“With a single press of a button, stream live video of your interactions with police to our secure servers. Know what to do if you’re approached by police on the sidewalk, in the car, in your home, or at a protest. Know what to pay attention to if you experience or witness police misconduct. Fill in the information you need to file an official complaint, and send it automatically to the police department. Use your phone’s location services, camera, and time and date stamps to collect evidence.”
Category Archives: Science & Technology
Is Earth a seeded planet?
“One possibility is that we will build 3D printers and create organic humans based on our software personalities just to experience reality through five senses. An organic creature can keep learning its entire life. So our future software selves might find a need to bring some of our minds back into organic form just to keep up the challenge and the learning. And you know where this is going. If the scenario I described might happen in the future, how can we know it didn’t already happen and we are the second-generation organic humans?”
Scott Adams thinks it is and makes his case here.
Sparked (drones as art)
The Masked Avengers
“All you need to be a world-class hacker is a computer and a cool pair of sunglasses. And the computer is optional.” — The Masked Avengers: How Anonymous incited online vigilantism from Tunisia to Ferguson.
Scott Adams: The user interface to reality
“The so-called ‘truth’ of the universe is irrelevant because our tiny brains aren’t equipped to understand it anyway. […] Our human understanding of reality is like describing an elephant to a space alien by saying an elephant is grey. That is not nearly enough detail. And you have no way to know if the alien perceives color the same way you do. After enduring your inadequate explanation of the elephant, the alien would understand as much about elephants as humans understand about reality. […] Today when I hear people debate the existence of God, it feels exactly like debating whether the software they are using is hosted on Amazon’s servers or Rackspace.”
Scott Adams: The Age of Magic
“Imagine walking to a crosswalk and doing the “halt” hand motion in the direction of traffic. Your ring and your watch can tell by their orientation to each other that you have formed that gesture and so they send a “pedestrian waiting” message to the street light. The lights change for you and you cross. It will feel like magic. Or point at something in a vending machine and your watch and ring can detect which item you selected, charge your credit card, and send a code to release the item. To an observer it will seem that you pointed at an item and magic released it.”
Dark Universe
“With astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as your guide, go beyond the night sky and into deep space to find out how discoveries over the past 100 years have led us to two great cosmic mysteries: dark matter and dark energy. You’ll hurtle through Jupiter’s atmosphere, peer at the web of dark matter holding galaxies together, and watch the colorful remains of the universe’s beginnings unfold.”
I was fortunate to experience this at the Hayden Planetarium (part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York). The most amazing and wonderful thing I have every seen.
How smuggled mobile phones are rewiring Brazil’s prisons
It’s easy (for me) to become discouraged about the surveillance state the US (and lots of other countries) has become. How can you resist an entity like the NSA? Perhaps, in the long run, we cannot. But in a twisted way, stories like the one below give me hope.
In Cell to Cell: How Smuggled Mobile Phones Are Rewiring Brazil’s Prisons, Jonathan Franklin describes how Brazil’s prison gangs are using technology.
Wired prisoners change the entire concept of incarceration. Instead of being isolated and punished, the inmate with access to a cell can organize murders, threaten witnesses, plan crimes, and browse online porn to figure out which escort to order up for the next intimate visit. […] Brazilian organized crime leaders continued to have widespread ability to make calls, receive calls, organize conference calls, and even hold virtual trials where gang leaders from different prisons are patched in to a central line to debate the fate of gang members accused of betraying the group’s ironclad rules.
Yes, I get that the gangs are committing awful crimes. But then, so are oppressive governments. We can talk about Right and Wrong at Sunday School, this is about technology.
Augmented Television
Watch a few minutes of this and tell me you don’t want one of these. This is clearly where things are headed. I can’t wait.
Location-aware Wi-Fi lets fans be part of show
Company I used to work for is big in collegiate sports marketing so this story probably more interesting to me than many of you. But this tech will almost certainly show up in lots of places. A few excerpts from full post:
The system, developed by UK start-up Mobbra, will let organisers *send football replays, backstage interviews with pop stars, or area-specific food deals direct to fans’ phones*. It will also encourage the audience to become part of the show.
With Mobbra’s system, dubbed Massivity, organisers can *take control of fans’ phones to create spectacular effects*. For instance, the camera flashlight on each phone could be activated remotely, turning the crowd into a glittering star field. Or a team’s colours could sweep around the phone and tablet screens in the venue like a Mexican wave.
These kinds of applications are possible because Mobbra has found a way to deliver Wi-Fi to every user in a large crowd. A typical wireless access point can supply just 50 connections – so unless a venue can afford to run an access point for every 50 or so people, Wi-Fi is not guaranteed. Even then, simple radio interference can destroy any chance of stadium-wide access.
The phone side of the equation is choreographed by an app called Fangage, which tweaks the phone’s Wi-Fi settings. It will launch on the Apple and Android app stores later this month. *During a game, all phones could vibrate to tell the crowd of a betting opportunity, or a special food and drink offer*, says Walton. “You can have four streams of video, which could be replays or goals from other matches that are on at the same time. At gigs you’ll get behind-the-scenes news and backstage interviews with the stars.”