maebmij’s blog

Eco-friendly electromagnetic superbikes, miniskirts, and hi-gloss white boots:

(TreeHugger article, manufacturer’s website)

Fake Steve Jobs on Google’s mobile phone platform thing:

“Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.”

Ouch.

I imagine the marketing-psychology stuff runs pretty deep here: I present for comparison a current Dell advertisement for their video chat system, and two Apple promotional screenshots of their video chat sytem:

Dell

Apple

And, to add some politics into the mix, I’ll just note that (allegedly) Michael Dell’s political donations are 89.4% Republican, while Steve Jobs’s are 99.6% Democratic.

It’s all iPhones at work at the moment. I got to play with one for a few minutes, so I finally got to try out my Fortune iPhone-web-interface, mentioned previously:

Something interesting that I hadn’t been able to visualise before was “viewport” scaling: The browser de-couples the physical screen resolution from the page’s virtual resolution. When you visit a web page, the browser simulates a relatively large window, and then scales the resulting page down so it fits on the screen, but is very small. If you’ve already designed with a small screen in mind, you end up with a lot of wasted space unless you tell the browser (via a meta tag) that you’d like it to pretend a smaller window size (resulting in less scaling). See Apple’s iPhone-Safari dev notes for a proper explanation.

Here’s Fortune with a specified virtual window width of 600 pixels:

And here’s what it looks like without a specified viewport width:

Incidentally, the viewport width seems to stay constant when the orientation changes: If you rotate to landscape, the page image zooms in somewhat so that it can still fill the screen without becoming any wider in terms of the virtual browser window (i.e. the viewport width is preserved).

Mostly grim stories of cyberpunk interest that I’ve collected, from the last year or so:

Cyborgs to do battle with police

“Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.”

link

Police spy-drones to monitor urban areas

“The machines, which are flown by remote control or using pre-programmed GPS navigation systems, are silent and can be fitted with night-vision cameras.

The images they record are sent back to a police support vehicle or control room.”

link

Police to wear head-mounted surveillance cameras

“Police say the Cylon camera will be used mainly while officers patrol potential hotspots such as Union Street, Mutley and the city centre … The message to the public is to enjoy yourselves but don’t misbehave because you don’t know when you may be caught on camera.”

link

Powered exoskeletons for stroke victims

“The robotic suit, which slips over a person’s upper body and arms, weighs only 1.8 kilograms (four pounds).

It was developed jointly by Activelink Co. — a venture of Matsushita Electric Industrial which is best known for the Panasonic brand — and Kobe Gakuin University.”

link

Taser knife-missiles

“If the subject tries to grab or disconnect the XREP projectile, the reflex engagement electrodes complete a circuit allowing TASER NMI to discharge from the Nose Electrodes, through the subject’s body, out to the hand that grabbed the XREP. … To maximize incapacitation, the XREP engine incorporates a microprocessor controlled optimal electrode selection technology.”

link

This Guardian article talks about Oscar Pistorius, a Paralympic sprinter with speeds that would currently place him 8th-fastest among able-bodied sprinters in Britain. He runs with Össur custom sprint feet (pictured). He’s asking to be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and there’s some debate over whether the feet constitute an unfair advantage. But I think the more interesting question is: As prosthetic technology improves, will we start seeing the best times coming from the Paralympics instead of the Olympics? Is it not at least theoretically possible that we could design a better sprinting leg than the human leg?
The article immediately reminded me of a great makes-you-think hidden detail from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a sci-fi story where many of the characters are cybernetically enhanced, having had various muscles and joints replaced with stronger artificial ones:

One of these characters mentions he’s a former boxing medallist; but if you look closely, you discover that his medal is a Paralympic one. It took me a few moments to work this out (”but he isn’t disabled!”): One possible future for the Paralympics is as the competition where humans with elective (and superior) prosthetics are allowed to compete; in such a scenario, they could become the most interesting competition, with the Olympics relegated to special-interest for the purists…

A few days ago, reader.mac.com turned up, and was theorised to be an iPhone-only feed reader web app. Now that the device has been released, you can check it out from other browsers:

• Install User-Agent Switcher (or change your user-agent string manually)
• Use the iPhone user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
• Visit http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http:%2F%2Fmaebmij.org%2Fblog%2Ffeed, or your choice of feed URL

Apparently, Safari on the iPhone sends RSS feeds to this app instead of processing them locally.

I spent today catching up on videos I’ve been meaning to watch:

Wired/New York Public Library debate: The Battle Over Books, from 2005

Larry Lessig and representatives from Google, a publisher’s association, and an authors’ guild all debate the legality and necessity of Google Book Search. It’s worthwhile, if only because both sides get their ideas across pretty well. Lessig is very convincing, as usual.

A Discussion with danah boyd, from 2006

Danah was in the news yesterday for her piece on social class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. This video covers some similar ground: It’s a rambling talk/discussion about how people interact socially online, focusing mostly on MySpace and Friendster. She’s a good speaker.

Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, from 1981

Everything from discussing what’s wrong with the way maths is taught, to getting toungue-tied trying to explain hadrons and quarks off-the-cuff without using any big words. The most interesting part, to me, is his extremely frank discussion of how he felt about his part in developing the first nuclear weapons.

I’ve been having great fun (along with the everyone else) with the new Google Maps feature that lets you view certain streets from the point-of-view of a sinister, slow-moving surveillance van instead of a satellite/plane:

Some related fun stuff:

Robot Exclusion Protocol: I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal… (via jwz)

Robots.txt 2.0 (via BoingBoing)

Reading about textonyms, I learned that if you type ‘Woohoo’ (i.e. 966466) on a numeric keypad using the T9 input system, the predictive text algorithm produces ‘Zonino’. I can’t figure out how this word found its way into the T9 dictionary - it isn’t an English dictionary word, and while it seems to be a surname, it’s pretty rare.

There’s some anecdotal evidence that this and other automatic word substitutions have escaped into the wild as synonyms of the intended words.

“Korea has developed its own android capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face.”

“The face is a composite of two stars, and its torso on a singer.”

cf. William Gibson’s Idoru