Thanks to Vika of words’ end for pointing me to unready.org. She pointed out that Ready.gov has been around for a while. (See my earlier post, The new cold-war: Ready.Gov.) I still wonder why they would be advertising so widely and in the Guardian of all places.
Blogshares: Blog Stocks
BlogShares – Fantasy Blog Share Market is a site where blogs are treated like stock. Players get a fictional $500 and can invest it in blogshares. I’m not sure how they calculate the value of the stock (something about incoming links), but my blog’s stock seems to have gone down recently. Please link generously 🙂
Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra
“I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moon-walker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter?” (p. 69)
Omon Ra by Russian author, Victor Pelevin is a dark science fiction novel about a young Russian who wants to be a cosmonaut and discovers that the Russian space program is a sham and that supposedly automated moon exploration robots actually have young men like him in them (who never come back.) And there’s more. I’m not sure if it is science fiction or surreal anti-science fiction.
I found the full text of a different translation into English at Lib.ru, see Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. There is a menu which lets you get a text file version.
Continue reading Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra
Creative Science Fiction
So a student at MIT and his friends are slipping invitations into books for future people to come back to our time for a time-travel party. Will anyone show up? How would we know if the person had really come from our future?
See Student organizes time-travel conference, Friday May 6, 2005 – From Associated Press.
Eric Rice: Podcaster, blogger and videoblogger
Eric Rice has emerged as on of the cult podcasters/bloggers.
He has even come to Toronto, see Eric Rice :: Video: Toronto Podcasters Meetup.
Audioblog.com: A commercial blogging/podcasting service
Audioblog.com is a commercial video and audio blogging service that are setting things up to make it easy for us to podcast or vblog. They seem to use Flash recorder utilities to make it easy. In the basic service that you get audio clips of up to an hour and 1 Gig of downloads a month (which they say would be 5000 downloads of 1 minute audio clips.)
How long before someone offers this for free?
Make: A Suitcase PC
A suitcase computer? Neat. See www.chriskaufmann.com/suitcase/.
This from the Make:Blog.
First Cellular Phones
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was one of the first modern cellular phones. It was a brick, but consumers lined up for them in 1984. See the story at CNN.com – First modern cell phone was a true ‘brick’ – Apr 27, 2005.
The new cold-war: Ready.Gov
The Department of the Homeland Security now has a site, Ready.gov to help us ready for biological, chemical and nuclear threats. It is full of wisdom like,
Studies have shown that taking steps to temporary seal off a room using common materials enhances the safety of a room against the impact of a chemical plume. (Ready.gov – FAQ)
Reminds me of the paranoia I grew up with during the cold war. How to prepare for the end of the world. Perhaps that’s the point – a bit of fear goes a long way. Look at the graphics from the ready.com home page. The women looking up to a “ready” man. The Buisness looking confidently at us like the Ready Kids (who are coming soon.)
Ready-to-fear.
So why is the Ad Council advertising Ready.com on the Guardian Unlimited site? That’s where I saw the ad … Is the Department of Homeland Security so insecure they have to advertise in a left-wing UK online news site? Is the Ad Council just randomly buying advertising space? Is someone trying to make fun of Ready.com?
Design: the new business skill
After years of making fun of the arts, it turns out that design skills are the new IQ (Imagination Quotient) for business (and, for that matter, engineering.) From a meeting with Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) folks and from Audrey Carr I have heard about the new Rotman & OCAD collaboration, see The Business of Design.