Charlie Stross, author of the highly-praised novel Accelerando, has written an interesting skeptical article on the technological singularity. The article makes many good points — except when it comes to “religion”. When it comes to “religion”, specifically religion and mind-uploading, what he says is remarkably silly. Here it is: Uploading … is not obviously impossible [...]
Google, the most divine being on Earth, has these prophecies about the future for us (via its prophet, xkcd): Your Thoughts?
Amazing footage, it boggles my mind to see Kermit in the ’50s: It’s such a shame that Jim Henson’s deft, pitch perfect sense of humor and imagination died with him. Most things muppet-related have been bland, assembly line, Disneyfied hack work since 1990. Blegh. Kermit the Frog is dead, long live Kermit the Frog. Your [...]
Just one of the interesting details from this informative interview about marketing on Facebook: This reminds me, please like Camels With Hammers on Facebook to stay caught up with us and help spread the word about the site to your friends! Your support or lack thereof makes or breaks a blog. Never underestimate your power [...]
I admit parts of this hit a little too close to home. And by “home” I mean Facebook of course. via Your Thoughts?
Last year, the week of Easter, atheists all over Facebook changed our pictures to the “scarlet A”, signifying our willingness to stand out and stand up in solidarity with other atheists. “‘A’ Week” was a major event for me since I got the idea of mass-friending people with the A avatars without even realizing there [...]
A good day for freedom of speech as the censorious FCC loses its case trying to levy a fine for a naked butt on NYPD Blue: NEW YORK – The Federal Communications Commission cannot fine broadcasters for showing a woman’s nude buttocks on a 2003 episode of “NYPD Blue,” a federal court ruled Tuesday, citing [...]
Watch where you put that thing: According to researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, there is a direct correlation between laptop use and increased scrotum temperature. In fact, hot laptops have been found to increase the temperature of scrotums up to 35 degrees above the normal body temperature of 98.6 degrees. [...]
Chaos Pet glimpses the future: Your Thoughts?
The video below is extraordinary and hope inducing, here’s the YouTube description: The Japanese company Blest has developed one of the smallest and safest oil-to-plastic conversion machines out on the market today. It’s founder and CEO, Akinori Ito is passionate about using this machine to change the way people around the world think about their [...]
Technology vs. Tyranny: In an attempt to make it easier for dissidents in countries such as China and North Korea to communicate without fear of government sanctions, researchers at Georgia Tech have developed software that can hide information inside messages posted to Twitter and other social networks, as well as in images that can be [...]
Andrew Sullivan argues: I believe the blogosphere first truly gained traction in America for a good reason. There is something about blogging’s freedom from the constraints of conventional journalism that captures an American ideal: civic engagement totally free of anyone else’s influence. It is an ideal of a fourth estate hostile to authorities public and [...]
Margaret Stewart explains how rights identification is allows copyrighted videos uploaded by users to be accepted or rejected by the rights owners and makes the pitch to rights holders to let their material get uploaded onto YouTube: Your Thoughts?
Your Thoughts?
Steven Pinker compares current worries that the internet is changing how we think and making it more superficial to previous “moral panics” at the arrival of all other new media, from the printing press to newspapers to television. (And his examples might as well have gone all the way back to Plato’s mistrust of the [...]
Pretty hilarious and completely NSFW unless you have head phones on: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7SzB58qHI0&hl=en_US&fs=1&] Your Thoughts?
The de-Convert passes along the story of an amusing atheist twitter “victory”: In a classic case of irony, Christians tried to get the statement “No God, No Peace. Know God, Know Peace” to trend today on Twitter. The result of this was the phrase “No God” became the #1 trending topic. Please understand that atheists [...]
College Humor has more and they’re really doozies. Your Thoughts?
uhhhh…. The company’s data team on Monday launched a trippy new application called the “Gross National Happiness Index.” Taking a similar format to its “Lexicon” trend-tracking product, the “GNH” currently displays a graph of data tabulated over the course of the past few years to track the “happiness” of Facebook users based on words picked up [...]
Neat video on how YouTube puts out so much material that we can discover what people actually will choose among a myriad of options and model TV off of it and then on the reach of Google and YouTube’s role in that: Your Thoughts?
The idea of being able to eat delicious meat without it coming at the expense of poor abused animals is just too good to be true. Here’s hoping this kind of thing really is our future: A controversial cooker that ‘grows’ meat and fish by heating animal cells in your kitchen claimed first prize in [...]
Evgeny Morozov discusses how repressive regimes use the internet to spread propaganda, finding it is a more powerful tool than censorship. Your Thoughts?
Over at Salon, Scott Rosenberg has a really thought-provoking and illuminating piece worth reading in full. Just two of the many salient insights: The most significant choice we have been making, collectively, ever since the popularization of Internet access in the mid-1990s, has been to favor two-way interpersonal communication over the passive reception of broadcast-style [...]