Alcohol and memory, the death of the reader (again), Peter Watts on politics, massively multicore computing, Lovelock and geoengineering …
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1 – My Data Crime: by Erik Davis
“The Ticking Time Bomb of the Watermarked Advance CD.” Those things suck. They also predispose me to more negative reviews. Do the maths.
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2 – How to Set up Google Custom Search for Your Website and Make Money
“Simply put, Google Custom Search Engine is a tool which allows visitors to search your website by using Google’s core search technology. This enables you to list search results according to the sites and pages you specify.”
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3 – Drink to remember, not to forget
“People often drink to drown sorrows. Our results suggest that this could actually paradoxically promote traumatic memories and lead to further drinking, contributing to the development of alcoholism…”
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“Our tissues don’t renew themselves by mere copying, with old skin cells dividing into new skin cells and so forth. Instead, they keep repeating the laborious process of starting each cell from scratch.”
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“The problem isn’t that Jordan is selling so many copies. The problem is that Ian McEwan is.” Interesting points, but overly alarmist, perhaps.
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6 – You Won’t Get Elected If You Don’t Speak Klingon.
“Both Law and Economics, in other words, are human artifacts. They’re like Gibsonian cyberspace, a consensual hallucination that only works because everybody agrees to stay inside the playground.” I vote Watts for 2008!
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7 – PET bottle armor
“At the request of the world’s largest cola cartel, Tsumura made this suit of PET bottle armor by slicing up bottles and sewing the pieces together with transparent nylon thread.”
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8 – The Future of Computing, According to Intel
“Machine learning and interference technology have been accepted by a broad slice of the research community, but we’re mired in a moderate level of quality. It’s not unusual for these systems to get things right 80 percent of the time.”
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9 – Ocean pumps could counter global warming
“James Lovelock, the British planetary scientist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has endorsed a cure for the “pathology” of global warming, but has admitted that it could make matters worse.”