FakeAPStylebook:
When a story is killed it is worth 45 experience points and drops one item from Treasure Table B.
November 20, 2009
Tweet of the day: “Killing a story”
Comments Off on Tweet of the day: “Killing a story”
Thinking about the Singularity
For some of you, this will be old hat (ancient history, even). For lots of people, however, the notion of a technological Singularity will be new — and disturbing in a way that hokey woo-woo New Age 2012 Mayan calendars ending is not. Glenn Reynolds writes about it in the December issue of Popular Mechanics:
For some time now, futurists have been talking about a concept called the Singularity, a technological jump so big that society will be transformed. If they’re right, the Industrial Revolution — or even the development of agriculture or harnessing of fire — might seem like minor historical hiccups by comparison. The possibility is now seeming realistic enough that scientists and engineers are grappling with the implications — for good and ill.
When I spoke to technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), he put it this way: “Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it.”
Even before we reach that point, Kurzweil and his peers foresee breathtaking advances. Scientists in Israel have developed tiny robots to crawl through blood vessels attacking cancers, and labs in the United States are working on similar technology. These robots will grow smaller and more capable. One day, intelligent nanorobots may be integrated into our bodies to clear arteries and rebuild failing organs, communicating with each other and the outside world via a “cloud” network. Tiny bots might attach themselves to neurons in the brain and add their processing power — and that of other computers in the cloud — to ours, giving us mental resources that would dwarf anything available now. By stimulating the optic, auditory or tactile nerves, such nanobots might be able to simulate vision, hearing or touch, providing “augmented reality” overlays identifying street names, helping with face recognition or telling us how to repair things we’ve never seen before.
Of course, there are some very scary scenarios as well: you think it’s bad when your email address or bank information gets hacked? How much worse will it be when you’re wearing your immersive technology 24/7? And how much worse again when you’re not wearing it at all, but have it embedded in your body? Being “hacked” then becomes life endangering, not just inconvenient. Charles Stross has written a few books exploring different possible futures (particularly Glasshouse and Halting State, both excellent and highly recommended novels, BTW), and it’s just possible that he’s being too optimistic.
Destructive technologies generally seem to come along sooner than constructive ones — we got war rockets before missile interceptors, and biological warfare before antibiotics. This suggests that there will be a window of vulnerability between the time when we develop technologies that can do dangerous things, and the time when we can protect against those dangers. The slower we move, the longer that window may remain open, leaving more time for the evil, the unscrupulous or the careless to wreak havoc. My conclusion? Faster, please.
Comments Off on Thinking about the Singularity
“Yes, I handled the ball but I’m not the referee”
Thierry Henry goes Diego Maradona one better:
The French national team advances to the World Cup on the basis of a “hand of God” assist.
Comments Off on “Yes, I handled the ball but I’m not the referee”
Those inevitable “new word” lists
David Harsanyi falls into the trap cunningly laid for him by the devious wordmongers at Merriam-Webster:
Like other books Americans have a duty to own — the Bible or “Atlas Shrugged,” for instance — the dictionary does not require an absurd marketing ploy to sell itself.
Yet, every year a barrage of cockamamie “word lists” are unveiled by publishers seeking to bring attention to the evolving English language.
In the end, these lists establish two facts: 1) We are unable to invent any new words of value. 2) If you put a list together, a columnist will probably write about it.
One needn’t be William Safire, though, to be unsettled that the word “philanderer” is a major mystery to so many people. According to a new list by Merriam-Webster, “philanderer” (a national pastime, meaning to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife) was one of the most searched words of the past year because of the crush of politicians and celebrities busy hiking the Appalachian trial.
The word receiving the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time was “admonish” (to express warning or disapproval). It was triggered by a crude outburst of a South Carolina congressman and the subsequent moralistic “admonishment” of him by Congress.
It’s not the lists themselves that bother me . . . it’s the blatantly contrived nature of the words appearing in most of the lists. “Unfriend”? Bleargh.
There is, admittedly, one trend that could prove to be a bright spot. The newly minted “teabagger” gives us hope that crude sexual terms will now regularly be applied to politics, where they can do the most good.
Perhaps “felching” will come to describe how the media gathers material for their coverage of the White House. Oh, wait . . .
Comments Off on Those inevitable “new word” lists
