I was recently given the Thinking Blogger Award, but work has been keeping me too busy to write en entry on it. Chip of Chip’s Quips named me for the award — which has been making its round memetically for some time now on the blogosphere. The award is given by bloggers to their peers that make them think. I’m very happy to hear I’m inciting thought and give my humble thanks to Chip for the award.
Finally I got a better idea of how I might look in my old age. The Face Transformer Java Applet can morph your face into several different types — including old age, child, manga, Botticelli and others. Check it out. Here’s me — the first one is my actual face, followed by my asian version, old age and finally manga.
An excellent debate has been raging in comment threads the past few days, on the potential dangers and fear of artificial intelligence. In the last round, the following point was raised:
An AI destroying all of humanity might solve our currently existing problems, but I’m not sure if I’d like that to happen. I’d much rather take the Friendly ones - but those won’t be developed if nobody fears the possible consequences of AIs. Therefore, I can only hope for more fear.
Read more…
I decided this deserved a blog entry and here we are. My answer is this:
Over six thousand people have voted in the Who’s Afraid of Robots? poll (which will remain open indefinitely). Many people supported this effort (see below), propelling the entry to the frontpage of Digg, as I had hoped, which increased the number of voters and brought a heap of varying opinions on the matter. The survey’s results are quite intriguing.
A few entries ago I decided on regularly presenting an entry featuring interesting articles by friendly commenters here, along with short reviews. To be featured here, you just need to do two things, number one is writing an intelligent article, number two is commenting here to let me know you exist.
Matt of the Bowl of Stupid blog, delivers a blatant and humorous coverage of psychotic sports fanatics.
Broc deciphers the online social networks out there. Or as he puts it himself:
If you haven’t noticed already, I dig patterns. In this post I am going to attempt to recognize the patterns of a few different online communities and see how they relate to each other.
Jakob Knudsen dissects the issue of dream analyzation. I find dream analyzation ridiculous, another child of the perpetually pattern matching human brain. So he had me at the title. But it’s fun to see the examples of dream interpretation and his lucid dreaming argument is great (okay, and I wanted to have mention of lucid dreaming here as a reminder to start practicing).
Enjoy the reading.
Some keen readers might have noticed the new Spotplex icon in the Networking section of the sidebar. I just got accepted into their beta trials today. I was a bit surprised as I only heard about Spotplex after they’d closed down their limited open window for beta applicants — but decided to go for it anyway. I consider it flattering to be let in so late.
In case you haven’t heard of Spotplex, it’s a new online service that automatically registers how often blog articles are read. They are then arranged in order of popularity on the pages of Spotplex so you can quickly catch a glimpse of what’s hot and glamorous on the blogosphere.
Due to the fact that it’s the reader-count that determines which articles make it to the frontpages, Spotplex has been hailed by some as the Digg-killer. While I’m sure that Digg now has such a cult-like following that Digg-killer is an overstatement, I do think the automatic-rating system has some pros over Digg. For example, I’m guessing that we can safely assume there will be no Spotplex mafia that has more control than other users of Spotplex. However, the nature of Digg and Spotplex is completely different — so I really think they shouldn’t be compared. Digg uses votes, Spotplex uses hitcount.
I’m still unsure whether Spotplex registers reader-hits from Spotplex itself in addition to regular inkblot readers — or if only regular readers are counted. If it’s the latter, then I’m unsure of whether inkblot earth has enough traffic (yet) to compete against some of the heavier hitters registered on Spotplex. A nice overview article on TechBuzz refers to that model as The Rich getting Richer. But in any case it’s always fun to participate in new kinds of online tech.
A nice little cherry on top of my Mass Producing Intelligence entry.
All this video needs is “Artificial Intelligence” in a big, fat font — flashing as the final message.
Nothing in the vid should come off as a surprise to the savvy — we’re living in an exciting time in the history of mankind. I’ve found people easily forget it in the busyness of our everyday lives, and in the pace of which things change. In a way, change has become such an integral part of our lives that it sometimes seems a constant.
Editors Warning: Take care in thinking about the video’s statements. Some may sound mindblowing, but are shallow, shaky and only included to impact you. Consider it practice in critical thinking.
