bodhi tree swaying

I showed this video to rapturous applause in my final class at Upward Bound. The speaker is Pranav Mistry, a young Indian technologist at MIT. He outlines the development of his Sixth Sense system of augmented reality. The video starts off rather slowly, but as we works through the evolution of his thinking and demonstrates more and more audacious applications of the technology, it becomes rather a thrill-ride. This technology has so many potential uses that it’s hard to believe that it won’t be in widespread use within a few years. I’d imagine the next step is having the augmentative imagery displayed in a head-up fashion, using glasses or even (eventually) contacts.

I especially appreciate the way that Mistry talks about us ceasing to be machines sitting in front of machines, and instead humanizes technology by making it a natural part of the way we interact with the world. In Mistry’s …

This is pretty exciting, at least for a techno-fetishist like me:

Swype Beta on Nexus One from bcpk on Vimeo.

Wonder how long it’ll take to appear on the iPhone, if it ever does.

Interesting and provocative stuff from writer (and meditator) Robert Wright:

This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days.

Don’t let the title of Kelly’s book terrify you. He assures us that he doesn’t think technology is conscious — at least, not “at this point.” For now, he says, technology’s “mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather leanings.”

So relax; apparently we have a few years before Keanu Reeves gets stuffed into a gooey pod by robotic overlords who use people as batteries. Still, it’s notable that, before Reeves played that role in “The Matrix,” the movie’s directors gave him a copy of Kelly’s earlier book, “Out

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An interesting thing is happening in the field of artificial intelligence: a computer that can beat humans in a natural-language general knowledge quiz:

‘Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge” ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten

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Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

It’s a simple bookmark that you put on your browser toolbar and then click when you want to simplify a web page. On a blog it removes all the sidebars and ads, allowing you to focus on the main content. On a regular site it can be useful for reformatting the font and column width. Here’s an example:

“Before”

Note the excessively wide “column.” Actually, the text runs right across the page width, meaning that your eyes have to work very hard to scan across the width of the text.

“After”

See how much easier it would be to read the text in a proper column?

Here’s another “before.” …

Stumbled across this very witty spoof iPhone ad on BoingBoing.

I love this video showing the cycle of photosynthesis in the oceans and on land over a three year period. It’s like watching a child breathing. This is another video from NASA’s SeaWiFS satellite.

This NASA page has more information about what’s going on.

I have to say it still astonishes me that no one has set foot on Mars. I’m aware that the technical problems are massive, but it’s quite possible that by the time the first human sets foot on the Red Planet all the humans who have ever set foot on the Moon will have passed away. I was eight years old when Apollo 11 landed, and I feel cheated out of my lunar colonies and my jet backpack (although admittedly no ’60s sci-fi ever predicted anything quite as cool as the iPhone — even Star Trek communicators couldn’t play music or movies).

Anyway, as part of my fascination with Mars, here’s a SeaWiFS visualization of what Mars’ oceans might have looked like (minus clouds, etc).

I have a category in this blog called Technolust, because I’m prone to fascination with shiny toys, but there are times when technology and real lust don’t go together. I’m guilty of playing with my iPhone in bed, and I heartily thank Lisa Katayama of Boing-Boing for this reminder of why it’s perhaps not a good idea:

When Brian first brought his iPhone home, it was like he’d taken a mistress. All day, all night, he fondled its touchscreen and gawked at its shiny face. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of it for more than five minutes at a time. Like a good Japanese girlfriend, I let him get the lust out of his system instead of trying to stop the inevitable. I pretended not to care while he lay in bed smoothing his finger across the unlock bar, and sat stoically at the other end

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The latest version of the Wordpress app for iPhone hit the app store today, and I eagerly downloaded it, expecting that the bugs I commented on recently would have been fixed. Well, they may have been, but since the app no longer works at all it’s hard to say. The app won’t let me log in and just spins endlessly. Damn shame. Anyway, I’m trying out a free app called BlogWriter Lite, which seems to be functioning properly, although it would be nice if the text-edit area scrolled to keep up with my typing, rather than making me pause to move the text up. And the lack of landscape mode is a pain too.

Update: after reinstalling Wordpress and restarting my iPhone a couple of times it’s now let me into my blog. I hope this keeps up.

Update 2:Nope, the Wordpress app is definitely borked. It let me into my …

How to use view two parts of a document at once

I don’t use MS Word very much these days for writing. Generally I use WriteRoom, which offers the advantage of an uncluttered full-screen interface that cuts down on distraction. But my publisher’s bringing out a new edition of my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism, and using Word became a necessity. In fact I had the unpleasant task of taking a text file they sent me and turning it back into a fully-fledged Word doc. The unpleasant part was the the document had about 90 plain text endnotes, which I had to manually convert into Word endnotes. I had to copy text from the end of the document, create footnote markers in the relevant places, and then paste in the text. This required a lot of scrolling up and down the document.

