“Chan pa he chan ho!”

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Leona

I was just musing over how incredibly annoying ads are these days… and then Heineken’s ‘The Date’ concept burst onto the scene. (Well, OK… ‘my awareness’. It’s been on ‘the scene’ for a good while already).

It’s AWESOME.

It takes some kind of bollywood-meets-bond, meets circus, meets date-movie memeplex and manages to create something immersive and engaging from it all. The joins between the borrowed ideas are seamless, and the cross-cultural slant is just a breath of fresh air. The two characters at the center of the action move the world’s tiniest story forward, from one moment to the next, and the miniature plot unfolds within the tight temporal constraints yet nothing feels squeezed at all (in fact, the shorter edits of the ad work even better). So we accept this gorgeous epic, compactified as it is in every possible dimension and yet remaining as engaging as any well-made marathon flick… Continue reading →

Exhibit – history of television

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Leona

So, when trundling along between the movator lanes at the airport (San Francisco), what do you expect to see? OK, what do you totally not expect to see? A totally awesome exhibit on the history of television, that’s what… right smack dab in the middle of the thoroughfare between the security-heads and the gate you’re supposed to wait patiently at.

What are the frigging odds? That someone has sought to entertain – scratch that - educate the pieces of captive meat traipsing back and forth… this was an ode to the beleaguered traveller, I tell you. An oasis of mental stimulation… Continue reading →

One rootkit to rule us all…

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Leona

It’s a good thing that the EFF has waded into the battle against Carrier IQ – the weaselly company that makes even Smeagle of LOTR fame seem upright and forthcoming.

You can catch up on carriergate here, or if you are averse to long passages of reading you can also look at a summary here: Schneier on Security… and then after all that you too can ponder on how relatively calm the people with the most to lose are being.

Update: watch vid of US Senator Al Franken quizzing an FBI pointy-haired about its use of CarrierIQ data. The answer is just… well, preciousssss. Vid after the jump: Continue reading →

Quantifying Occupy

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Leona

In the ‘Supporting Occupy Toronto‘ segment tonight, Steve Paikin grilled – as nicely as pie – the young, well-meaning pinstriped lawyer dude who spoke in support of the Occupy Toronto movement. Other than the latter’s point about demonstrating solidarity with other Occupy movements (that I get), I quickly tired of uttered generics like “the larger issues“, “dialogue“, “change“, blah blah blah. No amount of prodding would bring about any further elucidation.

And y’know, it’s this inability to consistently and categorically state its mission that is one of the perplexing things about the Occupy movement. For you see, it had a mission, but the mass media was sufficiently underwhelmed by it that it spun an entirely new mythology for the whole thing. One that even the protesters themselves might have bought into. After all, the media (and the rest of us left-leaning 99%-ers) had a vision where the Occupiers themselves did not – and a vision is how you instantiate a reality, folks… Continue reading →

That’s me in the boardroom…

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Leona

“…that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion…”

REM lyrics are appropriate, for I HAVE lost my religion. The eerily well-oiled machine that is my employer has decided that it will save a fair bit of coin by carrying out training in, get this, a virtual SECOND LIFE campus. Continue reading →

PETMAN: Terminator’s great great grandaddy

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Leona

So botjunkie have been subsumed by the IEEE and I didn’t know! Shame on me for not visiting them more often. But seriously… do you not quake in your boots when you behold this (even just a little bit?!!):

Don’t forget to check out their new automaton blog here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics

Umbilicus

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Leona

Those with a capitalist cheerleading bent might want to put down the pom-poms and statistics and fancy charts for just a moment – lay people are speaking.

There’s an organisation (whose name I’ve forgotten) doing the rounds with research-backed TED talks and whatever else… (can’t find ‘em, my google-fu is weak today) about how societal ills correlate spectacularly well with the gap between the haves and the have-nots in any society.

Specifically, they conclude that it doesn’t matter how rich or poor people are, (and by implication, where they are on the social pecking order)… it only really matters how BIG THE GAP is between the two extremes of rich and poor. When the gap is huge, as has rather become the case in most nations/cities/societies planet-wide, you can expect increases in crime, corruption, medical problems, mental illness, teenage pregnancies, you name it…

Half of the planet – let us call them group A – hears this and says,
“well, DUH? How is this news?”.

The other half – let us call them group B – says,
“That’s a load of crap. The real problem is the poverty end of the spectrum, not the spectrum or the gap per se”.

Both groups can agree on one thing: that if you have any sort of spectrum of wellbeing at all you necessarily have a gap, and by dint of that, “THE POOR”. Whether those “poor” people are millionaires surrounded by insufferable trillionaires, or whether they are garbage-surfing grovellers surrounded by those who have found the day’s meal, their condition shall be perfectly irrelevant to the fact of the gap’s actual existence. Continue reading →

How cool is this idea: recycling old phones (and other devices) for cash

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Leona

Go read about it on engadget.

iPod Touch vs Samsung Galaxy S2 – just because.

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Leona

I don’t have an iphone. I do however (at the time of writing) have the latest ipod touch and I had gotten used to it before I decided to buy an android phone (Samsung Galaxy S2).

I bought the android for purely philosophical reasons, namely that I liked the interoperability / openness of the hardware and attendant software stack, and it was just a way of casting a vote against Jobs’ slightly-anal-about-everything empire.

But let’s be honest folks, being anal has paid off for Apple, as far as product design, user interface design and build quality goes… let alone raw commercial profits. If we leave the commercial aspects / business strategy aside for a moment, on the basis that this is the furthest thing from the mind of the average smartphone wielder, and focus instead on the immediacy of things experienced with the phone, we are left with issues of : 1) design, and 2) flexibility/control. Continue reading →

Computations with a big ‘C’, vs little ‘c’ computations

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Leona

In the computing / computable universe worldview, the universe is akin to a giant computation.

This inevitably leads to anthropic questions like, ‘what solution is it trying to compute? / what problem is it trying to solve?‘ and of course ‘who kicked off the computation? Who wrote the program?‘.

The obvious (if trite) answer to this last question would be ‘God’, and there’s an interesting post over here about why the computation otherwise known as this reality isn’t even here to solve any kind of useful problem. The computation might just be there for the Almighty’s entertainment, and nothing more.

You’ve gotta admit this is great fodder for sci-fi storytelling.

But let’s back up a bit to the ‘what’s the computation for?‘ question. There is a presumption in this question – namely, that a computation exists to solve a problem. Continue reading →