10gui by R. Clayton Miller is a concept design for the next generation of multitouch interface. Starting with the premise that mulitouch monitors inherently flawed because holding your arm out straight for seven hours would result in a workforce with arms like this guy, he’s reimagined the whole nature of how we interact with computers. Miller does away with the mouse replaces it with the 10gui – a keyboard sized multitouch surface which as the name suggests it uses ten fingers as opposed to the standard two on say, an iPhone .But not only that, he also proposes a new operating system to support it – con10uum. While most attempts to reinvent or revolutionise human computer interaction have been either too annoying (the trackball) or counter evolutionary (the Alphabetic Keyboard) this looks like it has legs. I found myself imitating the movements on my cheap Argos desk and was impressed both by how intuitive it felt and can see how useful this could be.
So, Mr Spielberg, the next time you imagine a near-future operating system remember that your common-or-garden worker bee cannot be arsed standing up all day moving data around theatrically like a wizard casting spells.
Fiendishly simple game in which you have to say, find the equidistant point between the edges of a triangle… or the point of convergence between three lines. Yes, I know it sounds like maths and I am constantly makes me think “Why is this fun? My can learning?” but it is genuinely addictive.
My first feeling on seeing this promo spot for the Raytheon Sarcos Exoskeleton project was a rather juvenile shiver of cooooool. It was the same dizzy feeling of awesome I had as a child on seeing Unicron transform for the first time or seeing the trailer for Gremlins 2.
But once the feeling subsided and the grown up complexities of 21st century geopolitics resurfaced, I began to view this new superpower endowing suit in a whole new light. I first wrote about the development of exoskeletons in 2004 when then they seemed plausible but still far off. Then, I was still under the naive notion that governments would be the ones in possession of all of these deadly toys. Nowadays, given the sorry state of both the British and American Armies and the general tumbleweed state of our treasuries, it seems much more likely that well equipped mercenary armies such as Blackwater (now renamed Xe) would be the ones ultimately to boon from such advances. The two companies after all already have an established partnership.
Given the reports of, shall we say “misbehaviour” of Blackwater, the notion of their mercenaries getting hold of what Raytheon themselves are calling “Iron Man” suits is pretty worrying.
Of course this this is all just idle, armchair speculation. For now.
This article is not about whether or not Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) works. Its about how pastors are using this technique in their arsenal during sermons.
I recently attended a funeral for a Christian family member. For the past year she had fought bravely against a debilitating brain tumor and recently finally succumbed to it. During the time in which she was in treatment she wanted to straighten her life out with god so she could be at peace, knowing she was going to die soon. She had become active in a church and had befriended the pastor, and the pastor would show up at the hospital and spend time with her. I know it gave her great comfort, and I don’t belittle the fact that it did.
At her funeral though, the pastor who spent so much time with her spent over a half hour talking about her, and did his best to console other family members who have faith.
I realized that his intention was to be compassionate and reassuring to the family that she will go to heaven. He talked about her being baptized a year earlier, and about how she is resting in the arms of Jesus.
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevance. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice… you don’t.
You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear.
They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
Now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
That’s why they call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it
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