Blogging on and off since 2003
The Swift Report: Christian Gamers Resurrect Christ–and Profits–in Global Video Game Market : “…with expectations high for Gibson’s movie-to-game gamble on The Passion, the question on analysts’s minds: What Would Jesus Play?”
(Via Sully, who seems to have been taken in by it.)
When I first started reading science fiction back in the early 1960s, it seemed that all future cities were either shattered dystopias or cool, automated Jetsons-like worlds. This account seems typical: “Just swipe a prepaid card through a stanchion in front of an empty waiting vehicle, punch in the destination number, take a seat in the vehicle and our computer control system will sweep you non-stop to your destination.”
Well, apparently people are gearing up to actually build this stuff. Check out the SkyWeb Express website here, including the video clips. (But did they need to use such cheesy music?)
(Via Salon.)
We’re about to depart on a typically complicated trip. This one involves flying to Seattle for the weekend, then going down to Silicon Valley for a couple of days (work – for me, anyway); then down the coast to Carmel Valley for Thanksgiving, and home via San Jose. And, mirabile dictu, all of the flights are non-stop.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading back to my birthplace for a Jini Community meeting. It should be a lot of fun….
Nit-pickers will notice that although the graphic shows West End tube stations, the the earlier, misleading graphic has been updated. The original version is still to be found on Jini.org. Graphics notwithstanding, Jini Community Meeting itself will be at The Brewery in the City of London, near Moorgate and the Barbican.
Herewith a collection of the most ill-defined terms in the computer business today. I’ve chosen them because in the last few months I’ve encountered at least two WILDLY incompatible uses of each one of them – often many more!
Anyone like to suggest a few more? I’ll roll them into the top-level blog item as updates. By the way, I’m not suggesting that we stop using these terms, but I would like to see more judicious qualification and less universalization…
Apparently my blogger code is B5 d+ t+ k+ s u- f+ i+ o x- e l c–. Is this the MBTI of the new millennium?
This page on David Chalmers’ web site is way too much fun. Not content with giving us a taxonomy of zombies (including Hollywood zombies and Unix processes), he delves into cocktails, cartoons, and 1960s pop music. Of course the core of the page is the collection of links to papers on philosophical zombies: devices which seem to have become part of the standard toolkit of certain philosophers of mind. Nigel Thomas’s elegant Zombie Killer ought to have sent them all packing, but unfortunately these impossible (but arguably conceivable) undead critters just won’t stay down….
Here‘s a powerful thesis about red America and blue America. It isn’t about the north vs. the south. It isn’t about slave states vs. free states. It isn’t (primarily) about religion, or guns, or gay marriage. It’s about cities: an archipelago of blue cities in a sea of red suburbs and rural areas. It’s about the Urban Archipelago. Worth reading.
(Via Sully, who also has a link to this really cool graphic.)
We’re not yet half way through November, but winter can’t wait. The picture is from a traffic webcam about a mile from where I live in Brookline, MA. According to the NWS, Boston got 4 inches and Milton got 6.8 inches; we’re half-way between those points, so figure about 5+ inches. That’s what it felt like as I lugged the trash to the curbside.
Terry wrote: “”On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the year 1918 all fighting shall cease on the Western Front”
And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.
But it wasn’t.”
(From Better Than Salt Money.)