In honor of Google: Crome…

In honor of Google Chrome moving to open beta, I give you 3 short stories by Cory Doctorow with at least some relationship to Google.

Scroogled:  What would happen if Google turned evil, sold out to the gvt and DHS.

The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Are Engineered Away: The monestary (Campus) of geeks analyzing data.  The Order can be remarkably reminescent of Google.

When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth:  A little less linked, but still along a similar theme.  EOTWAWKI, and a few sysadmins burried in the bowels of a server room survive.. what happens after?

Also, for a full lenght novel in a slightly different vein, check out Little Brother.  It’s flatout amazing.  It also fed my paranoia something fierce.   I consider it a good thing, most of the time.

Whee!

Heather dragged me contra dancing tonight, and it was fun!  Exhausting, and hot, but fun.  There’s a contra dance every Thrusday night in Concord. I think I’m going back!

I’m glad the partners I had put up with my complete and utter clumsiness and inability to tell left from right.  I had a lot of fun.  It was also very dizzying.

Amazing robotics.

I didn’t post this when I ran across it months ago, though I was definitely enthralled.  JayG’s post yesterday about the exoskeleton being developed in Haifa that’s enabling paraplegics to walk with crutches spurred my memory.

BoingBoing had a post about the Neruobotics talk given at The New Yorker Conference this past May.    Yoky Matsouka, who is the director of the neurorobotics lab @ UWashington, gives an amazing presentation about the fledgling field of neurobotics.  Neurobotics is the intersection of robotics, neuroscience, and prosthetics.  I’m completely facinated.  It’s things like this that make me wish I’d been a bit more adventurous in college, cause I’d LOVE to get my fingers in it now.

Grow plastic in a plant? You can now!

Scientists at the MA biotech company, Metabolix, have figured out how to grow their bioplastic in the leaves of modified switch grass! This competely bypasses the need for polymerization, which is a very expensive and poluting step in the production of plastics, whether they originate from fosil fuels or from renewable resources.  This is revolutionary!   To make plastic all you need to do is grind up the switchgrass and removed the plant mater.  Voila! you’ve got plastic, just heat and shape!

Pandora radio may fold due to lack of money.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080818-pandora-cant-make-money-may-pull-the-plug.html

This is sad to hear.  Pandora is an amazing music service.  Bill * I were just talking the other day trying to figure out how they manage to keep afloat w/ free service.  Well, that answers that.  They can’t.  Too bad.  Hopefully something can be done to yank Pandora out of the red and out of impending doom.

new story

One of my favorite authors had a new short story published on tor.com today.    I’ve loved everything I’ve read of Cory Doctorow.  Loved the latest novel, Little Brother.  I’ll go into that another time.

Today, The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away was published on Tor.  Yet another interesting and geeky vignette.  Hardcore geeks as monks, sequestered from the world.  Interesting read, go give it a try.

memories

I was talking in channel with some of the geek boys about movies and such and we got onto the unrealism of Hackers.  Heh.  Fake as it was, it did spark my geekiness into tech, at least somewhat.   But what I love most is Angelina Jolie before she was big, as a dykeish, h4ck3r ch1xx0r.  YUM.  Plus the cyber industrial club-scene/fashion sense.  Rar.  Yum. heheh.

http://www.dreamagic.com/roger/hackers.gif

http://movies.infinitecoolness.com/01/hackers11.jpg

http://evoen.net/images/angelina.jpg

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/030709/165215__06angie_l.jpg