Into the Void

Spoofcard.com

Oh, this is a fun site. What Spoofcard.com does is allow you to block your telephone Caller ID and disguise your voice. Apparently they offer a service for folks who like to play practical jokes on their cellphones.

No, not really. Where this would come in handy is if you want to display your company phone number when making business calls from your personal phone. You can record the calls and play them back from spoofcard.com’s web control panel. Very nice!

If you aren’t into putting together a 555 timer and a comparator for a barebones audio distortion circuit Spoofcard.com could be a lot of fun.

Responsible Nanotechnology: 3D Spam?

In the “just one more thing to worry about” category, the CRN blog has an article about what might happen if spammers figure out how to control the 3D nanofactories we will all have on our desks.

SkyScout

SkyScout is a digital planetarium. You point it at the sky and it identifies whatever star or other celestial object you point it at.

I…
WANT

Technorati: celestron sky+scout planetarium

I have been thinking about about the environmental and medical effects of nano-pollution. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes - soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 60 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair, among others.

These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effects of exposure to environmental nanotechnology.

Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. Fortunately, at least one group is looking into it. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) is trying to put together a multi-disciplinary collaborative network to establish guidelines for safely handling nano-materials.

We don’t have very long to get the guidelines and some procedures in place. An emerging illness called Morgellons Disease is quite possibly the earliest indication of what we can all expect from nano-pollution.

“Morgellons disease” is the name given to a cluster of symptoms that includes skin lesions, often with small fibers in the lesion. Fascinating stuff. Right now the medical profession is pooh-poohing it as a symptom of mental illness - Delusional Parasitosis. The folks at the Morgellons Research Foundation have posted as much information as is available on their web site.

The medical profession as a whole is particularly unscientific when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses. Have you noticed? You can buy a lot of time if you pass the patient off to a psychiatrist.

It is possibile that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny bits of nano-technology. These objects may lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may appear to be fibers. According to a recent article in Popular Science, many of these objects are so small that when inhaled they can be carried directly into the brain using the same pathways as smells do.

Reading the Morgellons information reminded me of the few times I’ve come in direct contact with fiberglass insulation. You can’t see it, but it is painful and itchy. What if the fibers were microscopic? Would they still cause discomfort? I don’t know.

The dangers of asbestos were ignored for decades while thousands of workers died of the lung cancer it is now known to cause. I hope we don’t repeat the story with BuckyBalls.


Technorati: Morgellons+Disease nano-technology nano-tubes nano-pollution asbestos nanotube+modeler buckminsterfullerene buckyballs

I think I’ll name my next dog
“Hash: b2e189abf85e809a51522cdb0e53083a”

I found Don Park’s site (see below, Identicons) while searching for 2D codes such as ShotCode and QRCode. Once I get everything tagged, life is going to be much simpler.

Ok, so Don had links to some other fun icon sites, and I’d like to share them.

This one, created in php by Charles Dark of Visual Consumption, uses the same concept but a different implementation to build a colorful 9-code “Visiglyph” of your IP address.

This avatar, also based on IP address, can be found at planetOzh. I like mine. It’s purple.

And here’s your identicon:

Technorati: Visiglyph Identicon security tech

Don Parks Daily Habit - Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification

An interesting site I came across a few weeks ago, lost, then found again.

Look, I’m beautiful! Uh, well, at work anyway. My identicon at home looks like one of the bugs from the movie “Starship Troopers.”

Update: Since you wondered…

I’ve been playing with the .mobi stuff and discovered that 2D codes have a use other than to count packs of cigarettes. I can put my web site URL into a QR-Code or a ShotCode, print it on stickers, and stick the stickers to things. Then folks can point their cellphone cameras at the code block and the URL will show up in their phone as a clickable hypertext link.

I was thinking I could sell my bumperstickers that way, put the QR-Code on them.

There is a nice java app for cell phones at QuickMark Mobile Barcode - Web Site QuickMark. This app also reads SemaCode. Some fun! QR-Code even has error correction built in so that if the code block is torn or partly obliterated the app can still get the information out of it.

    


Create your own code with the QR-Code Generator.

Another 2D code is ShotCode. This one is targeted for advertisers. You have the option of logging all kinds of information about the cell phone and user.

Rethinking personal evolution.

Post-modernism is about creating a synthesis encompassing, integrating, and synergizing the existing, mutually exclusive domains of religion and science. A new spiritual paradigm, if you like buzz-words. Most of us have evolved far beyond the pre-industrial, that is, agrarian, monotheistic religions. Blind faith stopped being relevant before WWII, so you practically have to drop out of modern society to avoid moving to the next level. But don’t tell the poor devils unless you want a bloody Crusade right here in the US.

The atheists would claim that we have a god-shaped hole in our heads that we must fill with something, and this may be true. Now all the geeks don’t know what to do with this need for spirituality - or even exactly what it is that they’re needing!

KW has some great ideas, but he expressed an opinion in an interview that evolution is a sudden transformation rather than a process of gradual adaptation to the environment. I don’t agree that intermediate, incomplete forms are necessarily incompatible with survival. The universe doesn’t need miracles, *we* do.

To me, this idea that the Universe will bring you whatever you want if you are spiritual sounds a whole lot like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you work hard enough or if you believe hard enough, God will grant you grace. And all of your basest desires.

Look around you. There are a very few beacons shining above a sea of ignorance. Check out SoundsTrue. There are some excellent materials there - you just have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In my opinion, we will achieve enlightenment only when humanity physically evolves enough to provide us with appropriate organs for it. I’m just burning karma until then.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: post-modernism protestant+work+ethic blind+faith atheist transformation law+of+attraction burning+karma sea+of+ignorance spiritual monotheism pre-industrial darwin

Just testing that I can still post by email…

From the Samsung Blackjack of
Leslie Ellis

… From my latest toy.

—–Original Message—–
Sent: 8/12/2007 9:06 PM
Subject: Solid-state harddrives at Tiger

Solid-state harddrives at Tiger

or http://tinyurl.com/2×6jjo

Ok, so they’re not flowers, they’re lemniscates.

If you are using IE 5.01 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later and the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components, you can play with this interactively by clicking on the flower. IE may give you a security warning. Apparently IE doesn’t trust Excel.

The equation is
ampl + PM * SIN(petals * theta) ^ exp

Where
Petals is the number of petals in the lemniscate,
PM is +1 or -1,
ampl is a unit to add to the SIN function
and exp is an exponent
theta is the angle - you can’t change this.

Try the following data:

Have fun!