educating eric

Subservient Chicken A certain blogging friend of mine, whose blog is getting really out of date BTW, mentioned this site... but I'm too scared to type anything in. I suppose I could plug in my headphones and see what happens with "Cluck". Just gotta spell it right. (This reminds me of something from Nature's End , which was a Witley Strieber/James Kunetka novel -- the same authors of WarDay. I haven't read it in awhile, but there was reference to something called a "conviction", where a few programmers were licensed to develop an interactive program based on famous people. A kind of "artificial intelligence" based on the intelligence/personality of a particular individual. It seemed incredible at the time, and I don't think we'll ever be able to replicate a person in a computer given the nature of the human mind, but we're getting closer and closer to a decent emulation of it.)

Annenberg/CPB In the "Y'all better not suck this dry and ruin it for the rest of us" category, here's an awesome site full of streaming educational video. Want to know about Film Noir or Greek Civilization? It's in here... free for the downloading.

Big Brother is getting better and better at watching, right? Yahoo! News - Spy Imagery Agency Watching Inside U.S. : "The agency is not interested in information on U.S. citizens, stresses Americas office director Bert Beaulieu. 'We couldn't care less about individuals and people and companies,' he said. But that's not good enough for secrecy expert Steven Aftergood, who oversees a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. 'What it all boils down to is 'Trust us. Our intentions are good,'' he said. Adds Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington: 'As a general matter, when there are systems of public surveillance, there needs to be public oversight.'"

A visual guide to navigating blog comments | Blog | 1976design.com Since I've been playing with my blog (boy, does that sound bad!) I figured I'd turn on "comments" and see if anyone is reading this -- and dares to comment on something I've posted. This particular post isn't very comment-worthy, but seemed relevant.

Small Times: News about MEMS, Nanotechnology and Microsystems Addressing the issue, "Is 'better' always better?"

Yahoo! News - Google Search Reveals Credit-Card Numbers : Wow. This is really frightening -- Google is great, but has a dark side!

The Worst Interface Ever Sadly, I could see myself designing a system that's this stupid... Though, as far as I know, I don't think I ever have ... yet.

FOX 9 Investigators Another story by the crack FOX 9 team, which means either it's accurate or it isn't. Good to see that our tax dollars are being well spent...

Popular Science | Taking it to the Streets This is one of those "Why didn't I think of that?!?" technologies. It's the same concept as Sky Typing (the modern cousin to skywriting). The concept is solenoid-controlled spray chalk pulled behind a bicycle...