DISQUS

my HTML sucks a lot, apparently. There's a video here (new window)

Even though Microsoft's release software is often bogged down by bureaucracy, their research labs produce some unbelievably awesome applications. One of my favorites is a program that indexes images, and stitches them together. You can zoom out, and see the big picture, and it lets you zoom in by seamlessly selecting a closer photograph.

I can't do it justice, but check it out here. Make sure you stick with it through the 3d integration with some satellite imagery. I rarely say this about any program, but it is beyond cool.

Because I enjoy contention:
"Nuclear power would save us all."

Wired magazine (new window) had a six-word essay contest a few years ago. There were some brilliant entries. Some of my favorites:

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

The Axis in WWII: haiku! Gesundheit.
- Howard Waldrop

He read his obituary with confusion.
- Steven Meretzky

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news…"
- Steven Meretzky

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

D'oh! I meant to close that bold tag. Could one of you guys fix that for me?

But that's exactly the point, Mike. Thoughtfully changing one's position shouldn't necessitate "falling on one's sword".

It's a bit of a stretch, but I could argue that this "things are as they are and never change" mindset is promulgated by the sorry state of science education in the US today. You are allowed to change your "beliefs" once the evidence supports that change. But you can't talk about research, oh no. Sell it in terms of your feelings.

Ignoring new knowledge (which both sides of the aisle are happy to do) doesn't make you "consistent" or "honest". Ignoring new knowledge makes your though process archaic, dated, unreliable, and false.

I had planned on posting this as a reply to the "Google Reader Bankruptcy" article, but this forum will suffice.

Did you know that you can create a RSS feed of your facebook account? You can even point your Reader at it.

I wouldn't recommend it, though. I tried it, and now I can't account for about a week of my life. Facebook scares me a little.

I took a keyboarding class back in seventh grade, so I'm a touch typist. I also know how to center text in a typewriter and do some other classic secretarial tasks, which are all unbelievably useful skills.

Cognitive Daily (run by Davidson's Mungers) ran an informal poll on typing quirks that includes a typing speed tester. They found some interesting results. People who only use one thumb to space type faster, as do people who backspace with their ring finger.

Typing quirks results

They suggested a test from typingtest.com

I tested to around 75 WPM, and I type everything (numbers & special characters too by touch. I know when I'm beat.

Jarred, fun fact: when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first wrote the algorithm that powers Google, they called it "BackRub" because your site's pagerank is determined largely by what other sites link to you.

Jarred
You're certainly correct that the first generation will probably have tethered power and computing. My comment was intended to argue that iGlasses would function better as a self-contained apparatus that didn't piggyback on technology that we're comfortable with today. The problem isn't really in computing power. It's in energy storage. Moore's Law (exponential growth) still holds for CPUs and memory, but battery tech is a chemistry problem. Without major leaps in technology (fuel cells for example), we're constrained to linear growth in power availability.

I suppose that the whole point of augmenting reality is to allow the freedom of movement, with the accompanying interactions, both physical and psychological, without sacrificing external storage. A fully mature pair of iGlasses would confer the connectivity of your computer screen, except that you aren't bound to even a laptop. Doing research while strolling in a park seems backward, but if you'd be doing that same research seated in a cubicle otherwise, then iGlasses are a good thing. It comes back to being responsible for your connectivity. And come on. The iPhone is currently one of the closest things we have to an immersive device, but it isn't. It is stupidly easy to interact with, but it isn't designed to split your focus.

An entirely different question is what is reality. If the world is strictly constrained to physical interactions, then we aren't having this conversation. If we allow computerized information to be part of our "world", then augmenting what you would naturally see with it is no more unnatural than taking off a pair of gloves. Mind you, we're supplementing here, not supplanting. When you turn off the physical world in favor of the digital one, you're no better than a Friday night shut in playing Halo on Live.

As far as "lost in the web" goes, you should check out the Ghost in the Shell series. Some of it is great anime, some of it's pretty mediocre, but the philosophical thrust is apparently right up your alley.

It's probably unreasonable to generally expect for someone to completely unplug while you're talking to them. Have you ever turned off your cell phone or slept your computer because your current conversation was so intense? I never have, probably because I didn't think to. I wouldn't want someone checking their e-mail while I was talking to them, but I wouldn't mind them having a weather report or something innocuous taking up a tiny fraction of their attention. It might be possible to have your iGlasses transmit the amount of "load" they're delivering, which other glasses would represent by darkening the frames or faces. I'm only a little (a lot) creeped out by the mental image of a crowd of blacked out faces walking on a sidewalk. An external LED would be a good idea, though, if you interacted with people who didn't wear iGlasses.

