Archive for June, 2004
Like we need any more evidence that the U.S. has turned into a police state, along comes this article about an innocent Nepalese man who has been in solitary confinement for two years in BROOKLYN, with no trials, no charges, and who has been kept in a 6×9′ cell with the lights on 24 hours [...]
I’m attracted to this weird piece for so many reasons. It contains social networking, human connection, breach of trust, and one man’s story about how he is managing to handle (or not handle?) his life. It is the story of a man named Odin Soli who created an online persona named Layne Johnson and wrote [...]
This article talks about how 8 Silicon Valley Bankers and 25 VCs are doing an exploratory trip to China to explore business opportunities. This to me seems like a serious pivot point in East/West VC relations. In the article, they note the changing attitudes in China about Western financing. This is something to watch. QUOTE: [...]
I had heard about this technology before but here is an article that finally names this bizarre technology (FingerWhisper) where vibrations are sent through your hand so that when you put your finger in your ear, you hear sound. (ou know that funny phone symbol we make when we’re saying “I’ll call you” across the [...]
If you were having a baby and the test showed that the baby would have Down’s Syndrome, Tay-Sachs, deformed limbs, a cleft plate, deafness, dwarfism, skin disease, or any of a host of other known diseases, would you still have the child?
(Link to the original story in the New York Times. Subscription required but worth it.)
The author of this blog-post comments on how this seems intuitively sensible, which I agree with. The more people I meet, the more different they are, the wider their world-views, and the more we interact, the more I feel that I can think “between the cracks” of the different knowledge domains. So the lesson here [...]
Here is a somewhat interesting article on the small trend of authors opening up their manuscripts to collective writing and editing. Having just worked collaboratively with my colleague for the past three weeks using the great product called SubEthaEdit, I can say that this model REALLY needs to develop. I mean that in two ways: [...]
If you have not read anything about Burning Man, the anarchist art and culture festival held every year in the desert of Nevada, then you have been living under a rock. Here is a short but interesting article on the ongoing evolution of the Burning Man urban planning methodology. Picture building a city for 30-40,000 [...]
I can’t remember the numbers but there are some rules of thumb that state that if a movie goes from PG-13 to R, it cuts its potential revenues to 20% or 30% of what it could be, because R rated movies often do not draw enough people and so they get limited distribution. This is [...]
Sex drives all new technologies: Super-8 films, Videos, DVDs, the web. Well, now it’s time for orgasm-inducing porn on your…phone. According to this article, Europeans are building, building, building (pant) towards a climactic $1.5B worth of soft and hard-core porn purchases over their phones. A few lessons come to mind: • Selling sex is almost [...]
I have been coveting the Treo 600 since last year when it was demoed in July 2003 and they said at the time, it would be released in Fall. However, Canadians had to wait until just recently to be able to purchase a Treo 600 through Rogers or Fido. Here is a great page for [...]
This is a great article from SF Gate on a whitewater rafting and paddling park that has just been built in Reno. And here is the photo gallery.
It has been said that in some societies in the world, if the village shaman curses an individual to death, that individual will be cast out from the rest of the village and the other villagers will pretend that the person does not exist. They will not feed, talk to, nor acknowledge the presence of [...]
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this particularly awful campaign that contains 4 different shots of women fawning over a huge armpit that looks like a headless furry crotchless armless mutant. As usual, Mark Morford has quite a bit to say about it. You know what chicks really dig? Armpits. Not normal [...]
Along with a friend, I recently entered a business plan in the Telus New Ventures BC competition. My plan was about a service where every six months a person would get an updated report on their risk factors as more information was known. I pulled the plan because I do not have the contacts or [...]
The annoying thing about my hard drive is that I have to save a file somewhere and then put it in a folder. What if it is about Technology AND Art AND Society AND Biology? Sure, I could alias it into all those folders, but that takes too damned long so I throw it somewhere [...]
This is a wonderful article from the SF Gate website about a man named Dick Grace. From football captain to Marine Captain, to VP of Smith Barney Investments, and now a reformed alcoholic and Buddhist who owns a niche Cabernet Sauvignon winery and spends his time, money, and effort raising money for kids around the [...]
