The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism

"This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries. [...] Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate "free zones" across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. Even during this global financial crisis, multinational corporations heavily populate the list of the world's largest economic entities; the commercial diplomacy of emerging-market firms such as China’s Haier and Mexico’s Cemex has already turned North-South relations inside out faster than the nonaligned movement ever did."

Tagged with: politics • history • globalisation • sociology • economics • nation-states • capitalism • feudalism •

How Movies Activate Your Neural G-Spot

"Neurocinema helpfully speeds up a process Hollywood began years ago, namely the elimination of all subjectivity in favor of sheer push-button sensation. By quantifying which set pieces, character moments, and other modular film packets really lather up my gray matter, the adfotainment-industrial complex can quickly and efficiently deliver what I actually want. Movies won’t be “made,” they’ll be generated. Michael Bay, with access to my innermost circuitry, can really get in there and noogie the ol’ pleasure center. And here’s the best part: Once the biz knows what I want, it can give me more of the same. I’ll soon be reporting levels of consumer satisfaction previously known only to drug abusers. My moviegoing life will, literally and figuratively, be all about the next hit."

Tagged with: neurocinema • fMRI • analysis • audience • focus-group • research •

Rotten from the top down

"With no ideological or visionary differences within mainstream British politics, and with traditional political grassroots seemingly abandoned for millionaire’s favours, what we’re left with is politicians competing for the right to manage the country and at best tinker with an economic model that almost destroyed itself. The differences are tokenistic at best (viz. the Lib Dems’ laughably populist and unworkable mansion tax) and leave a vacuum where other questions are unanswered. Is this really the best we can do? Are the ideals of the politicians’ middle-class managerialist culture all that we have left to aspire to?"

Tagged with: UK • politics • party • system •

CSS3 – The future now – menu – Drop Everything

"The ONLY gaphic used in this menu is the photograph of the butterfly, all the rest of the demo is down to css3 styling." OK, that's pretty damned impressive, right there.

Tagged with: css3 • dropdown • menu • webdev • demo • style •

Turn on adhesive. Scale walls like Spidey

"The device is the result of inspiration drawn not from a spider, but from a beetle native to Florida that can adhere to a leaf with a force 100 times its own weight, yet also instantly unstick itself.

[...]

The device consists of a flat plate patterned with holes, each on the order of microns (one-millionth of a meter). A bottom plate holds a liquid reservoir, and in the middle is another porous layer. An electric field applied by a common 9-volt battery pumps water through the device and causes droplets to squeeze through the top layer. The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface—much the way two wet glass slides stick together.

“In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak,” Steen says. “But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces.”"

Tagged with: adhesive • device • science • surface-tension • human-fly • climbing •

How to Split WordPress Content Into Two or More Columns

Neat trick with functions and the 'more' tag,

Tagged with: webdev • wordpress • tutorial • content • columns • function • snippet • code •

Anonymity and the Internet

"Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security. Anonymity is bad, the argument goes; and if we abolish it, we can ensure only the proper people have access to their own information. We'll know who is sending us spam and who is trying to hack into corporate networks. And when there are massive denial-of-service attacks, such as those against Estonia or Georgia or South Korea, we'll know who was responsible and take action accordingly.

The problem is that it won't work." Bruce Schneier.

Tagged with: Bruce-Schneier • technology • internet • security • privacy • censorship • anonymity • futility •

The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News

“In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk,” the former New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote. “Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”

Tagged with: politics • media • history • journalism • objectivity • postmodernism • writing • truth •

Toward an Interstellar Archaeology

"Suppose a civilization somewhere in the cosmos is approaching Kardashev type III status. In other words, it is already capable of using all the power resources of its star (4*1026 W for a star like the Sun) and is on the way to exploiting the power of its galaxy (4*1037 W). Imagine it expanding out of its galactic niche, turning stars in its stellar neighborhood into a series of Dyson spheres. If we were to observe such activity in a distant galaxy, we would presumably detect a growing void in visible light from the area of the galaxy where this activity was happening, and an upturn in the infrared. Call it a ‘Fermi bubble.’"

Tagged with: space • SETI • archaeology • life • civilisation • science • fiction • speculation •

Information, Freedom, Flame-bait

"I'm big on obligations, because it seems to me that they're the flip side of rights. The right to not be murdered in my bed imposes on me the obligation not to murder other people in their beds. Human beings are social animals; we do not exist in isolation, and if we desire some specific behaviour from our peers, we, too, are required to abide by it. The alternative is tyranny, a state in which some individuals are exempt from ordinary rules and may exercise their liberty at the expense of others.

So it follows that if you want information to be free you are taking on an obligation to make information, and give it freedom. An obligation to work to better the lot of humanity, not to merely sponge off the labour of others.

Next time you hear someone invoke "information wants to be free" as a justification for demanding free-as-in-no-payment-expected content, ask them: precisely what content have you released for free lately?" Charlie Stross.

Tagged with: Charlie-Stross • free • information • culture • commons • internet • business • models • freetard • ideology • sloganeering •

Economic ‘perfect storm’ brewing?

"The United States and other major economies have not taken adequate measures to address the underlying forces driving the 2007-2008 financial and oil crises, according to the book. Consequently, they have potentially condemned the global economy to future shocks of more catastrophic proportions.

El-Gamal and Myers Jaffe argue that a more complex set of factors are at play where transfers of wealth to the Middle East have resulted in a perfect storm of global asset and financial market bubbles, increased unrest, terrorism, geopolitical conflicts, and rising costs for energy." More than likely, I suspect.

Tagged with: economics • energy • sustainability • globalization • oil • politics • scarcity • collapse •

Building body parts using nanocellulose

"In the new programme, the researchers will build up a three-dimensional nanocellulose network that is an exact copy of the patient's healthy outer ear and construct an exact mirror image of the ear. It will have sufficient mechanical stability for it to be used as a bioreactor, which means that the patient's own cartilage and stem cells can be cultivated directly inside the body or on the patient, in this case on the head.

"As yet we do not know if it will work. It is an extremely exciting project that brings together expertise in image analysis, prototype manufacturing, biomechanics, biopolymers and cell biology. If we succeed it will open up a whole range of new and exciting areas of use.""

Tagged with: biology • medicine • body • reconstruction • cellulose • nanotech • biotech •

How To Write A Press Release

"The best press release headlines summarise the story. Ideally, they contain everything the editor needs to decide if the stories they describe are worth pursuing. Try to get as much information as possible into the fewest number of words. Think of the publication you’re writing for and try to make it sound like one of their headlines."

Tagged with: PR • publicity • press-release • advice • tips • Gareth-L-Powell • copywriting •