All posts by Tom Marcinko

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The RFID and the saguaro

As somebody who used to have a front yard with a saguaro cactus, I understand why people pay up to $1,000 for them. Last year the law caught rustlers trying to steal 17 of these Sonoran Desert natives. So the National Park Service in Tucson, Arizona is planning to imbed chips in the cactuses to track them in case the plants go AWOL.

“We would likely not just go out and implant, but would gather data, GPS the locations, and record heights and widths and measures,” [Saguaro National Park chief ranger Bob] Love said. “We probably wouldn’t implant a plant that was not healthy or a desirable plant for someone to steal.”

Nevada chipped some of its barrel cactuses in 1999 to deter theft and help take inventory.

[Photo: backlitcoyote]

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A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Chuck Klosterman tells all. Snip:

JUNE 11, 2041: In a matter of weeks, the entire Internet is replaced by “news blow,” a granular microbe that allows information to be snorted, injected, or smoked. Data can now be synthesized into a water-soluble powder and absorbed directly into the cranial bloodstream, providing users with an instantaneous visual portrait of whatever information they are interested in consuming. (Sadly, this tends to be slow-motion images of minor celebrities going to the bathroom.) Now irrelevant, an ocean of Web pioneers lament the evolution. “What about the craft?” they ask no one in particular. “What about the inherent human pleasure of moving one’s mouse across a hyperlink, not knowing what a simple click might teach you? Whatever happened to ironic thirty-word capsule reviews about marginally popular TV shows? Have we lost this forever?” “You just don’t get new media,” respond the news-blowers. “You just don’t get it.”

[2005 map of the Internet by matthewjethall]

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Musicians use their brains differently: Another thing we kind of already knew

Hand musicians and nonmusicians some common household objects. (We’ll wait.)

On average, [musicians] came up with 14 more uses than nonmusicians could. In a second experiment musicians dreamed up new uses for everyday items while the prefrontal lobes in their brains got scanned.  And musicians had more activity in both sides of their frontal lobes than nonmusicians did.

[Tape musicians by borkur.net]

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Political science redux: Marketing, the Internet, and all that

2 Comments

Reading yet another article about how !!11!!ZOMG politicians are learning to use the interwebs!!11!!! suggests an observation, which I’ll try to make as politically neutral as possible:

If one particular candidate I’m thinking of wins the Presidency, one of the reasons is going to be how easy his Web site makes it to do volunteer work for him.  I’ve volunteered for several candidates over the years, but I have never seen anything this user-inviting.

Just an observation, but one that I think fits the mission of this site.

(Hint: His name ends in a vowel besides Y, which would be another first)

[Internet poster by Sebastian Prooth]

Blog

Multitasking: You can’t do it, my friends

2 Comments

babbage

It might seem like a strange thing to say, coming from a person who’s drinking coffee, answering office email, listening to Juliana Hatfield’s great new album How to Walk Away which I really recommend, and blogging, but multitasking is just about impossible, according to MRI experiments.

…[A] man lying inside the scanner would be performing different tasks, depending on the color of two numbers he sees on a screen. … [W[hen the man in the scanner sees green, his brain has to pause before responding — to round up all the information it has about the green task. When the man sees red, his brain pauses again — to push aside information about the green task and replace it with information about the red task. If the tasks were simpler, they might not require this sort of full-throttle switching. But, [U. Michigan neuroscientist Daniel] Weissman said, even simple tasks can overwhelm the brain when we try to do several at once.

Modern life expects us to do more and more things more quickly, if not simultaneously. If that’s not even possible, at what point do we reorder our tasks and expectations? How will your Bartleby-like character cope?

[Charles Babbage’s brain by Gaetan Lee]