This giant, robotic, helium-filled manta ray is very cool:

But this giant, robotic, helium-filled jellyfish is even cooler:

“Captcha” images are those distorted words that you have to read and type into a form in the web in order to prove you’re a human being and not an automated “bot” working for a spammer.

I’d read before about computer-science professor Luis von Ahn’s work in harnessing the power of captcha images but it had slipped my mind (too much reading, not enough time spent reflecting).

But in essence what an article in today’s Boston Globe explains is that old scanned texts are filled with words that are, to a computer, unreadable but which, to a human, are more easily decipherable. You’ll have noticed this if you’ve ever used a scanner to perform Optical Character recognition - a “d” may well be read as “c l” for example, if the printed text is at all faded. So, von Ahn figured out that unscannable words from older texts that are in the process of being scanned can be used as captcha tests online, performing the dual function of hindering spammers and saving archivists’ time by having the general public help with proofreading.

What a great example of creative thinking.

Here’s a blog worth looking at if you’re interested in things techie and designy looked at from a thoughtful perspective: Countersigns.

There’s a very interesting post, for example, on why Apple doesn’t do “concept products” (you know, like those space-age cars that will never go into commercial production). Hint: “Real artists ship.”

There’s another good post taking Verizon’s CEO to task for having a business strategy that consists of hoping that Steve Jobs will “just go away” (he’s had a bout with cancer).

With all the fuss about Phoenix’s “discovery” of water ice on Mars (which must have been the 20th time water has been discovered there) I’m surprised that this picture doesn’t get more attention:

This isn’t to take away from the good work that Phoenix is doing, of course. It’s an amazing thing to go to Mars, pick up a sample of ice, and do measurements of it.

But to actually see a frozen lake on Mars is just stunning. This isn’t a new picture either — I think it must be a couple of years old now.

For most of the time since buying my iPod Touch last October it’s been “jailbroken,” meaning that I’ve hacked it to bypass Apple’s propietary protections in order to install unauthorized software on it, the grounds being that it’s pretty ridiculous for a computer manufacturer to insist you can only run their software on the machine you’ve bought from them. And the iPod Touch is nothing but a handheld computer.

So that’s been great. I’ve had various programs running on it such as an ebook reader (on which I’ve read several novels), some games, a flashlight, and I can’t remember what else.

But after the launch of Apple’s Application Store on iTunes I decided to un-jailbreak my iPod by installing the latest update to the iPod firmware, meaning that I could use the store but could no longer use the free but unauthorized applications that I’d installed.

That doesn’t seem much of a loss, since the App Store is full of goodies.

• I have the mobile version of Omnifocus installed, which is a Getting It Done application. This syncs with the corresponding application on my Mac, so that I can carry around a list of outstanding tasks, categorized by project and context (e.g. “errands,” “office,” “computer,” etc.)
• I have a free ebook reader (Stanza) installed and have already read a few short stories. I’m working on a SciFi novel right now.
• I have a trial version of Remote Buddy, which turns my iPod into a remote control for my Mac Pro ( I was shocked to discover the Mac Pro didn’t come with a remote!).
• I have Twinkle, which is a Twitter client.
• Box Office tells me what movies I can’t go to see because I’m too tired after working and because we have Maia to look after
• I have a new flashlight program (yeah, it just makes the screen white and bright, but that’s very handy when I’m negotiating my way through a darkened bedroom at night).
• I have a dictionary installed (although it’s not as good as the free one I used to have).
• I have the Apple Remote program, although it only works with iTunes and I may never use it.
• Pandora is pretty cool — it generates playlists of music based on my favorite artists. It’s basically a series of customized radio stations. I’m listening to an Anthony and the Johnsons radio station right now and am hearing new music I love (I’d never heard of Peter Bradley Adams, for example, and I love his “Lay Your Head Down” from the album “Gather Up.”) I can give new music a thumbs up or a thumbs down so that the radio stations tune themselves to my tastes. So awesome!

