Omega Point

Just recently, I was lamenting the fact that there are likely orders of magnitude more people who understand the “turn it off and then on again” method of troubleshooting than the scientific method.

To back up my theory, this month’s Wired Magazine sees editor Chris Anderson confidently stroll into Crazyland with his essay The End of Theory, asserting that the age of the scientific method is over, replacing hypothesis and testing with statistical number-crunching of massive databases.

Needless to say, there exist a variety of reactions to this idea, most of which can be summarized by “Wait, what now?”

The Daily Galaxy’s critique of Anderson’s article was particularly effective, pointing out that recognition of correlation is not the goal of science; rather, it provides a starting point for science to begin from:

Noticing a correlation between factors is the START of science, not the end.  When you see that two things affect each other and ask “Why?”, you’re a scientist.  When you just record a million trials you’re an accountant.  When you say “It happens because that’s the way things are” you’re either a mother answering a five-year-old’s fortieth question in a row, or uninterested, or possibly religious.

The “you are not qualified to make this assertion” style of criticism tends to bug me, but in this case, it seems particularly accurate:

This combines with his second error: Belief that the Internet is the entire world.  This is an easy mistake for somebody like a Wired editor to make, but the fact remains that if you walked down a street shouting “LOLCAT” most people wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about.  This is important.  In fact, a species where everybody knows about LOLCATS is one whose viability needs severe re-evaluation.

So I’m blogging for my employers, the Masters of Digital Media Program. I scored tickets for the Vancouver Art Gallery/Centre for Digital Media (that’s us!) joint speakers series, KRAZY! Talk Industry Giants, held in conjunction with the KRAZY! comics + video games + anime + other stuff exhibition at VAG, and so, I’ve been blogging my thoughts about each lecture.

By agreement with my boss, these posts will not consist of a giant sarcastic rant about the use of exclamation marks in names of proper nouns, how to end a sentence with ‘KRAZY!’, nor the thirteen different fonts Ticketmaster used on the tickets to the events. This last one in particular will be tough. One of them is Comic Sans.

The first post –featuring my thoughts on what a generally all-around swell guy Art Spiegelman is– went up a few days ago.  Coming up, Tim Johnson, M/M Paris and Will Wright.

Do check it out, won’t you?

Google Alerts are a wondrous thing — provided you remember to create them. For me, my “Second Life” + “Vancouver” alert resulted in this spam site masquerading as a blog:

Teenagers, in particular, increasingly keep in touch with friends and acquaintances every time they log on but they are also forging new casual sex dating vancouvers with people who may share an interest but live on the other side of the world.

A recent innovation is the creation of virtual worlds which promise an entire social life in cyberspace.

Second Life is an internet community with a population of more than 100,000 real people.

Each resident controls a adult dating free site uk puppet called an avatar which reflects their personality.

Seamless insertion into copy there, guys.

(http://thedatesex.com/2008/03/03/news-does-happiness-live-in-cyberspace) 

And she updates her site all the time.

Seriously.

Yes, yes. Lots of people were complaining that I hadn’t blogged about my appearance last year on Lab with Leo. So yeah, I was on it. Looking like a dork.

YouTube

Flickr

With the US release of the iPhone permeating even Canadian news, I’m finding that my current smartphone solution just isn’t as desirable as that which I cannot buy. These days, I’m more than happy with my Treo 650, despite PalmOS showing its age. I expect a Linux-based Treo will follow the recent Palm Foleo by the end of the year. However, I don’t actually even use the data side of my smartphone.

That’s right, I have a smartphone with no web access at all. Why? Well, the 650’s wifi capabilities kind of suck, but it’s usable. However, if I want to use EDGE, I don’t have a lot of options.

Canada has three national mobile phone companies: Bell and Telus, which are both CDMA, and Rogers, which uses GSM. (It’s actually four national companies, if you include Fido, which is now owned by Rogers, and which uses the Rogers network, but has separate branding and billing plans, including things like per-second billing.)

