Ramblings & ephemera
From Sander Duivestein’s “Penny Thoughts on the Technium” (The Technium: 1 December 2009):
I‘m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not [...]
Posted on December 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Gene Weingarten’s “The Peekaboo Paradox: The strange secrets of humor, fear and a guy who makes big money making little people laugh” (The Washington Post: 22 January 2006):
Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins [...]
Posted on November 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” (The New York Times Magazine: 5 September 2008):
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
Social scientists have a name for this [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steve Paulson’s interview with Robert Wright, “God, He’s moody” (Salon: 24 June 2009):
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kim Zetter’s “New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud” (Wired: 30 September 2009):
New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim’s dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.
The sophisticated hack uses a [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Wikipedia’s “Gruen transfer” (28 September 2009):
In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when consumers respond to “scripted disorientation” cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques) …
The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: Oude School
From John Cloud’s “Why Girls Have BFFs and Boys Hang Out in Packs” (TIME: 17 July 2009):
For the better part of the past half-century, feminists, their opponents and armies of academics have debated the differences between men and women. Only in the past few years have scientists been able to [...]
Posted on July 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Becker’s “Hitachi Develops RFID Powder” (Wired: 15 February 2007):
[Hitachi] recently showed a prototype of an RFID chip measuring a .05 millimeters square and 5 microns thick, about the size of a grain of sand. They expect to have ‘em on the market in two or three years.
The chips are packed with 128 bits [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: sleepymyf
2005
From Brian Krebs’ “Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat” (The Washington Post: 1 August 2005):
DefCon 13 also was notable for being the location where two new world records were set — both involved shooting certain electronic signals unprecedented distances. Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “List of confidence tricks” (Wikipedia: 3 July 2009):
Get-rich-quick schemes
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate “sure things”, get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: State Library of New South Wales collection
From Peter Stark’s “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go” (Outside: January 1997):
There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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These come from a variety of sources; just Google the law to find out more about it.
Parkinson’s Law
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Source: Cyril Northcote Parkinson in The Economist (1955)
The Peter Principle
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
Source: Dr. Laurence J. Peter and [...]
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, science, technology | No Comments »
photo credit: C. Young Photography
From Joshua Foer’s “Giant Burning Holes of the World” (Boing Boing: 16 June 2009):
… these sorts of mine fires can stay lit for a very long time. One burned in the city of Zwickau, Germany from 1476 to 1860. Another coal fire in Germany, at a place called Brennender Berg [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, on writing, science, security, tech in changing society, weird | No Comments »
From Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, & Shumeet Baluja’s “What’s Up CAPTCHA?: A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation” (Google: 20-24 April 2009):
There are several classes of images which can be successfully oriented by computers. Some objects, such as faces, cars, pedestrians, sky, grass etc.
…
Many images, however, are difficult for computers to orient. For example, indoor scenes [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Joe Clark’s “The extreme Google brain” (Fawny: 26 April 2009):
… Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox, which explains, using scientific findings, why large majorities of girls and women behave almost identically at different stages of their lives – while large minorities of boys and men show vast variability compared to each other and to male [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “Twins Suspected in Spectacular Jewelry Heist Set Free” (Spiegel Online International: 19 March 2009):
Saved by their indistinguishable DNA, identical twins suspected in a massive jewelry heist have been set free. Neither could be exclusively linked to the DNA evidence.
German police say at least one of the identical twin brothers Hassan and Abbas O. may [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Errol Morris’ “Whose Father Was He? (Part Five)” (The New York Times: 2 April 2009):
I had an opportunity to visit the fossil collections at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. It was part of a dinosaur fossil-hunting trip with Jack Horner, the premier hunter of T-Rex skeletons. Downstairs in the lab, there [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David G. Post’s “Jefferson’s Moose” (Remarks presented at the Stanford Law School Conference on Privacy in Cyberspace: 7 February 2000):
In 1787, Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the “complete skeleton, skin & horns of the Moose” shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his hotel. One can only [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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