It sounds as if the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police is a science fiction fan – one who takes it a little too seriously. During a recent conference, he suggested that the police forces of the near future will have to deal with a variety of new threats to law and order, ranging from tech-savvy small-time crooks to rogue clones and human-robot hybrids. Personally, I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t just a viral marketing ploy for the forthcoming Blade Runner re-release.
Category Archives: Blog
Second Life is hell – classic literature meets the metaverse
Next time someone tells you to go to hell, save yourself the inconvenience of an eternity of torment – check into Second Life, where a recreation of Lucifer’s domain as envisaged by Dante can be explored from the comfort of your favourite computer chair.
Throwing Off The Shackles of Reality
When you think about it, Drew Harry’s got a point. Developing a virtual world that slavishly apes the real is kind of stupid. His meeting spaces arrange people based on their allegiances, representing a person’s expressed opinions by aligning them physically in a wide open space. I don’t know if that’s what I’d choose to emphasize, but giving up the virtual Aeron chair makes sense. [kurzweil]
MySpace For The Literati
The phrase “jump the shark” has probably jumped the shark, but if I can be indulged in its use one last time, I’ll point out that social software has jumped the shark when you need a MySpace for people to talk about books. Or maybe I’m just cranky about the slickness factor: somehow LibraryThing doesn’t set my teeth on edge in the same way. [mefi]
Wand For Scraping Audio Samples
Two Ph.D. candidates at MIT have invented The Sound of Touch, a digital instrument that texturizes sound. It works like this: you use a microphone built in to the wand-like instrument to record a sound, then you brush the tip of the wand across a surface. A processor translates the shape of that surface into an effect applied to the sound. Sandpaper would gives your sample a gritty sound, silk a satiny smoothness.