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Beating the Hive Mind
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1–2 minutes·
3 comments on Beating the Hive Mind“What’s this?” I asked, toying with a white cylinder with letters printed across it. “It’s a cryptex,” explained Eric Harshbarger, one of Mind Candy’s in-house puzzle designers. “Like the one from the Da Vinci Code.” In The Da Vinci Code, a cryptex is a cylinder with five wheels that can be rotated independently; each wheel…
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Avoiding dress collisions
Last month, Laura Bush turned up to a party at the White House in a $8,500 Oscar de la Renta dress, which three other women also happened to be wearing. Laura Bush quickly changed her dress, but the damage was done and the story of this amusing accident quickly spread across the Internet. I was…
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Singularitarian
“[When] there are wireless chips in my clothes, when I get up in the morning it’s going to simplify my life enormously. There’s all this stuff I won’t have to consciously think about anymore. If I don’t know where my cowboy boots are, they will tell me.” – Bruce Sterling I quite like Bruce Sterling’s…
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The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
(As I mentioned in my last post, I have this big backlog of posts I want to make. One of my notes says ‘zelda’. I’m not sure what this means any more. Could it be about the Phantom Hourglass trailer I saw at GDC? Or maybe it’s about the Zelda music they played at Video…
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Fight the good fight
I’ve often wondered what it is I’d like to do in my life. Science, Mars, politics (of the non-traditional sort), education, alternate reality games have all appealed and continue to appeal. But perhaps one of the things I feel most passionately about is intelligent thinking and rational thought – science and the enlightenment, in short.…
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A Smoother Future
(Photos and stories from my trip to Madrid will be up soon!) Every time I wander around a lab, I’m always amazed at how anything ever gets accomplished, what with the innumerable racks of chemicals and samples crowded into fridges and shelves, bits of paper scattered all over the place and various out-of-date printouts and…
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Genetic Enhancement
The Atlantic ran an anti-genetic enhancement article this month called The Case Against Perfection. Written by Michael J. Sandel, a member of the notorious President’s Council on Bioethics, the article is cogent and well-argued. Essentially Sandel believes that embryonic or hereditary genetic enhancements would remove the ‘giftedness’ of every child – in other words, the…
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Introspection
Lately, I’ve been thinking about why I go to sleep in lectures so often. It isn’t because I’m tired, or because I’m bored; there are plenty of times when I am both tired and bored and fail to fall asleep with the kind of dependability that I do in lectures. Nor is it because I’m…
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Only a Matter of Time
“The location of the Greenwich Meridian, that was decided arbitrarily, right?” “I suppose. They put it there because our system of time or mapping or something like that was designed in Greenwich.” “But if it was designed in, say, America or Russia, the ‘zero time’ could have been there?” “I don’t see why not.” “So,…
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Lucid
I arrived back in the UK yesterday morning after a 24 hour journey from Sydney. Predictably, it was raining. What I tried to do during the flights back home was to time my eating and sleeping so that I could reduce any jetlag I’d have caused by the ten hour time difference. The easiest way…
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