In a move seemingly designed to make me ruin the inside of my panties, Google has released the first cut of its Earth product, based on technology it acquired when it purchased Keyhole.
The product is, in a nutshell, a copy of the earth on your computer. In fact what it does it stream detailed data from Google’s massive database so that you only see the parts of the earth that you’re interested in at any particular time. It can also overlay data such as roads, populations, crime rates etc.
But don’t take my word for it, check out some reviews.
I’m not normally one to regurgitate celebrity gossip, but one story has me very concerned. The 16 missing days between the Old Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise’s infatuated new Bride-Bot.
… Sometime that week, her friends say, she flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with Cruise about a role in “Mission: Impossible 3.” The meeting took place after April 11.
The next time anyone heard from Holmes was on April 27, when she appeared in public as Cruise’s girlfriend and love of his life.
Where was she during those 16 days?
Somewhere during that time, she decided to fire both her manager and agent, each of whom she had been with for years and who were devoted to her.
Read the article. This is just awful. And the new Tom Cruise has been coming across in interviews as, well, completely bananas.
In the days before blogs, they might very well have got away with this.
Put an RSS subscribe button next to search results where applicable. Then let me browse my Google news feeds in a gmail-like interface, or as an additional search page like the “Desktop” page.
You could even use a local engine, like the great Google Desktop engine.
Update: Scott posted a comment with the following great advice:
You can actually hack Google to give yourself this feature. You need:
1. Firefox
2. The Greasemonkey extension (http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/)
3. The Annotate Google script (http://ponderer.org/annotate_google_redux)
Which is great for the 1% of Firefox users (who comprise around 5-20% of web users, depending on who you ask) who have Greasemonkey.
Still, that’s a cool hack.
I was sick yesterday, so instead of having an impro gig I spent the night writing some songs and a few gags for this Tuesday’s stand-up gig. It’s been a while since I’ve written so effectively, so I was quite pleased with the results. Then this morning I was dabbling in Wikipedia and came to the entry on philosopher David Hume.
Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the 1700’s, most known for Utilitarianism, Naturalism, and receiving accusations of Atheism. The section on the Bundle Theory of Self particularly interested me as I’ve recently experienced odd feelings of being inhabited by separate entities whose dominance varies depending on the task at hand.
Audience: [cough]Too many drugs[/cough]
In particular, I can relate to the following:
… when you start introspecting, you notice a bunch of thoughts and feelings and perceptions and such, but you never perceive any substance you could call “the self”. So as far as we can tell, Hume concludes, there is nothing to the self over and above a big, fleeting bundle of perceptions.
Speaking as someone who is required to be highly rational and scientific in my day job (Computer Programming for a large bank) and random, emotional and creative in my hobbies (improv, stand-up, music), I have begun see these bunches of thoughts and feelings ebb and flow quite dramatically over the course of a single day or week. I also have a fairly diverse set of friends with dramatically different approaches to life, and this also affects which aspects of my personality surface at a particular time.
This thinking led me along two seemingly-unrelated strands of thought.
The first is the nature and reasons for creativity. Given that we are such fluid entities, and assuming a desire in the individual for some concrete identification of the self, it is not unreasonable to say that creating a concrete item such as a painting, a song, or a story would help to create an anchor-point for one’s identity. “This is me, now”. They are flags planted in the earth at points along one’s path through life. They help to mark the journey.
The second is to do with tribalism and fear of The Other. People naturally gravitate into groups of like-minded individuals who mutually reinforce each others’ sense of self. This, too, provides an anchor point for certain aspects of the personality, by validating their existence and approving their expression. Over time, and with sufficient exposure to one group over all others, this would result in a hardening of the individual’s personality into a single form; less of a bundle of ever-changing thoughts and feelings, and more of a singular - dare I say, robotic - entity.
[pointedly looks at football fanatics]
This helps to explain, to me at least, the nature of such phenomena as xenophobia, sexism and racism. All come about when large-ish, mutually-reinforcing collectives communicate mostly among themselves and exclude opinions (either deliberately or accidentally) which would disrupt the hardening of their identities into a form which resonates with the collective.
So it seems that, at some level, the acts of painting a bowl of petunias and beating up homosexuals both satisfy the same need: To capture and identify the self.
But there’s no such thing as the self. Which sucks for gays but is good for Camberwell Market.
Read everything on this site, it looks awesome. I have no idea who Adam Rice is or what he does, but:
- His site looks really cool
- His content is interesting, and talks about stuff I like
‘Nuff said!