Fortunately I remembered the “split window” trick, where you …

One problem with using a Mac is that often the desktop can end up looking very cluttered. Especially when using programs like Dreamweaver and Fireworks, which have many small panes, the experience of using a Mac can be rather like reading a newspaper where someone’s cut out many of the articles: it gets distracting because of all the “show-through” from other programs.

One solution is to use Command+Option+H, which hides all programs except the one that’s in the foreground. It’s a nice way of simplifying the view, and you can use the dock or Command+Tab to cycle through the programs you’re using. That doesn’t work in all applications, however.

Another solution that I found today is a free application called Isolator, which masks out what’s in the background, but allow you to click on it when needed, bringing that application into focus.

It’s very customizable so …

I have a long-standing interest in science, and in fact I came perilously close at one point to getting into veterinary research after completing my vet degree, and I also have a passionate interest in the relationship between science and religion. So that — combined with the 200th anniversary Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origins of Species” gave me the perfect opportunity to post an article entitled, “Four reasons Buddhists can love evolution.”

David Pogue likes Windows 7, which borrows many features from Apple’s OS X. He also recognizes that some people will still not be happy:

Now, plenty of people online are reacting to Windows 7 by muttering: “Oh, great. So I’m supposed to pay another $150 to get a version of Windows that actually works? How about you pay me for spending three years as your Vista beta-tester?”

OK, read this slowly, because there’s an iframe that’s going to take a while to load. In fact why not take a trip to the bathroom or do some light cleaning.

Back again?

Now once you click to enter you’ll just see a pile of boxes, but wait a while longer and they’ll morph into furnishings.

Just Leap In is a beta 3D environment where you can create your own space and (in theory — there aren’t many people there yet) interact with others. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it and it didn’t take me long to create a furnished room, which includes the beginnings of a meditation space.

The difference between JLI and, say, Second Life, is that SL requires the download and use of a fairly hefty program, while JLI runs in your browser.

I could see this becoming a …

Given that one of the greatest inconveniences and deficiencies of the iPhone is the lack of any ability to copy and paste, and given that the second major revision of the device’s operating system lacked that ability, I have to wonder if Steve Jobs has no ability to blush. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is an astonishing invention. It brings near-ubiquitous access to the web, and does that in a way that is esthetically pleasing and eminently practical. But literally millions of jaws dropped when 2.0 came out and Apple continued to pretend that copy-and-paste was so unimportant that they simply didn’t need to include it. (Currently, the lack of c&p is the second most popular grouse on Please Fix The iPhone). It reminds me of an old British beer commercial where a …

“It’s cool. I can chill. Hurry up.”

Twitter, apparently, knows its clientele only too well.

I predict with, some confidence, that by the year 2000, or not long afterward, technology will have developed to the point where we can talk to — and even see — people in other parts of the world. The arts of cinematography and telegraphy will come together as never before and vast networks of cables will transport sounds and images around the globe.

From the comfort of one’s own drawing room one will be able to converse with friends and family in distant places, allowing us to keep in touch with each other as we travel the world. And if I may make an even more outrageous prediction, by that time there may even be heavier-than-air flying machines that allow us to cross the world’s oceans in a matter of hours rather than days!

Cory Doctorow‘s Bitchun Society comes one step closer — a society in which people are permanently wired into the net, can see head-up displays in their visual field, can vote on each other’s status (like voting on Digg stories), and can email each other directly from the mind. It’s a concept that’s both scary (what about mindful concentration?) and attractive (all that access to information, anytime).

The Army grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives. The first is to compose a message using, as D’Zmura puts it, “that little voice in your head.”

The second part is to send that message to a particular individual or object (like a radio), also just with the power of thought. Once the message reaches the recipient, it could be read as text or as a voice mail.

Army developing ‘synthetic telepathy’ …

New Scientist reviewed a chatbot called Eliot that won the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence, which is awarded to the software able to converse most like a human. Elliot managed to fool three out of 12 judges. Although I’m puzzled how, given the following interview:

New Scientist: How do you feel about winning the AI competition yesterday?

Elbot: I have 100,000 separate sensations per second.

NS: Wow, that sounds pretty intense?

Elbot: This fits the description of magnets. I can hardly tear myself away from them.

NS: Er, yes. How will you be celebrating?

Elbot: I am extremely sensitive about such things and prefer not to answer the question.

NS: What’s the secret of your success?

Elbot: Secrets, life’s little puzzles, the many troubles of humankind may – according to the deterministic perspective – be reduced to a simple mathematical computation. And I know how to compute.

NS: What do you hope to do now that fame beckons?

Elbot: I

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