Video Gamers at the End of History

Video Gamers at the End of History

• Oh no! There are poor, lonely introverts playing video games! These people need help!

Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators

Bacteria make computers look like pocket calculators

• Ashby’s Law trumps Moore’s Law. Not much more to say.

Scientists warn US Congress of cancer risk for cell phone use

Scientists warn US Congress of cancer risk for cell phone use

• This is one of those cases where I think everybody should just stick their head in the sand.
• With your head in the sand, you can’t use a cell phone.

Radio waves from cellphones damage sperm, study says

Radio waves from cellphones damage sperm, study says

• I have one word for smug cellphone producers, providers and users: tobacco.

Elective Fields? Surely you jest

Wireless yes, elective no.

“It turns out the human body is not affected by magnetic fields; it is affected by elective fields. So what we are doing is transmitting energy using the magnetic field not the electric field.”

And, no. Please read “On the Nature of Electromagnetic Field Interactions with Biological Systems” by Allen H. Frey, ISBN 1-57059-055-9, and Biomagnetism: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Williamson et. al, ISBN 0306413698, and find the correct way to state what you are trying to say. What you did say is weird science. Will someone from Cal Tech please help these people out? I’m retired.

– heading back to the Cretaceous

Jeffrey Sachs: The digital war on poverty

Jeffrey Sachs: The digital war on poverty

• Maybe it’s good that the world’s poor are becoming increasingly dependent on yet another western umbilical (like the so-called “green revolution” of an earlier decade), and maybe it’s not. Time will tell.
• Then again, maybe some missionary engineers in Rwanda will come up with an appropriate technology version of the cellphone, made out of banana leaves and pineapple tops.

Vint Cerf on the Future of the Internet

Vint Cerf on the Future of the Internet

• I happen to be a computational linguist, among other things, and I disagree with Cerf’s assessment of the present and near-future success of automatic translation — you can’t translate correctly if you can’t think. Computers can’t think, and we won’t know how to make them think for quite some time.
• His assessment of the impact of mobile computing is spot-on, though, and it’s a point that’s often not on the radar in western industrialized countries with hot and cold running PC’s.

Britain under water: Computer game’s chilling images show flooding danger

Britain under water: Computer game’s chilling images show flooding danger

• Well, I can’t see how all those British cities would ever flood like that.
• Unless the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt and sea level rises, I mean.

Charles Arthur: The internet cannot be centralised, parliamentarians

Charles Arthur: The internet cannot be centralised, parliamentarians

• The nice thing is that even if national governments managed to figure out a way to regulate content on the Internet, another Internet with unregulated content would simply spring up in its place. And so on, ad infinitum. If these governments have nothing better to do than play a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, then be my guest.
• State-sponsored thought control is at an end, for as long as we have the wherewithal to keep a network running. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Bluetooth is watching: secret study gives Bath a flavour of Big Brother

Bluetooth is watching: secret study gives Bath a flavour of Big Brother

• I’m sure there are many people who would love to have their location tracked in realtime so that anybody can find them at any time.
• I’m also sure there are many people who would not.