I don’t believe this Mobiro is really playing the violin. It’s fingers do seem to be moving but can you hear the vibrato?? I don’t see the fingers making that happen. I suspect Mobiro was following the Spice Girls’ lead and just miming. Still – pretty impressive. Good to see Toyota stepping up to Honda’s Asimo.
Tags: robots
I still feel this way too. Like I’m living in some kind of sci-fi novel.
xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
Blogged with Flock
We had a massive debate at TPN HQ last night (until my internet access dropped out at midnight and didn’t return) about the subject of free will which was kicked off in a massive twitter debate during the day.
My central postulate was this: if every decision you have is a thought: and if a thought is an autonomous electro-chemical process in the brain: then to claim to have free will, you have to be able to explain how you create a thought outside the process of causality.
The discussion got fairly heated at one point when I (probably wrongly) threatened to eject Dave from The Global Geek Podcast if he kept interrupting me. Sorry Dave, probably harsh. Belinda says I get like that during debates.
Anyway, nobody in the room was able to explain to me how they create a thought except to say “I think them”, which, in my opinion, is a circular argument, because the next question is “how did you decide to think that thought?”.
My other suggestion was that if you are in control of your thoughts, you should be able to stop having them. I suggested everyone in the room stop thinking for ten minutes, and when everyone agreed they couldn’t do that, I asked how they could claim to be in control of the creation of thoughts if they couldn’t stop them at will also? This lead to lots of angst and “but but but” retorts, none of which held any water.
Second Life is a pretty good environment for having discussions like this with people from around the world in real time, although you still suffer from the issue of having 20 people trying to talk at once at times. We need a virtual talking stick to pass around or something. Perhaps someone should create one.
Exactly 90 minutes ago I had an idea. My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story – 140 characters at a time.
After I put the kids to bed, I quickly googled to see if anyone had already done something similar and couldn’t see anything (although even if it isn’t 100% original I don’t care, it’ll still be fun), registered the domain name TWITTORIES.com (a twittory is a twitter story), threw together a wiki using wikispaces, and exactly 90 minutes later I am launching it to the world.
The basic idea is that each twittory will last for 140 entries and each entry can be a maximum of 140 characters. Twittory #1, which I have already entitled “The Darkness Inside”, will commence as soon as we have 140 people signed up here and will conclude, no matter where the story is up to, when we have the full 140 entries. 140 x 140 is… a story with a maximum of 19600 characters.
I always knew Marshall McLuhan was onto something…
I listened to a great podcast today. Episode #73 of the Skeptoid podcast. It’s called “Logical Fallacies”. I highly recommend it.
If you’ve ever had a conversation with anyone about their supernatural or pseudoscientific beliefs, you’ve almost certainly been slapped in the face with a logical fallacy or two. Non-scientific belief systems cannot be defended or supported by the scientific method, by definition, and so their advocates turn elsewhere for their support. In this episode, we’re going to examine a whole bunch of the most common logical fallacies that you hear in reference to various pseudosciences. When you hear one that you recognize, be sure to wave and say hello.
As you know, I’m trying to figure out how I can make the world a better place. Today I had a chat with Richard Giles about some of the recent attempts I’ve made to volunteer for organisations like LifeLine and Big Brother Big Sister, my vision of a 21st century geek version of Rotary, and the following sites:
Mobile Phones and Social Activism
The track for today is:
Maritime
“For Science Fiction” (mp3)
from “Heresy and the Hotel Choir”
(Flameshovel Records)
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
TPN now has a HQ in Second Life! Add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends (that’s me). I’d be happy to show you around and help you find your SL legs.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
You can show your love by buying me stuff from my Amazon wish list.
Get the TPN version of Particls.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
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Here’s a great tip for any podcasters using Adobe Audition. Since I started using Garageband on my Macbook a few weeks ago, I have come to enjoy the wonderful “ducking” tool that is built into GB. Ducking automatically dips the volume of your backing music when someone starts talking in another track, and then lifts the volume again when the vocal track stops or there is some silence. It’s very cool. And it made we wonder why I had never seen that tool before in Audition which costs about $1600. Sure enough, there doesn’t seem to be a ducking effect in Audition. There is, however, a free plug-in that will do the trick for you. I’m using it now while I edit a particularly troublesome show and it’s saved me hours. Literally.
Fortunately, someone has already written step-by-step instructions on how to download, install and configure the plug-in. The guide is written for Audition 1.5 but worked fine for me in 2.0. Check out the ducking in Adobe Audition guide here.
Peter87 Hax captured a few seconds of me ranting in SL tonight. See what you’re missing out on?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKyblas9s8o&rel=1]
I got home from a lunch today to find a notice in my mailbox (the analogue one) from the post office. A parcel to collect. So I walked down to pick it up, thinking it might *finally* be my copy of Leopard from Apple (nope), and what I received was a package wrapped up in plain brown paper and string, with no details of the sender. I opened it up walking back down the street to find… this:
“Okay….”, I’m thinking, “I’m *finally* famous enough that people are sending me anonymous porn. I don’t remember *this* being in my Amazon wishlist… what a bitch it’s VHS… I’ll have to borrow the kids’ old VHS player and move it into my “special place”.”
I turn it over and see more of the same:
I opened it up and got this:
A close-up will show you what it actually is:
I think it’s from my friends at Paramount. Nice packaging! Certainly amused the hell outta me.