Those are the main programs. There’s not much I can think of from the jailbroken apps that I miss!

I tried out the Wordpress app, which allows you to write to your blog, but quickly deleted it. Apart from the problem of it crashing, it also doesn’t serve any function that I can see. I can already use the Safari browser to log in to my blog and use all the admin functions, while the mobile Wordpress app offers very limited functionality. For example you can’t even edit a blog post. How useless is that!

Anyway, the app store is amazing and there’s so much free stuff that it makes my head spin.

There are some great pictures of the Apollo missions (remember them?) on Boston.com. Well worth looking at just to get a sense of the magnitude of the adventure we were capable of undertaking back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Before the Apollo pics there are some contemporary images of technology that might be used on future missions.

I came across this interesting post today, in which an email from Bill Gates explains his frustration with trying to download a program from the Microsoft site — and it really does sound like a painful experience, complete with the usual scary messages, pointless questions, etc.

Here’s just a taster — it’s worth reading the whole thing:

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

Hey, Bill, if you’re that frustrated with the Windows experience have you ever thought of switching to a Mac?

I confess that sometimes I get frustrated with my Mac, but honestly I could never go back to using a PC. This graph shows the kind of care Apple takes. While Microsoft programs become more and more bloated, Apple are working on slimming down their applications (and the Operating System itself).

Just look at the changes in the Mail program, and in Font Book and Preview!

Very promising: Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

(Actually the headline should say “make” rather than “find.”)

A story about a Silicon Valley company that’s genetically engineering bacteria and fungi to produce crude oil:

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

The problem seems to be the scalability.

If successful, this would help a great deal with oil independence, so that we’re less tied to repressive governments (think Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran). Since the process can use agricultural waste it could potentially move in the direction of being carbon-neutral, although that seems more open to question.

An intriguing piece from the Daily Mail in the UK about uncovering latent dinosaur tendencies in birds.

Apparently chicken embryos have long tails that shrink and lose vertebrae as they develop. They have teeth that do the same thing. By manipulating the animal’s genes you can get it to retain the long tail and develop curved teeth like a dinosaur’s!

The article also revisits Mary Schweitzer’s recovery of soft tissue from a dinosaur fossil — an amazing discovery. I believe those proteins have been sequenced and been found to be similar to modern birds, leaving the possibility that the genes could be reverse-engineered.

There’s a rather uncritical reference to “when Raul Cano, professor of microbiology at California Polytechnic State University, made the first attempt to extract DNA from insects almost as old as the dinosaurs that had been embedded in amber” (my emphasis). The insects were 40 million years old, which is about 25 million years after the last dinosaurs perished. I guess it’s a judgment call whether that’s “almost as old” as the dinosaurs. I’d say not.

Still, it all adds up to some fascinating research. I’d love to see a dinosaur recreated!

Some really fascinating cellphone services are outlined here: State Of the Art - Cell Services Keep It Easy, and Free - NYTimes.com.

I just dug out my pay-as-you go T-Mobile cellphone and started using it again in a small way. At least from time to time it’s now switched on and I’m using it to send text messages to Twitter. I’m actually thinking (again!) of getting an iPhone so that I’ll only have one gadget to carry around rather than two (my cell and my iPod Touch). Ah, the simplicity!

The fact (at least everyone seems to think it’s a fact) that there’s a new 3-G iPhone coming out helps, and I’m even thinking of getting rid of the landline in my office and transferring the number to the iPhone so that I won’t be paying any more than I am at present. The only drawback would be that I’d have to figure out what to do about faxes — which I don’t use much anyway. And maybe there’s some other fax service out there that the NYT article doesn’t cover?

A few days back, as soon as it was available, I downloaded Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1. It’s substantially similar to Firefox 2, naturally, but with some new and welcome features.

It has an automatically generated list of “most visited” page, which I’ve found very handy for getting back to pages that I’m visiting often — for example the competition I’m running on 99designs.com, which runs for only a week and is hardly work bookmarking.