[found via JerryChacon]
I just added my del.icio.us linkroll to the sidebar. It’s sort of an experiment, as I’ve been a bit lazy when it comes to using social-bookmarking services (but intend to do better).
Feel free to add yourself to my network. Also, if you have links I might enjoy you can send them to me through del.icio.us, just add for:hthth to the tags lists when you’re saving a bookmark.
Time for a new kind of entries to spice up the social life and bring respect where its due. Starting with this one, I’m going to make it a regular event to write an entry featuring interesting articles by inkblot earth’s commenters, along with short reviews. To begin with, these reviews will be centric around the delivery of the content, rather than to serve as an extension or response to the article itself.
First up is an article by MC, the author of the Neurophilosophy blog. The title is a reference to the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind written by Charlie Kaufman (great movie, excellent camera work and Jim Carrey does wonders). The article discusses recent the scientific achievements of preventing rats from transferring fearful memories from long-term to short term memory, while still allowing other memories passage intact. The article is not long, but does a great job at highlighting the research, along with appropriate linking to references and extra information.
KuiperCliff does a fantastic questioning of a recent article in The Guardian regarding an announcement of a new quantum radar that can “see through everything”. Doing the right thing, Cliff goes the distance and contacts a physics savvy consultant to get a clearer idea of the story’s validity. The writing style is pleasant, and very well linked for easy info-retrieval. Finally, he ends it with splash of good humor.
Ok, this isn’t really and article as such — but John of the One Man’s blog found this fantastic website — something I had been trying to find for some time! It’s an online service that allows you to supersize images and print them out over many A4’s (i.e. puzzle together a really large picture from the pages). Great stuff. Check out John’s blog, it’s usually just short blurbs, but the content is always interesting and he updates freakishly often (how do you do it John?!).
Someone I know only as a Bowl of Stupid wrote a great entry on what it’s like to go through your archives and discovering how much your blog has changed. It’s personal, but it reflects a lot of frustration many of us online writers feel. It’s well written — and BOS, if you want my opinion — write more honest stuff like that entry 
That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy the reading.
For the short time I’ve been maintaining inkblot earth, I’ve only participated in one link-meme frenzy. I have been tagged, though, without following it up. To those that tagged me in the past and I didn’t respond: it’s not that I don’t appreciate the links — but rather that I felt the meme didn’t fit here/appeal to me. This one I thought was quite appealing, the Tech Link Train — a meme for Technology and Science related blogs only.
Memes generally have two pros:
The second point is (to me) a prerequisite; and as it is in this case, the meme is themed so you’re guaranteed to get a list of blogs that people have (a) deemed interesting and (b) have similar content. So that’s my excuse for participating, the following is not a random list purely to gain exposure — but also to provide inkblot earth’s readers with other interesting stuff to read Due to my youth in the blogosphere, my list of science blogs is still in its infancy — which made me delighted to have this train-of-a-meme deliver a handful of science blogs to surf through!
I was tagged by Tony Targonski of the Computer Science Canada blog, thanks for the tag Tony — and for putting inkblot earth on top Tony didn’t include the history of the meme for good reasons; but my opinion differs as is evident by what I wrote above. So I took the liberty of re-installing the history from the person who tagged Tony.
I hope that the following few I will prove as interesting a read for you as they are for me. If you’re one of those I tag (and want to jump on the train), then you should do the following:
My Tags
The Tag History
Computer Science Canada Think Artificial [formerly "Inkblog Earth"] Bill 2 Me Standardzilla Steve Healy Games AVINASH & Web 2.0 Tek Works Solo Technology Tek-Works Syn TechTites Chaos Laboratory Quick Online Tips Cybernet Technology News Hongkiat LyteByte Technospot The TechZone Mega TechNews Tech Buzz Techzi Connected Internet John Chow dot Com Ted Leung on the Air Geek is a chic. you’ve been HACKED IDIOT TOYS JMH Techtronics Web Services UtterlyGeek Tech It Like A Man! Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot techboyardee The Tech Inspector LiewCF Go2Web2.0 FriedBeef CypherHackz Mashable! Hongkiat Himanshu’s Blog Tech Nix Update ReviewSaurus John TP
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