The Singularity Summit is an annual event put on by the Singularity Institute ("bring[ing] rational analysis and rational strategy to the challenges facing humanity as we develop cognitive technologies that will exceed the current upper bounds on human intelligence"). In a nutshell, it can be rationally conceived that in humanity's near future artifical intelligence will be created that is smarter than us, and after that, all bets are off, hence the "singularity". You might say to yourself, just like surely there are some scientists making sure we don't get hit by a giant asteroid or that some bioweapon doesn't decimate the planet, surely there are some scientists or policy thinkers out there who are considering that and preparing for it, just in case, to make sure we don't end up in some Terminator-esque dystopia. These are those scientists and thinkers. The following is my brief recap of the event. Continue reading

I think I have a new favorite cinema trilogy. Lush and sensual visuals, soundtracks, imagery... Continue reading

I made a music video thingy using footage from our recent houseboat weekend for Tripped and Fell in Love, my favorite YACHT song from their new album Shangri-La. Continue reading

Tesla was watching Blue's Clues this morning and I got to wondering what Steve, the show's host, was up to these days. Starting with the default two step of Google -> his Wikipedia page, I find that There were apparently enough rumors going around that he died of a heroin overdose that he has his own snopes.com entry. He quit the show because, in his words, "I knew I wasn't gonna be doing children's television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid's TV show, and it was happenin'--fast." After quitting he concentrated on... Continue reading

Turntable.fm may turn out to have pulled the most epic Odeo since Twitter. Despite serious problems with stability, the service has practically erupted in users with average engagement times that surely beat out even Facebook. I'm not going to bother typing up a description of the service as it is ably described here at Signal News, and I'm thinking of writing a more in depth analysis of their engagement mechanics (based on Amy Jo Kim's Smart Gamification patterns), but here is a brain dump: As my friend Todd Siegel pointed out, at a basic level SecondLife has been offering something... Continue reading

I suppose people are going to freak out about the privacy issues concerning the recent revelation that since iOS version 4.0 your device has been keeping a record of where it has been. Personally I just thought it was awesome to see the data using this great open source tool cooked up by the researchers who discovered the recorded data. This reminds me, I should spend more time in Vegas. And I should go sailing more. Update: Note that the granulaity of the visualization is artificially aggregated into a grid cluster (and weekly cluster) by the visualization tool. I altered... Continue reading

A new group chatting app Yobongo launched recently, just in time for SXSW. It is an iOS app which uses your location to throw you into a simple chat room with other people in the same location. I've been semi-obsessed with it since it launched last week so I thought I'd note down some thoughts about it. Here's its well produced but nauseatingly-hipster intro video: The reason for my interest is that back in 1999 I was working an a product idea in a similar vein. Instead of pursuing that idea I instead co-founded a chemical informatics company and have... Continue reading

A little over 16 years ago I was living in the Durham/Chapel Hill area, surely a time and place that would rank highly in a list of the densest concentrations ever of rabid indie music hipsters. Being 1994, the Internet was just starting to transition from a mostly a college kid phenomena, and the vivacious online community dedicated to the local music scene had long been the alt.music.chapel-hill Usenet group. One of my favorite local bands of the time was Pine State, a country band with the punk ethos of doing just fine with more attitude than talent (aka Psychobilly,... Continue reading

My favorite new product of the past decade, after the iPad and the iPhone, is HeatTech from Japan. It's a new fabric that is comfortable, anti-static and most importantly unusually warm despite being very thin. I love it. Mie's mom introduced her to it back in December and she brought some back for me. Her mom sent another care package of HeatTech recently. I can't get enough. They make undershirts, underwear and socks. Exciting! Seriously, I love this stuff. Continue reading

At a recent closing keynote for a Vimeo conference Bruce Sterling delivers another wonderful ramble of subtle coherency. I love to listen to this man talk. He does at a world-class level what I am often doing in my head at an utter hobbyist level. If you ever wonder what I'm thinking, staring off into space, watch this talk and you'll probably get a good idea. I don't expect many people will watch it though as it is nearly an hour long, and for that matter it starts deceivingly slow and unfocused so I imagine most people in this hyper-distracted... Continue reading

This is one I'd been thinking about for awhile but finally go around to giving it a shot. I made Tesla some custom coloring book pages using photos of people in her life: herself, Mie and I, Elida, Sofia, MIchelle and Jeremy (and their new cat Francis). I figure coloring people she knows should be more fun than coloring random fictional princesses and mermaids right? The process is simple: pull the original photo up in Photoshop and create a new layer. Use the brush tool to trace the original images in the new layer and the layer panel to hide/show... Continue reading

After 15 years, my first Internet hosting provider is making some big changes that caused me to go grab my stuff from there. These are some really dusty files.... Update: Wow, I just realized the full extent of these changes. The provider is apparently selling the serve.com domain name, which is the domain of my main email address I've used to sign up for pretty much EVERYTHING on the Interwebs since 1995 until now. This email address will no longer be functional in a few weeks. There is no way I can possibly be sure to update all of my... Continue reading

I'm bummed I had to miss the TC Disrupt this year, as I was really in the mood for it. But while travelling between Claverack, NY and Williamsburg, MA today I scraped out a basic Skedu schedule for the conference. It's a little wonky since the HTML for the conf web page was a bit inconsistent and thus a bit of a pain to scrape, but it's more or less correct and complete I think. Skedu is a lot more useful for multi-venue events, but I think it's still handy to have the schedule for the single-track confs. To use... Continue reading

The nifty Six Apart community-oriented blogging site Vox is closing down this month, so I just imported all of my posts from my weblog there into AkuAku. I tended to use vox for more playful or trivial posts. It was sort of my Facebook wall before I started using Facebook much I guess. Not sure what to do now, but I'll probably just continue my tendency to not post quick little things to AkuAku directly. Continue reading

Here's how to install CouchDB on CentOS (such as provided by one of my hosting providers, SilverRack): rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm yum install couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb start I shaved a few yaks before I figured this out so hope this saves you some time. Note that there is a rare but serious bug in CouchDB 1.0.0, so if you install that version read the warning first. Continue reading