It also has a great address/searchbar which looks for pages whose titles or URLs match the search term you type in. For example, the other day I read an article about Charles Lindbergh on the BBC News website. To find it again by trawling through my history would be tedious. To find it in the address bar all I had to do was to start typing in “Lindbergh,” and all three pages I’d recently consulted on that topic appeared. Apparently Firefox draws on three months of browsing history, which should be plenty.

It’s also very fast. They say it’s twice as fast as Firefox 2, although I’ve no way of checking.

So far only one of the plugins I use has been updated to work with the new version, but that’s OK. RC1 is a sneak preview of a forthcoming product, not a finished work.

Microsoft has a new browser coming as well, but Internet Explorer’s market share has been declining steadily over the years. According to the NYT, Internet Explorer is used by 75% of computer owners, but on my own websites I see only 57% of visitors using that browser. Perhaps the language is misleading; that “75% of computer owners” includes me, since I technically have IE6 and IE7 running on a virtual version of Windows XP on my computer, but in fact I only ever use those programs for how well my sites hold up across different browsers. I have IE on my computer, but in practical terms I’m a Firefox user. When I browse using my iPod Touch, I’m a Safari user. There are no doubt many other people in a similar situation.

I couldn’t watch the Nasa TV coverage of the Phoenix Landing because the site was swamped, but I did manage to tap into the audio feed and so I was able to follow the landing every step of the way. By the time touchdown was announced I was jumping up and down with excitement. Afterward I was so moved I literally couldn’t speak.

I’m in awe of the talented people who made this happen. There is still genius in America, and that genius still manages to make strides forward despite the cult of incompetence that the Bush administration has developed. (Putting a horse-show organizer in charge of FEMA. Rebuilding the levees with dirt. Rumsfeld chuckling about how the looting in Baghdad was just one guy with a vase being filmed over and over again. No planning for the period after the war, etc, etc, etc.) These Nasa people have vision and skill. Real skill.

The exploration of Mars is something that greatly excites me. It’s a fascinating planet and although we know infinitely more about it compared to the days prior to the Viking landings I still find the slow pace of discovery that robotic exploration dictates to be excruciating.

I get very emotionally invested in these little explorers. They’re our eyes and ears and fingers reaching into the unknown, on what are effectively suicide missions of discovery. Brings a lump to my throat.

The Phoenix lander apparently has only 90 days before the Martian winter sets in, and then it’ll be buried in something like three feet of dry ice. But before that it will — all going well — have drilled into the Martian regolith, sampled the ice that’s locked in there, and discovered who knows what. Analyzing water on Mars! Analyzing water on Mars! How cool is that?

I had some problems trying to send twitter messages (tweets?) using my T-Mobile phone. Unfortunately T-Mobile blocks calls to the US Twitter number because it’s a “short code” (40404). So the only way I can text to the Twitter widget on this blog is by sending the text message to a UK number, which is of course more expensive.

T-Mobile has a funny history with Twitter. In December last year people stopped being able to Twitter via T-Mobile, and T-Mobile staff announced the following to their disgruntled customers:

…Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider, and therefore you are not able to utilize service from this provider any longer…. T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.

Charming.

That’s a pretty blatant abuse of power (deciding who you can or cannot call) which is probably why a couple of days later T-Mobile said there had been a terrible misunderstanding and of course it was just a technical problem. Right.

My problem seems unrelated to this historical episode. The hitch is that I have a pay-as-you-go plan with T-Mobile and since calls to 40404 are free they naturally don’t want me to have access to that number. “Only let people make free calls if they’re paying you a lot of money” is the general idea!

It would be ideal, of course, if Twitter had a standard ten-digit phone number in the US that I could text. I’d be happy to spend the 10c for each message sent.

The brain’s a fascinating thing — apparently the most complex known object in the universe. And you can mess with it using magnets:

Many scientists now use [transcranial magnetic stumulation] for basic research. Some have used it to induce electrical changes in the brain’s temporal lobes, which have been linked with religious belief, because some sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy seem to experience hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to mystical experiences of holy figures.

