dimanche 28 mars 2004

Hotlines Augustine has kindly furnished a one-place link to her interviews with God. She's also removed any lingering doubts over whether to bother with Gibson's 'Passion', due here this week unless three Jewish brothers win a court case (BBC) -- which is extremely unlikely. "Well Mel, if you're interested in credibility, here's what you should do..." suggests Blaugustine (March 27 for ideas). zzz "The Touch Graph at Google allows you to see the net of relationships between web sites. Entering a URL lets you see a graphical map of its various 'Similar pages' links, as well as the pages similar to those pages, and so forth." (Grafyte Blog). It uses Java and requires a few moments' patience while it does it's thing. But then ... WOW! For reasons that escape my tired mind, 'Sexy Magick' was the nearest place running rings round me when I tried it. Perhaps Julie will know why when she's done with her move... I don't think it's just a matter of shared interests. Any sexy magick from this corner is locked up for today. I'm still waking up to the joy of being on holiday for a week when I'm not half asleep. zzz The Google beta is fun. So is the Blogbot project ('Things that... make you go hmm') they're working on at Microsoft, though I'd rather somebody else got there first. Having, on the other hand, turned down Orkut invites, I'm glad to see David Weinberger explaining why he looks "down (his) long and winding nose at Friendster and other such Artificial Social Networks (ASNs)" (JOHO). David -- whose 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' (Perseus, 2003) is creeping its way up my reading list -- also objects to a misconceived notion common in news circles. "The Internet," he says, "is not a medium" (hyperorg). zzz ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.............. The rest can wait. 10:05:17 PM  link   your views? [] At the back of your mind Some of my more elderly friends and relatives worry far more about their memory lapses than they should. It's alarming, of course, to feel that you've "lost it", but I've been reading up the whole subject a little more closely of late and the news is not nearly as bad as it can feel. The science of the workings of memory has come a long way in the past decade alone. And it has once again attracted Hollywood's attention. "'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (official site)' is one of the few films that has managed to take advantage of some of the storytelling possibilities of recent advances in memory research." Not due for release in France until October, the movie sounds pretty good, if the rest of Kirk Jobsluder's write-up on the film and the "mythical memory videotape" (Kuro5hin) is anything to go by. "Memory is not a videotape that can be rewound to a specific point in time, erased and wound forward again. We don't recall memory so much as recreate it anew each time. The badly-aged 'brain as computer' metaphor has tended to dominate speculative fiction about memory. In this metaphor, memory is encoded and stored on something analogous to a computer hard disk to be recalled and recovered later, and the ability to scan, project, copy, download, edit and delete memory makes perfect sense. In contrast, more recent research suggests that memory is quite a bit more slippery," Kirk says. The rest of his article is worth reading, as are a couple of entries on two different aspects of memory in the past week by Roland Piquepaille. On Monday, he told us of 'The Arrival of Nanotech Memories' and today, in Technology Trends, he explains "why researchers from Trinity College in Dublin are adding memory to virtual reality characters to give them a more realistic gaze". One of the most important things about memory decline with age is believing, wrongly, that you're doomed to suffer: "Research has also shown that common, everyday memory failures tend to be judged more harshly when the failure belongs to an older adult. What is laughed off in a younger adult is treated as an indication of cognitive decline in an older person. There are ways in which cognitive function (memory, reasoning, problem-solving, etc) declines with age, but it would be fair to say that general belief over-estimates the extent of this. It is, to a large extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe deterioration is inevitable, you are not likely to make any effort to halt it." That observation at 'The Memory Key' reads like banal common sense -- unless you happen to be one of the worrywarts. I strongly commend that "key site", 'About Memory,' maintained by psychology PhD and author Fiona McPherson. It's regularly updated and includes a weblog. If you've got Shockwave Flash, one of the fun links at Fiona's site is to 'The Secret Life of the Brain' (PBS) in 3-D. A trip there is much cheaper than a run through a scanner! 5:26:38 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.