What a marvel the first photographic images must have been to their early-19th-century viewers — the crisp, unassailable reality of scenes and events, unfiltered by an artist’s paintbrush or point of view. And what an opportunity for manipulation. It didn’t take long for schemers to discover that with a little skill and imagination, photographic realism could be used to create manufactured realities.
Friday July 31st 2009, 7:59 am
Filed under: technoporn
I was rooting through spam on one of my hotmail accounts this morning when I saw an email from Amazon announcing the Kindle was now $299.00. That’s at about the right price point for me to seriously consider buying one. When Sony came out with the Reader a few years back, I seriously considered buying one because it was seriously gorgeous. But ultimately it was just another gadget. You had to hook it up to a computer to download stuff onto it. I’ve got enough things that want to plug into my computer, thank you.
What’s really awesome about the Kindle is that you can download books wirelessly from Amazon. Meaning you can be sitting out on the beach, buy a book and start reading it, without leaving your chair.
You really can’t beat that with a stick. It actually took Apple’s iTunes + iPod stack and did it one better. (Yeah, the iPhone does the Kindle one better in that regard). For me the problem is still the fact that with these integrated systems, the consumer basically gives up their rights to everything. Which was rather well illustrated just recently when Amazon removed copies of 1984 from customer Kindles after they found out that the publisher didn’t have the right to sell them. You might have shelled out $9.99 for a book, but you don’t really own it.
Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctrow posted about a high school student suing Amazon over this. Hopefully this will result in legal precedence preventing companies from messing with user’s digital content on devices that they supposedly own.
The New Yorker also has a good review that Language Log picked up on a few days ago. That reviewer’s judgment was that the iPhone was probably a better reading platform.
I’m on a posting binge this morning. I caught up on some old Planet Money blog posts, and I saw this one TED presentation.
The speaker was introducing gapminder.org, which is a new online service to visual trends in the types of statistical data that governments and NGOs have been ferreting away since the 1960s. The idea is to be able to see the changes that have happened, and challenge many of the myths that define how we think about the world. This stuff is seriously awesome.
In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,’ †which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.
His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior.
Obviously what we need is a version of firefox that runs on typewriters!
Speaking of typewriters and other forms of “obsolete” technology, my electric is still off. They’re now telling us that power will be restored sometime between “now and Sunday.” Fortunately, mom and dad have always been relatively well prepared for power outages. Dad still has the lamp that hung in his mother’s kitchen when he was growing up. (There are advantages to growing up Amish!) It has an old Victorian-period cast iron arm that’s supposed to be mounted on the wall. Lehman’s Hardware in Kidron has reproductions of them, but they’re rather expensive. I’m thinking I might keep this one and mount it in the dining room. I’m thinking I’m going to hit Lehman’s in the coming weeks and get enough to light the rest of the house.
It’s been an interesting experience, living by lamp light. This morning I was taking a shower when I noticed the lamp in the bathroom was burning very dim. It had run out of oil and was just burning the wick. Not good! So I hit Walmart on the way in to work. Amazingly they actually do sell lamp oil, and they had it in stock. The Ace Hardware in Ellet was completely out when I checked yesterday. Well, back to 1899!
Later this year, scientists will put a 40,000-pound chemical laser in the belly of a gunship flying at 300 mph and take aim at targets as far away as five miles. Boeing’s new Advanced Tactical Laser will cook trucks, tanks, radio stations—the kinds of things hit with missiles and rockets today..
The article, part of Popular Science’s “How it works” goes on to describe how the ATL will work.
