Fact: Neal Stephenson is making a video game
And there’s a Kickstarter pitch to prove it:
Not that I’m particularly into sword-play but holy crap. This is basically the most Stephenson-y thing ever.
And there’s a Kickstarter pitch to prove it:
Not that I’m particularly into sword-play but holy crap. This is basically the most Stephenson-y thing ever.
There are some things that are necessary in one’s life. This “Dress Up Bigfoot” magnet set is one of them. To quote the manufacturer:
Why can’t we find him? We think its because he’s right under our very noses, hidden in plain sight. So we’ve created this fun magnet set to help you find clues to catching a glimpse of the mythical beast.
“Audacity is easily written off as naïveté, as overshooting your resources or talents. And that’s a danger. […] But you can’t make the future without imagining what it might look like.”
And I think all of us in the field of instructional technology at least aim to walk the fine line between dreaming up a future for our faculty, staff and student clients…and overstepping the (sometimes scant) resources we have to help shape it.
Wired has pulled together 7 fantastic steps that they themselves employ for helping to predict what’s coming next. Ranging from “explore the willful inefficiency” to “look for deep design”, the list has lots to learn from – and lots to apply to our day to day. 20 years of experience can’t be too wrong, right?
Like some sort of terrible combination of Portal, a medical form and copyright law, “Welcome to Life” greets a new resident of a future digital consciousness. If this is the singularity, would I still be in?
Absolutely.
“Communication breaks down even with a subtle little thing,” Vertegaal said. “When you think about preserving human communication, it’s more about what you leave out rather than what you add. With this system, we’re trying to leave out as little as possible.”
Roel Vertegaal of the Queen’s University Human Media Lab discusses the benefit of making remote communication more natural with the TeleHuman projection system. The device allows for a 3D image to be projected at life size into an environment and further allows users to glean subtle information about a presenter that would have been lost by transmission in 2D. While this device isn’t perfect (yet), the technology already has clear classroom implications. Imagine sending yourself to any campus in the Commonwealth without going anywhere at all. Certainly much less jarring for the learner than the alternate, “Big Brother” on TV approach.
Check out the video for a few previews of how the TeleHuman system works:
There’s more about the TeleHuman and its sister, BodiPod at Wired‘s site.
Is anyone else seeing shades of the Zambian space program in the costuming and locations of this video from Niki & The Dove?
While listening to one of my favorite paranormal/cryptozoological podcasts the other night, the name of a blog got lodged in my head. Modern Pterosaur – which covers sightings of flying, prehistoric creatures in the present day – struck me as an ideal name for a spunky women’s magazine. And thus was born this cover (with Kate’s help, of course):
In today’s “look at this cool thing that Wired unearthed” posting we have these incredible photos by Christina de Middel that envision what a Zambian space program in the 60’s might have looked like. Don’t laugh: apparently one was “seriously” considered. The image above is my new favorite thing of the next 72 hours, at least.
AT&T demoed something remarkable that it calls Watson – and made it available as an API for developers today. To quote Engadget, since they were on-hand:
“One day AT&T hopes to make this a standard feature of its services, eliminating the language barrier once and for all.”
Learn more by reading “AT&T Translator app hands-on: smashing the language barrier” (video included).
I hope AT&T does both make this a standard feature and smash the language barrier, because this is the kind of sci fi wonderfulness that makes me excited for the future and glad to be in the field of instructional technology. Some might say that eliminating the need to learn a language may diminish the nuanced understanding of other cultures that language skills unlock. To the contrary, I think Watson pulls down the barriers that prevent many people for getting curious enough about other cultures to even want to learn the language. Were more people able to connect human to human with a mitigating tool to bridge the distance between tongues, it would bring the world just that much closer together. Watson, then, is a beautiful thing.
I thought instead of making a music mix, I might instead make a playlist of like videos that all feature what I’ve started calling new tribalism. It’s vaguely post-apocalyptic. Sort of like a Hunger Games dance party. Anyway, these span at least the last four years of things that have caught my eye. Enjoy!