How a magnet turned off my speech - Telegraph

Selene, Japan’s lunar spacecraft, has been putting together an incredibly detailed map of the moon that includes mineral identifications. That’s all cool, but the sheer Japaneseness of the map below delights me. It’s the moon as Hiroshige would have printed it had he been into astronomy.

If you click on the image you can see a larger (250KB) version that covers the whole of the earthward hemisphere.

Yesterday and today I meditated with a friend who lives a couple of thousand miles away in Spokane, Washington. We both used our computers to log on to Skype, a free service that allows you to talk with other people (and even see them). My computer was set up on a coffee table, with the built-in webcam pointing at the area where I meditate. Priyamitra was likewise sitting in front of his computer. I could see him in full-screen, and he could see me the same way.

We did a little chanting together, and then I rang a bell and we meditated for 40 minutes.

I find it to be very supportive when I sit with other people. My sits are calmer, my mind is more settled, I’m less inclined to restlessness, and the time goes by faster.

I’m very appreciative that I can do this! Just a few years ago the idea of having a full-screen image of a friend meditating 2,000 miles away would have seemed like science fiction.

I’ve been looking into the possibility of having group videoconferencing that would allow a few of us to meet and discuss our practice or to study together, but so far that’s still in the Sci-Fi realms, unless you’re prepared to spend a lot of money. At the moment Skype only enables you to videoconference with one other person, but hopefully they’ll add that facility soon.

Here’s an interesting account of someone trying to step back from being online, in touch, and on call 27/7.

There are interesting lessons here for many people, including some meditators. It’s increasingly common these days for people to take laptops and cell phones on retreats. When I was a lad (even just ten years ago) it just wasn’t acceptable (not seen as necessary) for people to make phone calls when on retreat. Phones were definitely for emergencies. But now you get people disappearing “behind the bikeshed” in order to have chats or even to do work.

And as for laptops, although I’ve never taken one on a retreat I’ve been on as a retreatant, I have taken one when I’ve been teaching. In fact that seems to be pretty much standard these days — so many of our notes are in electronic form — but I think that more retreatants are taking their notebooks with them, which is a huge shame. Sometimes people are even checking email!

Making phone calls and being online on a retreat are just totally the opposite of what’s meant to be going on, which is an abandonment of the normal “opiates” of busyness and discursiveness that we use to keep from experiencing ourselves more deeply. But it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that it’s even possible to disconnect for a week or weekend. The same unacknowledged and untreated anxiety that drives them to be in touch 24/7 makes them think that something bad — something really, really bad — is going to happen if they’re out of contact.

There’s a level of magical thinking in there, of course, which takes the form of thinking that being in touch continually through electronic devices is going to keep everything all right. It’s certainly nothing quite as rational as “if my mother falls and breaks her hip I can drop everything and go to help her” because that could be achieved just as easily by giving the phone number of the retreat center as an emergency contact. The thinking seems to be more an unconscious assumption that the world will somehow run more smoothly if we’re in contact with it. In other words it’s egotism — the sense that we are so important to the running of the world that it can’t get by without us. It’s that egotism that gets fed by taking cellphones and laptops on retreat, and that’s why we need to unplug once in a while and just experience ourselves.

Remember that slogan from Microsoft in the 1990’s? I think it was for Windows 95, that much-delayed operating system that seemed in danger of becoming Windows 96. The slogan came up in the context of an excellent article on multitasking. Here’s a quasi-Buddhist extract about “Where to you want to go today?”

…consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”?

And that’s the problem with technolust: it taps into a deep restlessness that is driven by a longing for completeness and connection, yet the objects of our longing can never ultimately take us to those goals. Completeness and connection start by being right here, right now. It’s when we learn to like “here and now” that we find ourselves losing our technolust and finding our happiness.