The Internet in Your Pocket, Before the Internet

Last updated on: September 7, 2014 at 8:35 pm By Paul Fidalgo

Mark Hill, browsing for oddities in Amsterdam (what a life), discovers a most prescient artifact indeed: A portable transistor radio from the late 1960s named “Internet.” Hill writes: [T]here’s even more connection with today’s internet age. The cream case, flat upright format, rounded corners, and ‘screen’-like black tuning display all recall Jonathan Ive’s now legendary design for the iPod. The Internet radio even has white earphones! … I was also very fond of the fact that it was complete with... Read more

When in Doubt, Blame Slender Man

Last updated on: September 7, 2014 at 2:00 pm By Paul Fidalgo

This is entirely predictable, and disappointing. Because of a couple of recent incidents in which young people have commited crimes because of the perpetrators’ imagined connection to the entirely fictional being Slender Man, certain corner of the media were sure to be on the lookout for what might constitute a “trend” or “epidemic” of Slender Man-related offenses. And they got one! Last week, a teenage girl in Pasco County, Florida allegedly set fire to her family home after an argument.... Read more

The Less-Than Doomed E-reader

Last updated on: October 10, 2014 at 10:30 am By Paul Fidalgo

All of this leads me to think that e-readers are not doomed, but that they’re going to cease to be an explosive category of mass market technology. Instead, I think we’ll see them continue to be honed and improved for a slightly niche market of frequent book consumers. Read more

The Moore’s Law Express Hits the Great Ceiling: A Possible Hitch to Alien Contact

Last updated on: October 7, 2014 at 9:51 pm By Paul Fidalgo

Amid the discussions of the potential for contact with extra-terrestrial civilizations, there’s one big buzzkill I don’t recall ever hearing posited as a possibility for why we haven’t made contact yet: Because it can’t be done. Read more

Measuring the Immeasurable Heavens

Last updated on: September 4, 2014 at 10:47 pm By Paul Fidalgo

In this video from Nature, we are introduced to Laniakea, the incomprehensibly vast supercluster of galaxies of which our own Milky Way is an infinitesimal part. Astounding. “Laniakea,” by the way, is Hawaiian for “immeasurable heavens.” Well, they measured them. Read more

The Brutalization of Women in Video Games, and its Apologists

Last updated on: October 7, 2014 at 9:51 pm By Paul Fidalgo

Note: Comments are disabled on this post because life is too short for what I’ll have to sift through, and I don’t like comments sections anyway. I so appreciate the work of Anita Sarkeesian, the media critic whose Feminist Frequency series of videos examining the portrayal of women in popular culture are always enlightening, eye-opening, and more often than not, troubling in what they say about how far we are have to go as a society. I hadn’t seen a new video in... Read more

The Collision: Enforced Religion Meets the Internet

Last updated on: October 7, 2014 at 9:51 pm By Paul Fidalgo

Every human being alive today, provided they have access to even the most rudimentary computing hardware, is now a broadcasting platform. Compared to generations past, even for the least electronically visible among us, we have many times the reach for any thought or opinion we care to express. And we rarely have full control over who hears what we say. The consequences for the expression of religious belief (or lack thereof) have been enormous. To my mind, the collision of... Read more