by cameron | Mar 2, 2008 | science, singularity, Uncategorized
If you haven’t read / aren’t reading Warren Ellis’ work, then you are seriously missing out on one of the most exciting things happening in media (for my money anyway). I only discovered his stuff about a year ago and I’ve become a complete fanboi. Ellis has been writing comics for about 15 years, including some mainstream titles like IRON MAN and FANTASTIC FOUR, but he’s best loved for his original titles such as TRANSMETROPOLITAN (about a Hunter S. Thompson-esque journalist in a dystopian future America), GLOBAL FREQUENCY (about a loosely-coupled team of expert terrorism fighters), and PLANETARY (about a small team of super-powered humans saving the world from the forces of evil, domestic and interstellar). His writing is edgy, political, taps into transhumanism and the singularity, and he usually works with terrific artists who create stunning imagery to flesh-out his stories. He’s got a new web comic called FREAKANGELS which looks like it’s going interesting places as well.
Anyway, this post was prompted by one of his blogs posts this morning (see below) about the Thunderbirds and I was thinking about how shows like that (and, of course, Star Trek), considered camp and silly even at the time by many, inspired a generation. And I was thinking – what are today’s shows which are likely to inspire the next generation of adults to push the boundaries of science, art and business? What shows on TV today are building a vision for a better future, one we can aspire to, strive for, work towards? Most of the shows I love today (or have loved recently), the futuristic shows, are dystopian. BSG, Firefly (RIP)… ummm… hard to think of any others right now. While they each have some cool toys and technologies, I don’t think either of them contain aspirational messages. I do, however, get a lot of aspirational futures from the books I read. Charles Stross, William Gibson, Vernor Vinge – all write about near-term futures which get me bloody excited. But not TV.
Got any suggestions?
| I loved THUNDERBIRDS. Save the world, go back to your island base, get rat-arsed, smoke a thousand cigarettes and hit on the Quality and the Asian girl. These are the lessons tv taught us back then. . I will go now, because Ariana says these notes are taking on the tone of a guy on a desert island talking to his pet coconut. |
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by cameron | Dec 9, 2007 | robots
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
Toyota Mobiro and new Robots by AkihabaraNews
by cameron | Nov 27, 2007 | Podcast, singularity, Uncategorized
Yesterday, November 26, was the third anniversary of G’Day World and Australian podcasting. What started off as an experiment to see how to record two Skype calls turned into a full-time job. Check out the first show here. I hope that’s a lesson to all the kids out there. If an idiot like me can make a living out doing something fun like making podcasts, what can smart folks like you do?
That said, I still feel like we’re just starting. I’m frustrated on a daily basis with how little I have achieved in the last three years and the road ahead seems daunting and exciting at the same time. Not a bad way to be actually.
I’d like to thank everyone who has listened, commented, provided advice, support and money to the show over the last three years. I especially want to thank my guests and co-hosts. It’s been great to share the journey with you. I especially want to thank my family to allowing me to piss $500,000 of our life savings into TPN without lopping off my nads. And to my TPN partners (aka the ‘hosts’), Mano , and the guys from AnyWebCam.com who have kept us running over the last couple of months – without your continued support and vision, none of this would be possible.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to review some of the 300+ shows that I think have been significant (in no particular order):
#147 – John Romero – creator of DOOM
#242 – Vint Cerf – co-inventor of TCP/IP and hence the Internet
#42 – Dr Aubrey de Grey – life extension researcher
#56 – Noam Chomsky – world’s leading intellectual and critic of American foreign policy
#57 – Ray Kurzweil – scientist and author, prophet of the Technological Singularity
#60 – David Weinberger – co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”
#61 – Doc Searls – co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”
#264 – Dr Peter Ellyard, Futurist (Part 4) – Australia’s leading futurist
#243 – Dr Peter Ellyard (part 3) – Australia’s leading futurist
#238 – Eliezer Yudkowsky – world leading AI researcher and futurist
#302 – Dr John Demartini on overcoming your fears – inspirational speaker and author
#271 – Vernor Vinge, SF Author Extraordinaire – Award-winning SF author, predicted the cyberspace in 1981
#290 – Julian Burnside QC – one of Australia’s highest profile barristers and human rights advocates
There are heaps more but this is a start.
by cameron | Nov 9, 2007 | Podcast, technology
Before I move into the “making the world a better place” motif for Season 04 of G’Day World, I wanted to do a show about my recent experiences of migrating from Windows to a Mac.
Yes – hell has finally frozen over and I’ve bought a Mac.
As some of you (those who read my Twitter feed) will know, about two weeks ago the terrific folks at Global1Training sponsored a 17″ widescreen MacBook Pro for your humble host. Global1Training are the folks who run Dr John Demartini’s seminars around the world. If you haven’t listened to the interview I did with Dr John (G’Day World #276) then you really should. He’s got a lot of good tips for taking control of your life. If you’d like to attend the upcoming Demartini seminars, click on the Global1Training link above for a 2 For 1 discount on tickets.
So.. onto the Mac.
This show is going to detail my reasons for getting a Mac and my experience of the migration.
Is a Mac as easy to use as Mac aficionados claim?
What is a .dmg?
What does “eject from disk” mean?
What is the “Command” key?
Why doesn’t CTRL-C work?
Where is the “Backspace” key?
How do you drag to “Applications”?
Why doesn’t tapping the touchpad work?
Where is the right-click button?
Where is the “START” button?
Why won’t Safari or Firefox go full screen?
