Disqus - Friends of yish

Re: collision detection: Why is the science of interrogation so neglected?

Clive — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:46:59 -0000

test

Re: collision detection: Why is the science of interrogation so neglected?

Clive — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:03:03 -0000

Test, again and again.

Re: collision detection: The Age of Awareness: My latest feature for the New York Times Magazine

Clive — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:25:38 -0000

ellening, thanks so much! Keep me posted as to how your experiment goes with your friends -- it sounds very cool.

Ruth, yeah, the small-town stuff that Tufecki talks about in the article is really spot-on, I thought! Glad it resonated with your experience. Also, as to your point ... "when you're updating throughout the day, daily, with details of your life that wouldn't necessarily come up in the casual "hi, how are you, lovely weather we're having" conversation over a short amount of time you can learn a lot about someone" -- that's precisely it. The *type* of information one exchanges/observes via ambient tools is often (though not always) rather different from information in face-to-face interactions, which is precisely why it opens up new channels in our emotional bandwidth.

Tery, I was an early ECHO user too! I joined in 1996 and sort of drifted away only early this year. ECHO had all sorts of ambient info built into it, ranging from one's handle to the information you go when you "looked" at someone's account. Plus the "yo" -- a proto-IM!

Re: collision detection: Relaunching with a new blog design

Clive — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:29:10 -0000

Hey all -- thanks so much! Good to be back. Blogging has become this incredibly important extension of my thinking process -- keeps my brain limber -- so for completely selfish reasons I'm glad I'm back doing it. Plus, it feel weirdly *lonely* to be surfing the Internet, seeing cool things, but not being able to get into conversations about them here via comments.

Re: collision detection: The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:15:29 -0000

Woo!

Re: collision detection: Hiccups due to our fish ancestry

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:24:23 -0000

Hey Chris --

I went into my Disqus account and didn't see any comment of yours in the "spam", "flagged" or "removed" sections -- so I'm not sure what happened.

Is it possible there was a hiccup on the browser side when you submitted it? It's either that or, yeah, a Disqus bug.

I'm not 100% thrilled with Disqus, but it's better than having my entire commenting shut down by Pair every other day ...

Re: collision detection: Teenagers unwittingly use the scientific method to beat video games: My latest Wired News column

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:26:34 -0000

LX, yish: Heh.

Great link, too, yish -- thanks!

Re: collision detection: Relaunching with a new blog design

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:29:23 -0000

<waving> to everyone!

Lucas, good point about the comments proper being too far down the page ... I'm going to try to tweak the html so they appear just below the posting, with the "Add New Comment" box at the bottom.

Re: collision detection: Study explores how a fly avoids a swatter

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:32:17 -0000

James, that is a breaktaking comprehensive guide to flyswatting!

Re: collision detection: Teenagers unwittingly use the scientific method to beat video games: My latest Wired News column

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:00:31 -0000

Heh.

Re: collision detection: Relaunching with a new blog design

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:03:38 -0000

Paul, the Twitter widget was created by Twitter, but the design -- the color, shape, fonts -- were carefully tweaked by Andrew Hearst (the guy who redesigned my site) so that they'd closely match the look of my blog. Andrew did the same thing with the Tumblr sidebar!

Re: collision detection: The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep

Clive — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:14:35 -0000

Andrew, wow, I had not seen that site before!

Debbie, awesome summary of the gradient issue! I cannot wait to see what you're able to figure out about bee spit. I cannot believe that last sentence made sense in English: Awesome.

Re: collision detection: Ghostly "timescanned" images of New York's streets

Clive — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:26:00 -0000

pjm, whoa -- I had no idea that's how photo-finish photos worked! Do you have any links to slit-scan sports images? I want to see some!

Franco, good to be back!

Jason, that video is *insanely cool* ... and those linked-to images, man: Those were all taken with normal crappy-end digital cameras?

Re: collision detection: Study explores how a fly avoids a swatter

Clive — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:40:39 -0000

Electrically-charged devices are cool, but what I really want is a steam powered automatic fly killer ... made of like brass and wood and stuff.

Re: collision detection: Ghostly "timescanned" images of New York's streets

Clive — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:41:30 -0000

That is just superweird looking. Awesome!

Re: collision detection: Ghostly "timescanned" images of New York's streets

Clive — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:43:16 -0000

Looking at those makes me feel like I've just taken some salvia.

Re: collision detection: Chinese scientists unveil "the anti cloak" -- technique for defeating invisibility shields

Clive — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:44:47 -0000

I thought lit-crit academics already duked it out in 80-storey-tall mechas.

Re: collision detection: Ghostly "timescanned" images of New York's streets

Clive — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:16:03 -0000

Woo! Thanks!

Re: collision detection: Chinese scientists unveil "the anti cloak" -- technique for defeating invisibility shields

Clive — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:39:41 -0000

Thank you for those incredibly kind words! And hey, I have nothing against humanities scholars -- on the contrary, lots of my pieces rely extensively on the social sciences! And my degree is in English and Political Science, actually ... I did not formally train in science. So when I speak of lit-crit mecha wars, it's because I've actually seen and participated in them IN PERSON.

Re: collision detection: The Age of Awareness: My latest feature for the New York Times Magazine

Clive — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:21:45 -0000

Peter, so cool to hear from you! Those illustrations are really gorgeous. You should issue them as desktop wallpaper!

That's a lovely example about the trackball. Ambient tech support!

Re: collision detection: The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep

Clive — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:24:17 -0000

Great, great descriptions, Doug! You're quite right that human engineering has figured out many ways to create big gradients; indeed, a lot of kinetically active tools aren't possible without some sort of gradient.

Re: collision detection: The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep

Clive — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:24:33 -0000

I hadn't thought about teeth!

Re: collision detection: The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep

Clive — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:28:33 -0000

Sure, hopefully so! Of course, the materialist view of conservation is only one way of looking at it. I suggested it because it's an attempt to speak Latin to those who are already speaking Latin; i.e. if modern industry regards the natural world mostly just as a resource for plundering, then it's useful to talk about the way that overplundering can prevent future, better, yet less intrusive forms of plundering, right? Historically, any farmers and hunters worth their salt knew how to work with the land so as not to exhaust it.

The spiritual, aesthetic, and cultural reasons are of course equally as compelling, or even moreso. And interestingly, they often dovetail with the materialist approach of non-massive-monocropping farmers ...

Re: collision detection: The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep

Clive — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:28:45 -0000

Heh.

Re: collision detection: Cows align themselves with magnetic north

Clive — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:54:11 -0000

Cow science. What is there not to love?

Woo!