You mean, other than turning us into mental hummingbirds, crazy for empty-calorie tweets and sugary serial blog links?
Dave Barry probably said it best:
The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, ‘people without
lives.’ We don’t care. We have each other.
Or read David Carr’s Why Twitter Will Endure (“Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it.”)
Really? Or is David suffering an attack of that whaddaya-call-it? cognitive dissonance, the first line of defense in the psychological immune system. Suffering builds character, so I like to seek out suffering whenever possible. I don’t think of Twitter as attention deficit, I revel in it as diversion surplus.
Better yet, read the letters to the editor (yes, they still publish those!):
To the Editor:
David Carr perfectly captures the impoverishment of the cultural moment when he suggests, “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.” The universe inside a soap bubble!
Peter Tarr
Bayside, Queens, Jan. 4, 2010
To the Editor:
I very much enjoyed the first 140 characters of David Carr’s article, “Why Twitter Will Endure.”
Boomer Pinches
Northampton, Mass., Jan. 3, 2010
Why will Twitter endure? Because nobody has the time to be “present” in the usual way to each other, according to Joel Stein, Call Me! (But not on Skype):
I used my landline to call Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology. She told me people are not only uninterested in Skype, we’re also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. “Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that,” she said. “But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control.”
Telecom and cyberlaw professor Marvin Ammori has a great post at Balkinization on Net Neutrality and the First Amendment.
Next Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission is holding a “workshop” on the issue, as part of the important FCC rulemaking to codify “network neutrality.” The workshop’s title is, “Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet.” Net neutrality, as I’ll explain is of one of the most pressing First Amendment questions of our time, having an enormous impact on individuals’ power to speak with one another, to organize politically, and to change society. Yesterday, the same day the USA Today had an excellent, comprehensive article about network neutrality, the cable industry’s head lobbyist delivered a speech claiming that a net neutrality would violate the First Amendment.
Read more at Balkinization.
News items of possible interest to fans of Rapture For The Geeks:
- IBM Blue Brain’s Henry Markram at TED on Building An Artificial Brain (video);
- Artificial Brain ‘10 years Away’ – A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, so says Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
- Ray Kurzweil Speaks at Google, July 1, 2009;
- Scientists Worry That Machines May Outsmart Man – Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture, by John Markoff in the New York Times.
- Unix Turns 40 – Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS, by Gary Anthes in ComputerWorld;
- The Coming Superbrain – Computers keep getting smarter while we just stay the same, John Markoff in the Sunday New York Times, 24 May 2009;
- Robot Warriors Will Get Ethics Guidelines – When and what to fire will be part of hardware and software ‘package’;
- Building a Brain on a Silicon Chip – A chip developed by European scientists simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain.
- I Robot? – A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm.
- Deep Blue Does Jeopardy! – For nearly two years, IBM scientists have been working on a highly advanced Question Answering (QA) system, codenamed “Watson.” The scientists believe that the computing system will be able to understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz show.
The case, which arises from a minor political documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” seemed an oddity when it was first argued in March. Just six months later, it has turned into a juggernaut with the potential to shatter a century-long understanding about the government’s ability to bar corporations from spending money to support political candidates.
The case has also deepened a profound split among liberals, dividing those who view government regulation of political speech as an affront to the First Amendment from those who believe that unlimited corporate campaign spending is a threat to democracy.
Read the rest at NYTimes.com.
At issue will be whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates.
by Richard Dooling on September 12, 2009
in Geekophilia
If you used MacPorts on Mac OS X (Leopard) and you went ahead with the Snow Leopard upgrade, not realizing that it would break MacPorts, then the next time you ran a port command, you probably got an error message like this:
dlopen(/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib, 10): no suitable image found. Did find:
/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib: mach-o, but wrong architecture
while executing
"load /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib"
("package ifneeded Pextlib 1.0" script) invoked from within
"package require Pextlib 1.0"
(file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 40)
You fed the error message into Google, and now here you are!
When you travel to MacPorts to find out how to upgrade, you wind up on the Macports Migration page, where it tells you to save a list of your installed ports by running the command:
port installed > myports.txt
Then clean any partially completed builds, and uninstall all installed ports:
sudo port clean installed
sudo port -f uninstall installed
But, er, uhm, your MacPorts installation is broken, remember? Meaning that when you try to run the commands above, you just get the error message above.
Maybe I’m the only one dumb enough not to realize that it’s okay to download and install the MacPorts Snow Leopard upgrade from here and then proceed with the above commands. For some reason I had the mistaken impression that I had to totally uninstall the old MacPorts, first. Not necessary, at least not for me.
Note, before installing the Macports Snow Leopard upgrade, you must first install the new Xcode from the custom folder of your Snow Leopard install disk, as explained at the MacPorts install page. Some even suggest that you must install from the disk and NOT from the Apple Developer site.
Other than that, everything works out just peachy.
Also note, that if you are a MacVim user, there is a temporary build available for Snow Leopard here, courtesy of the ever-generous Björn Winckler.