Despite having an otherwise highly developed telecommunications network, there is a flaw: Canada’s cellular companies are gouging us on data fees. Observe. Sadly, at one point, Fido had a $20/month unlimited EDGE plan, as well as a $30/month unlimited incoming/outgoing calls plan. Needless to say, after their acquisition by Rogers, both of these were quietly canceled.

So right now, my want-to-buy device seems to be the Nokia N800 tablet. It’s a tiny 800×480, WiFi/Bluetooth web browsing, media-playing, handwriting-recognizing, 8GB-extensible Linux device. There’s no phone, but then again, I already have a phone.

So, who wants to buy me one?

I’m sick. Sure, I’m getting over it now, but it’s been a couple of days. I’m not actually sure what I have, only that it sucks. So far, I’m pretending it wasn’t due to my walking to the pharmacy in the rain the day before I started seeing symptoms. No, that’s crazy talk.

Recently, it seems like everyone I know is either sick, or involved in some massive family/social life drama, or having stuff stolen. I lost one half of a pair of earrings, Eric lost his camera equipment and Rob from Social Signal had his MacBook stolen.

Rob, of course, had the courage to at least put on a brave entertaining face for the rest of us, but man… that had to hurt. After a quick “back up your data, seriously” conversation, I did just that. Badly. But I’m going to grab another drive this week, so… you know, please don’t steal it before then, guys.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about ways of LoJacking my MacBook Pro to produce some kind of entertaining photoblog of snapshots of whoever stole it, complete with a record of access points detected, cross-referenced to WiFiMug. (or better yet, some obsessive wardriver’s map!)

Experience tells me that stolen laptops are rarely recovered, and that photos of computer thieves are frequently faked. Still, it’s something I’m setting up just in case.

Like most Mac-owning, right-thinking individuals, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the Apple iPhone, despite living in Canada, where mobile data rates are unfortunate, to say the least. Also, the whole “closed platform” thing. That and the “how do you dial this with gloves on?” bit. And the fact that there’s no word of any Canadian release date, and there’s only two GSM carriers in Canada anyway… and they both use the same network. But hey, it syncs well with iCal and has a real web browser! I want one already!

So enough about products whose chief value is making its user look cooler and more affluent than non-owners! There’s a far more geeky smartphone just over the horizon!

Behold, OpenMoko! It’s made of Linux! FIC (not that FIC) has spearheaded the open smartphone platform with their currently-almost-released Neo1973 phone being the first capable of running OpenMoko. The actual handheld looks… cute, actually. Kind of 70s retro, like a non-translucent clamshell iBook.

The featureset is impressive, with WiFi, AGPS and a 640×480 screen, and includes everything we’ve come to expect from a smartphone, save for a camera. According to the OpenMoko wiki:

“The 2nd generation OpenMoko device will be introduced at this time. We have something special in the works, but again, you will help shape this device.”

That sounds like a camera to me, since one’s missing, but who knows?

The UI seems somewhat dated, which is not altogether unheard of with Linux, though it will obviously be skinnable in some way — a feature I’d definitely want to make use of. I’m not totally impressed by the look of the dialer in particular. I’d like to see something a bit higher-contrast, personally.

I do like the fact that it uses a similar multi-touch panel as the iPhone, but isn’t that patented? Oh. Yes it is — but maybe not by Apple.

Personally, I find the most important feature of a phone or PDA is ease of use and how well it can sync with my computer. I’m eager to see how well the OpenMoko platform does among the early adopter crowd, but for now, I think I’ll be holding off on that preorder.

Aren’t all blogs supposed to have one of these after an extended absence of posts?

This Wednesday, (March 21st, 2007) I and the rest of the Social Signal team will be at Social Tech Brewing Vancouver, for this month’s topic, “Learning in Virtual Worlds”.*

From the Social Signal blog:

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for the March gathering of Social Tech Brewing’s Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from social media, nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas — and beer!

Beer! Virtual worlds! Community-building! It’s got it all! If that sounds like your mug of beer, you should join us!

From 7-8 PM, we’ll be at WorkSpace at 21 Water St. (See Google Maps)
Afterwards, we’ll be moving across the street to Six Acres.

See the blog post at SocialSignal.com for more or RSVP here!

* You know, like that Second Life thing.