Do Macs “blue screen”?
Do you have to buy two versions of all of your favourite programs if you are still running a Windows machine and a Mac machine at the same time?
Which is the best 3G card – the Telstra NextG card or the Three NetConnect card.
What do I think of the Blue Snowball USB mic?
These were just some of the issues I faced after cracking the seal on the MacBook. Is the Mac truly superior to Vista? Listen to this show to find out.
Update: A good suggestion by Raf, here are the recommended apps that Jono from Xero and Duncan Riley sent me:
Jono’s list with his comments:
Twitterrific: Best twitter client, IMHO
Growl: Notification software – ties in with a whole bunch of Apps. So, new emails, downloads finishing, etc.
Delicious Library: Cataloguing software… Sounds nerdy, but it looks soooo good…
Sapiens: Mouse gesture launcher. Version 1, so doesn’t do much yet.
Transmission: Nice BitTorrent App, very clean interface.
xTorrent: More fully featured Bit Torrent & downloading App, has very good search feature.
Download these so quicktime player will play a lot more codecs:
Perian: This adds DivX playback, amongst others…
Flip4Mac: This adds WMV playback.
Any other movie files should work in either VLC or MPlayer…
And of course: Google Earth, Skype (features lag behind on the Mac unfortunately).
Use iPhoto, its awesome 🙂
Duncan’s list with his comments:
Twitteriffic: you’ll love it
Audio Hijack Pro for Podcasting: Hijacks any audio on your mac (ie Skype calls). easy to use but you do have to pay for it after a trial. If wasn’t expensive for memory. General podcasting support is built in via Garageband for non-sykpe calls.
Cyberduck for FTP: it free, there are paid clients out there but this does a pretty good job
Snapz Pro if you want to do screencasting, captures SL as well. Payware but fairly cheap after trial.
For running Vista
Parallels: if you’ve only got the upgrade Vista I can tell you how to install. Parallels allows you to run windows from the Mac desktop, and programs like they were native on your mac. Bootcamp from Apple is free but you cant run Windows and OSX at the same time.
I presume you’ll stick with Microsoft Office under win, but if you switch try Neo-office, its Open Office code but customized to be more Mac friendly. It’s a little slow in loading, but its cheaper than buying office itself. You’ll find Thunderbird for Mac cool as well.
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by cameron | Nov 9, 2007 | technology
I recently installed the Flock browser and I’m enjoying the way it integrates things like Flickr feeds into the main screen. I’ve got it set up to show the Digital Photography Show’s Flickr feed, a nice continual stream of visual inspiration during the day – kind of like the visual equivalent of Twitter.
by cameron | Oct 30, 2007 | technology
If you’ve ever lost someone close to you, you’ll know what I mean.
The same is true with new technologies. I’ve often said that there are five types of technology (I’m sure I’ve blogged this before but I can’t find it atm):
1. Those that are just stupid and a waste of time.
2. Those that are solutions looking for a problem.
3. Those that are occasionally useful but if they were taken away from you, you would hardly notice.
4. Those that are so useful that if they were taken away from you, you would sorely miss them.
5. Those that are so important to you that if they were taken away, you would fight in the streets to get them back.
I’m sure you can all think of technology you’ve seen over the last decade which fit into each category.
While I was in Perth, for some reason I had real trouble connecting to Twitter from either my laptop (accessing the net via my 3 USB modem) or my mobile phone (also accessing the net via 3). And I missed it. A lot.
Until I was away, I hadn’t realized how much a part of my daily connectedness Twitter had become. Sure – I like Twitter. I have it running in the background for hours every day but not all day – I often turn it off to avoid distraction. Yet when it was “taken away” from me for three or four days, I found myself getting cranky and going into serious withdrawal symptoms. I was checking it every few minutes to see if 3 had sorted out their network issues. I even resorted to sending and receiving a few twits via sms, something I never do anymore.
It’s a sweet relief to be back at home now on my regular connection and have Twitter working seamlessly (or as seamlessly as it normally does with their regular issues) in the background.
However, if anyone asked me why it has become so important, I really couldn’t answer it logically. It’s not like I learn much of significance, although I do pick up a lot of late-breaking news from there. And it’s not like I primarily use it to keep in touch with friends or market my business or anything else. I have more of an emotional connection to it – it’s that same feeling of connectedness that I miss when I’m offline (not by choice) when I travel to places like Bundaberg… that disconcerting feeling that I’m not plugged in, that there is a conversation going on… and I’m not part of it. That I’m on the outside. That I’m in a cone of silence. And I hate it.
I’ve come up with a name for it. It’s not entirely original but it surprisingly only has a few thousand google results, so it’s as good as original. 😉 Kind of reminds me of when I started podcasting. There is that famous Doc Searls post where he can only find a few thousand google results for the word “podcast”.
Anyway, the term I’m using is “meta-conversation”. That’s what I was trying to refer to in my post from Perth the other night. This conversation that is emerging from the combination of all of the new tools, swirling around, popping up waves from time to time, taking on an emergent life of it’s own. You are part of it. But it is greater than you, greater than me, greater than any single conversation or person or even tool, technology or start-up. It’s the sum of all of our conversations, the sum of the 24×7 connectedness, the pulse of the new society, the hum of a billion brains working together to dream new dreams, plot new adventures, the drum-drum-drumming of a new emergent intelligence being born right under our noses.
I welcome you, Lord Meta-Conversation, to our little world and I hope you enjoy your stay here.
