By carlf on 16 July 2010
I recently read about the toughest doctor to ever win the Nobel Prize. He was working at a hospital in Eberswalde, Germany when he got the idea of threading a catheter all the way to the heart in order to check pressure and to inject dyes for diagnosis of various disorders. Naturally, everyone else thought that shoving something into your heart was insane.
Luckily, Forßmann was also insane. He was ordered not to perform the procedure so he ignored his superiors and tied his assistant to a table and catheterized his own heart and then ambled on down to the radiology department to get photographic evidence. Ultimately he was fired. Most likely because the other doctors didn’t like being made to look like sissies.
He went on to sign on as a medical officer in WWII and even did some time as a lumberjack. His contribution was finally recognized in 1956 with the Nobel Prize. Looking over the life of Forßmann, I can’t think of many people alive today with the pair of brass ones that he had. What a sad time for the world.
Posted in Medicine |
By carlf on 14 July 2010
Anderson Cooper has been hitting Scientology pretty hard lately. After devoting a week to Scientology on his show, AC360, Scientology decided it was time to strike back with 95 glorious pages of crazy all available for free on the Internet. They question his journalistic integrity, his fairness, and his intelligence. They attack those who were interviewed on his show, people who have left the church, as violent psychopaths. The one thing they don’t explain is why Scientology, a religion which supposedly cures all mental illness had so many violent psychopaths at high levels in their organization. Is the tech not working out as advertised?
Posted in News, Religion |
By carlf on 13 July 2010
Better keep an eye out. Rupert Murdoch sees all.
Posted in News |
By carlf on 8 July 2010
The idea of augmented reality has a certain appeal to me. I love computers much more than the average person and the idea of computers helping me out even more with mundane daily tasks sounds awesome. This video shows me what a fool I have been.
Posted in Art, Culture |
By carlf on 30 June 2010
Nomic, originally developed by philosopher Peter Suber is a game in which the players can modify the rules at any point. The initial goal is to get 100 points but, like all other rules, that can be changed. The result is a fascinating intersection of philosophy and law. As Suber put it:
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
This all dovetails nicely with Suber’s work on the paradoxes inherent in laws referring to and amending themselves as described in the essay The Paradox of Self-Amendment
in American Constitutional Law and his book The Paradox of Self-Amendment. He finds that paradox abounds in real world legal systems and that they seem to work around it for the most part. The ongoing success of Nomic seems to indicate the same.
There are countless variants around today. Much of the play takes place online and some games have been running for more than a decade.
Posted in Games, Philosophy |
By carlf on 30 June 2010
Has real news grown too depressing or bland for you? Allow me to suggest Lie Blog. Every story guaranteed to be 100% made up and completely absurd. It’s like Weekly World News but with more truthiness.
Posted in Comedy |
By carlf on 30 June 2010
Newly issued Hacker Monthly is well worth your time. It is available as a print edition purchased online or as a PDF available for free from their website. It has some excellent writing and covers everything from running your own startup to flying an SR-71 Blackbird. It has something to appeal to the nerd in all of us.
Posted in Internet, Print, Technology |
By carlf on 30 June 2010
Woot was recently acquired by Amazon. Not a surprising move. With every retailer on the internet lately taking the plunge, Woot makes sense. Mostly, Amazon has done a good job of remaining hands off with their subsidiaries so no big changes are to be expected. More interesting is the Woot CEO’s announcement to employees. A sample quote:
Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot – with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.
Some of the internet’s stodgier companies could learn a lesson here.
Posted in Internet |
By carlf on 29 June 2010
Mental Floss has an interesting item about the phenomenal success of Farmville and other Zynga games. In a nutshell, they argue that the games do well because they create a system of reciprocal social obligation between players. If someone waters my crops, I feel compelled to do the same for them. They reference a talk by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz which refers to Farmville and similar games as sociopathic applications.
It seems to me that the problem with applications like Farmville is the insidious way that they introduce obligations to people who, under normal circumstances, we would owe nothing to. Among my family and friends, there is no problem with a social obligation. If my friend pays for dinner tonight, I will pay next week. These small exchanges deepen the bond with those close to us. On Facebook, though, we are in the situation of having countless small obligations to people we don’t really care about in real life. Everyone on Facebook has 10 or 20 close friends on their friend list the remaining several hundred are not friends in any real sense of the word. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to throw a sheep at them or poke them or water their crops. This sudden explosion of obligations, while profitable to companies like Zynga, is a nightmare for the average person. It is the subversion of our own social networks for the gain of Zynga and others with no real benefit to the user.
This behavior could best be described as parasitic.
Posted in Technology |
By carlf on 29 June 2010
Google recently released a handy little command line tool which lets you query and modify your data in a variety of Google sites all from the command line. It’s not really all that usable on its own but, if you want to script something with Google, it is a regular godsend. As a small example, I have written a script to allow you to convert your Google contacts to mutt aliases. This is just to scratch my particular itch. I make no promises that it won’t crash your computer, burn down your house, or impregnate your dog.
You can download it here.
Edit: Updated for googlecl 0.9.9. Added MIT license.
Posted in Programming |