Conspiracy boom, microfluidics, augmented reality, Burning Life festival, the case for legal athletic doping …

• 1 – Mephisto: Elegant and Powerful Weblog-Engine

  “… a free Ruby-based weblog-engine which combines the quality, functionality and user-friendliness of other systems in a simple, elegant and powerful user interface.” Looks pretty funky. May have to investigate.

  (tags: CMS web2.0 Ruby software engine blogging Mephisto)

• 2 – Life Sucks, Then You Die

  “If you don’t see the point in living, then you’re missing the point of life entirely. The point of life is to enjoy it.” Motivational stuff for people in bad patches.

  (tags: life change happiness self-determination motivation inspiration)

• 3 – Essay: The Conspiracy Boom, by Jay Kinney

  “Say what you will about conspiracy theories, they are unlikely to go away as long as real life, courtesy of the daily news, keeps tossing us events that seem like, well, conspiracies.”

  (tags: secrecy culture discourse government politics theory conspiracy)

• 4 – Microfluidics: Like Computer Chips With Plumbing

  “Microfluidic devices are a lot like computer chips with plumbing. They will likely become an integral part of all sorts of medical technology — once all of the physics problems are worked out.”

  (tags: futurism pharmacology medicine technology chemistry biology microfluidics)

• 5 – Of Muscle Tone and Mixing Meds: Should Athletic Doping Be Legal?

  “… as long as this kind of assist to human potential remains illegal, it effectively creates a sort of class system, mostly accessible to those atheletes privileged by wealth, status, or both to take advantage of what doping does for their prowess…”

  (tags: transhumanism regulation medicine drugs doping sports)

• 6 – Augmented Mixed Reality – Real to virtual and back again

  “We are seeing more uses of things from the real world crossing over into the non-game metaverse environments. e.g. tennis ball trajectories and scores from Wimbledon into Second Life. Is this augmented mixed reality?”

  (tags: virtual experience culture worlds synthetic SecondLife metaverse augmentedreality)

• 7 – Zen Technologies’ military weapons simulators

  “Though the name Zen might seem antithetical for a maker of weapons simulators, it comes straight from a book that Atluri, an ardent meditator, was reading while they were tossing around company names: Zen in the Martial Arts.”

  (tags: technology weapons training virtual simulation)

• 8 – Burning Life 2007!

  “This year, Second Life’s annual homage to Burning Man is back, bigger and more imaginative than ever!” Could be interesting. Could be a total flop. Only one way to find out, of course.

  (tags: metaverse event festival virtual BurningMan SecondLife)

• 9 – Disable Windows Update restart nag

  “Windows installed another round of updates and now it’s asking you to restart. Again. One simple command line entry can disable this obnoxious reminder.” Heaven sent – I hate that damn warning.

  (tags: hack disable reminder restart update Windows)