Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Hobnobbing in front of Walnut Creek’s Apple Store with the iWait.org crowd, who were holding places on line to be among the first to purchase the highly anticipated new Apple iPhone.  Visiting around 4 pm, I asked an iWait kid, about number twelve in line, how much he was selling his place in line for.  His answer, “Two-fifty.”

The glass front of the Apple store was covered from the inside with heavy black paper, I assume to be unveiled at the 6 pm iPhone sales opening. There was a carnival atmosphere building Friday evening at Walnut Creek’s upscale shopping district, the pulse quickening with iPhone launch excitement.

For those who care not to wait, there are plenty of exotic phone gadgets already on the market, such as this Verizon LG model (below).

Of course, a leading 3-D virtual world is Second Life, a rich 3-D experience which you enter after downloading Linden Lab’s browser portal.

A friend was telling me about an acquaintance whose son had fallen in love with a woman he met within his many hours of Second Life absorption. The innocent young man planned to travel to Texas to meet his virtual girlfriend in her primary world flesh form. His concerned parents ran a background check on her. It should come as no surprise, the siren turned out to be in her mid 40’s with a criminal record.

Second Life was presaged in part by Neil Stephenson’s insightful work of modern science fiction, Snow Crash. The detailed mind of imaginative writers through the ages, such as Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles,recognize that as many planets we may colonize, how ever many virtual worlds we create, we always manage to fuck it up! Corrupted by greed, power, prejudice and fear there will always be the insecure knigget, the weakest link, probably a Republican, who will introduce a tear in the fabric of the psychic community trust.  The rest is history.

If Monty Python’s Flying Circus had a virtual universe, this would be it. Check out a strange and beautiful land, an interactive 2 1/2 D world, Red Universe.

It’s interesting to observe that as we struggle with the real world, the virtual worlds can be more enabling for design and play. There is so much in the real world we cannot control. Virtual worlds and online communities provide us with experiences that permit more control, opportunities for fresh starts and re-invention.

EtOoQFa5ug8

Last summer a Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, fumbled through his description of the Internet as a “series of tubes.” His simplification was a clumsy adaptation to what telecom folks colorfully refer as “pipes”, network bandwidth such as fiber optical cables providing faster transmission speeds and therefore a “fat pipe.” In 3 to 5 years IBM promises we will have much, much fatter pipes. (Link to full story.)

“We have worked out a way to ship almost inconceivable quantities of data at extremely low power,” said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for International Business Machines Corp.

Imagine 160 Gigabytes of data or an entire HD movie being downloaded to your computer or DVR box in one second! The implications of this new chip are staggering. Codecs, audio and video compression technologies, such as MPEG used in mp3, DivX and all the rest will no longer be necessary. Larger hard drives and bigger memory storage devices to collection your new tidal wave of data will be necessary. Online video web sites will contain larger, higher resolution clips which will certainly compete with traditional television broadcasting stations to a larger extent than they do now. Peer-to-peer networking schemes will be more important for sharing vast storage resources than bandwidth itself. Networked games will become higher resolution and more interactive. I can imagine two remotely located Nintendo Wii users playing a lifesized game of tennis through the network. My mind is on fire with ideas, get me a VC quick!

“Stupid Tea” Originally uploaded by brappy!.

Tony Hicks writes And Another Thing a very funny column in the Contra Costa Times. His recent article, “Humor not lost in translation” about preparations for the 2008 Olympics in Bejing points out a number of humorous errors in translation from Chinese to English, such as a park celebrating diversity named, “Racist Park.”

Hicks goes on to explore the phenomenon known as “Chinglish”and provides a few helpful links. The link to Flickr’s Chinglish section devoted to photos of awkwardly worded Chinese signs and labels is very good.

NO BANGEE!
Originally uploaded by Danburg Murmur.

whoa, pt 2
Originally uploaded by brappy!.

Why of course, it’s only a refinement of the Frustrated Total Internal Reflection sensing technique.  See the cool video displaying virtual DJ platter interaction on the big colorful touch screen.

Getty Images is one of the world’s largest stock photography agencies. They’ve created an interactive Flash web site with ten extraordinary visual experiences for web browsers to explore: 10 whey ays.  The cosmic zoom of way number 2, information, is amazing.

In a nice follow up to the Timothy Leary theme… Neuroscientists Probe Psychedelic Psilocybin.

Neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues tested the effects of psilocybin–a drug derived from certain mushrooms that appears to mimic the effects of serotonin in the brain–on 36 middle-aged Americans who had never tried psychedelics before.

More news coverage about the psilocybin research.