This is a really fun topic. With any luck, someone will stumble across this discussion in thirty years and laugh at how utterly wrong we were to be so hopeful. The machines will have taken over by then. (Forgive me, I've been watching the Sarah Connor Chronicles)

By the way, all of my links should pop into new windows.

1: one of XKCD's takes on Wikipedia

2: The glasses might not need to be better than HD (1920x1080). In fact, full 1080p is probably overkill. The eye doesn't work like a camera, so your display doesn't have to stand up to the same type of scrutiny. An HD display is supposed to look great from a wide variety of distances and angles. Your glasses only have to look great from a single vantage point. The camera mounted outside the glasses would, of course, need to have the highest resolution possible.

3: I wouldn't want to have a pair of iGlasses and a phone. I'd expect for my glasses to have all of the necessary circuitry and power built in. Interface is probably the tough one here, but with some relative of of today's gesture-based interfaces or something that we hadn't even thought of yet, a clever programmer could probably make it stupidly easy to control.

4: Regarding safety, I'd point you to the collision avoidance systems that are going into some cars today. With the right software, your iGlasses can make you safer. Your brain notice some patterns faster than others, and your glasses could superimpose an attention-getting graphic over something (car, person, etc) that you might otherwise not see until it's too late.

5: I am terrible with names. A conversational facebook would be a godsend. And frankly, I wouldn't mind someone facebooking me while they talked to me. I'm pretty sure I could get over the initial icky feeling.

6: Finally, a problem. We already miss beauty because we're distracted by our computers and our iPods. I suppose we'll have to balance when we wear our glasses and when we leave them at home. I'd probably stargaze some with them, and some without them. Picking out obscure or dim constellations in the sky is part of the pleasure. I'm more likely to see a shooting star while wearing iGlasses than looking in a book.

7: To tie back to some earlier posts, could you combine a blank book and your iGlasses as an e-book reader? You get to actually turn the pages, and feel the book progress, but when you're done with Tolstoy, just close the book, and open it again to Sontag. It'd be a beast to design, but it is very doable.

10: And for fun speculation, let's consider the feasibility of using iGlasses as "handicaps" a la Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. The more intelligent someone is, the more distracted they'd be by a superabundance of information. As long as you can control what information is available, you can limit what people know or remember. After all, if you see something briefly, and never can find it again, it's almost as if it never happened (this hints of Orwell). This happens to me regularly, and I have a much easier time just accepting that knowledge as unattainable.

Whoo, this is fun. There are all kinds of points that we can get into here, but I'll keep it down to two or three.

1) Rachel, while thinking is anything but linear, most oral storytelling is amazingly linear. In my limited recollection, oral traditions are limited in what story branches can be pursued. Written text, however, can tell concurrent stories, aided by the reader's ability to flip back a few pages and review what's happening somewhere else. And if you want to look at nonlinear print storytelling, look on your bookshelf for some sweet manga.

Joel, you get two points:
2) the Kindle uses an e-ink display. This is significantly different technology from your computer screen. It's not backlit, it has much higher resolution than most computers, and those factors make it much easier on your eyes while you're reading it. From what I've seen, it may be equivalent to a single print page. Incidentally, reading white text on a black computer screen is less stressful, and you lucky Macintosh users can get this effect instantly by pressing Ctrl-Opt-Apple-8 (all four keys at the same time) which will invert your monitor's display. It's fun to play with at least. Use the same key command to reverse it.

3) This is one enormous problem with the Kindle. You may be able to almost instantly define words you don't recognize (thank you Susan Sontag for making me feel illiterate), but you can't feel your progress through a book. That may not be that big of a deal when you're reading an inherently skinny work such as Harper's or the Economist, but reading a piece like War and Peace without the shape of the book changing is rather disorienting.

I'd expect for the Kindle to sell rather well for purveyors of the New York Times' Bestseller list. I'd also expect for subscribers to print magazines (i.e. Harper's) and newspapers (NYTimes) would enjoy tidy access to their literary smack. My literary tastes are a bit more eclectic, though, and I know that I'd miss the pedantry promulgated by wielding an unwieldy or esoteric tome in public.