Futurismic

Grimly fascinating reading over at Wired, where there’s one of those infografficky-mashup articles about the international trade in illicitly-obtained human organs and body parts. Even when we’ve reached a point when we can reliably print off spare parts for our meat-machines, the ol’ global wealth gap pretty much ensures that there’ll be a cheaper option overseas if you’ve got the right contacts. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “unbranded spares from China”, doesn’t it?

Also known as “nontent”: largely unedited chunks of press release copypasta’d into supposedly legitimate British journalism venues. This clever project can help you spot it in the wild. It’s depressingly common, especially in those organs which I increasingly find myself bracketing in a category labelled “the usual suspects”…

I like projects like this, because they let us watch the watchmen (and the watchmen who are supposed to be watching the watchmen). For the last few months I’ve been kicking around a concept called “undersight” for exactly this sort of citizen sousveillance phenomenon, and thinking it a pretty smart coining… until a swift Google revealed that someone at H+ Magazine beat me to it back in 2009, and that was probably where I first picked the term up before burying it in my subconscious. Ah, well. Still a useful term, though, and one I’ll be keeping.

Today’s earlier post about building your own “Watson Jr.” supercomputer was the 5,000th published post in the Futurismic database, of which – even more astonishing, at least to me – 3,205 bear my own byline.

(Stats junkies may be interested to know that approved comments outnumber the published posts quite considerably, as there are 7,515 of them at time of writing; furthermore, a selection of overworked and underpaid plugins fend off a back-of-the-envelope average of 2,500 spam comments every day.)

In theory, this landmark must have been passed long ago; we lost a whole lot of the archives when Moveable Type died on us a few years back and forced the migration to WordPress, and much of that missing legacy, sadly, consists of the posts by the people who started Futurismic and built it up from nothing: Jeremy, Brian, and Tobias. Without their work, I’d never have had this little soapbox to stand on; I’m quite shocked to see just how much standing upon it I have done in the last five years, and how many folk have stuck around to listen.

I hope you’ll stick around a little longer. I certainly intend to.

Impressed by Watson’s Jeopardy! victory? Found yourself with the urge to build your own (scaled down) supercomputer artificial intelligence in your basement using nothing but off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software? IBM’s very own Tony Pearson has got your back. [via MetaFilter; please bear in mind that not all basements will be eminently suited to a research project of this scale]

Meanwhile, fresh from whuppin’ on us slow-brained meatbags, Watson’s seeking new challenges in the world of medicine [via BigThink]:

The idea is for Watson to digest huge quantities of medical information and deliver useful real-time information to physicians, perhaps eventually in response to voice questions. If successful, the system could help medical experts diagnose conditions or create a treatment plan.

… while other health-care technology can work with huge pools of data, Watson is the first system capable of usefully harnessing the vast amounts of medical information that exists in the form of natural language text—medical papers, records, and notes. Nuance hopes to roll out the first commercial system based on Watson technology within two years, although it has not said how sophisticated this system will be.

Ah, good old IBM. My father used to work for them back in the seventies and early eighties, and it’s kind of amusing to see that their age-old engineering approach of building an epic tool before looking for a use to put it to hasn’t changed a bit…

Like Sauron’s eye, unblinking amidst the roiling smoke above the fulminating* cone of Mount Doom, the Tolkien estate never sleeps. Why, only yesterday we heard about them cockblocking a book in which ol’ J R R appears as a character! But lest you think they only go after infringements that offer some realistic chance of damaging or exploiting Tolkien’s legacy, Futurismic fiction alumnus Adam Rakunas has also fallen foul of them… for making a badge.

Back in the late 2009, I got into a Twitter conversation with Madeline Ashby about geek culture, fandom, and a bunch of stuff like that. Madeline wrote, “While you were reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion.” I thought this was an excellent encapsulation of the divide in SF/F/Whatever fandom, and thus took to Zazzle to make little buttons with her quote. I bought a bunch, handed them out at a few conventions, then I had a kid and promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, when Zazzle emailed me to say they were pulling the buttons for intellectual property right infringement.

And guess who complained about their rights being infringed?

Good to see there’s no loss of proportion over at Tolkien Towers, eh? Or, you know, not.

[ image copyright Adam Rakunas; no orcs were exploited in the making of this blog post ]

[ * I'm pretty sure that's not an appropriate verb for a mountain to be conjugating, but it just looks right, you know? ]