experiments on rats and monkeys have already yielded remarkable results: electrodes were implanted in the animals’ motor cortexes, and when neurons in that region of the brain fired in certain patterns, the electrodes successfully transmitted a signal to operate a simple lever or robot arm. Meanwhile, neuroscientists in another part of the same program are attempting to transmit sounds and images directly into the brain’s auditory cortex, and a third group is aiming to discover whether parts of the human brain can be replaced by silicon microchips. Such “memory implants” could enable the military to insert combat experience into a soldier’s head—creating, with the other projects, the possibility that a fighter pilot could “upload” his training and then fly a plane from the ground, all the while following orders beamed from headquarters directly to his brain.

As Dan put it, “Pretty neat stuff.” It’s true; there’s nothing like the fulfillment of the Terminator-Matrix prophecies to get you up in the morning. I, for one, welcome our new cyberdeathmachine overlords and look forward to my grandchildren’s eventual enslavement. Computers are far better than people, and it’s high time we let them assimilate us.

But seriously, Marzipan. This is not the first serious attempt at crazy neural link cybernetics, nor is it that impressive yet, compared to some recent successes. Nevertheless, dipping into the DoD’s bottomless cash pit is certain to bear fruit eventually. I’m generally in support of anything DARPA wants to spend money on; they gave us the internet, and that puts them up there with Prometheus in my book. I mean, their biggest waste of funds so far was the Star Wars program, and that involved space lasers, so it was still pretty cool.

evan :: Oct.09.2003 :: Notions :: No Comments »