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  • Guardian Banks interview

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    A Guardian interview with Iain Banks in which he reveals he wrote his new novel, Dead Air in only six weeks. Should I be worried?

  • Kurzweil and AI

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    Hah, I always knew that AI pundit Ray Kurzweil was up to no good, but this article proves it. Kurzweil is fond of making grand – and vague – predictions about the future of AI, but as far as I can see he his only major achievement that could possibly be related to AI is…

  • Child kidnappings

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    1 comment on Child kidnappings

    There’s been a story on Metafilter that mirrors a recent thread on the Culture mailing list concerning the rash of media coverage on child kidnappings in the US and UK. If you read the Metafilter discussion, it morphs into an argument about whether it’s insensitive for someone to say, “Well, it’s very sad that these…

  • Euromix 2

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    With the recent and long-awaited release of Dancing Stage Euromix 2 in the UK, I decided to have a look around the UK discussion forums for Dance Dance Revolution. A lot of people criticised Euromix 1 for having a dated interface and small song selection, but at the time of release it used the most…

  • The Decline of Metafilter

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    4–6 minutes

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    Once again, Metafilter has me worried. Far be it for me to predict the imminent demise of one of the Internet’s most popular and well-known weblogs when it has confounded the predictions of countless others, but this time I think there’s a real problem.

  • Ipod

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    I recently bought an iPod when I was in America, and have been very happy with it since – it’s proved its worth on many an occasion, including long car journeys. However, when I upgraded to the latest version of the firmware, which offered various significant new features, there was a drastic drop in battery…

  • Longbets

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    Got back from DC last week, just been catching up on things recently. Anyway, Longbets is finally showing some interesting activity in its discussion forums.

  • Malls

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    2 comments on Malls

    Something that bothers me about the malls in America is the fact that you can’t look around freely. These otherwise pleasant and interesting places have stalls set up in the centre of their ‘streets’ which are invariably populated by mobile phone companies, and if you should even glance in their general direction, they’ll call out…

  • Change Blindness

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    Change Blindness is an interesting psychological phenomenon that’s attracting a lot of research these days. There are a number of theories about why it occurs, and from a quick look at the literature I’m inclined to think it’s something to do with the role of attention and something called re-entrant processing.

  • DC

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    I’ll be heading off to Washington DC on Tuesday, and I’m told that most of the museums and zoos there have free entry. Considering that I managed to spend about $35 just going to one (small) museum and one (big) zoo for an afternoon in San Diego, I’m pretty pleased. My experience of San Diego…