Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information [...]
I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently. The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that [...]
Over at EconBrowser, James talks about Geography and Income. He talks about the question of how much economic activity is dependent on geographic location. When you look at a map of GDP density – GDP per square kilometre – it’s fairly obvious that the bulk of economic activity in densely populated areas which are near [...]
Are the American people obsolete? Salon argues that because of globalisation and technology there is now a increased separation between capital and labour. The activities that generate wealth have both been outsourced to cheaper shores, and become more efficient because of technology. As a consequence the social contract in Western society between rich and poor [...]
I read Paul Graham’s essay on the acceleration of addictiveness this morning, and it really struck a chord. I feel as though it is almost impossible to become bored these days, there is so much to do. Is this because the world is getting more addictive, or just because I have gotten older and have [...]
I just read this awesome thread over at RPG.net about character creation in the new RPG Eclipse Phase. Man, this RPG sounds awesome! As ExNihilo mentions in the thread: The fact that a question like “Can my character upload his living consciousness into a distributed network-swarm of microscopic robots?” results in actual debate is enough [...]
Hmmm…. first I read this transcript from a speech by Dmitry Orlov entitled “Social Collapse – Best Practices”, and then I saw on Boing Boing the post How are you coping with Collapse-Anxiety? The first post describes what might happen if the US collapses in the same way economically as the USSR did in the [...]
While reading this article in The Economist, the section on rising inequality leapt out at me. The newspaper suggested that technology may be to blame. This is certainly a situation that I’ve been expecting for a while. In contrast to the Singularity proposed by Vernor Vinge, I believe that as people become more educated, have [...]
The Redshift theory basically categorizes computing needs as either growing faster or slower than Moore’s Law. Traditional business is over-served by Moore’s Law, whereas applications such as financial market simulations, drug industry research, computer animation, and the high-growth end of the internet industry (Facebook, You-Tube, Flickr), are needing computing resources faster than Moore’s Law. These [...]