Harkaway

theblindgiant:

A 20” touchscreen computer with a 2-5 hour battery life and built in gestural control, coming out in October. We’re moving towards the place where our devices understand physical movement and even what you might call physical slang - waves, nods, and so on. So here you have a device which responds to touch but also to hand movement in the air, like magic. As interface becomes more instinctual, we lose our sense of data as other and begin to see it as a layer of the world.

Compare and contrast. From Wired: a warning that consumer-grade EEG headsets may be hackable to reveal or at least hint towards confidential data. Also: a basic thought-interface for a physical object. It’s not exactly Firefox - the Clint Eastwood movie, not the browser - but it’s real.

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My mother is a time traveller.

Me: where is this place?
Mum: it's where JS used to be.
Me: okay...
Mum: yep.
Me: isn't the place I'm going to called JS?
Mum: um.
Me: and didn't it just open?
Mum: might have done...
Me: you're from the future, aren't you?
Mum: no.
Me: you are, aren't you?
Mum: no.
Me: you're a time traveller from the future, pretending to be from Sevenoaks.
Mum: that's silly.
Me: you are.
Mum: don't be ridiculous
Me: I knew it.
Mum: I'm really not.
Me: who was president in 2051?
Mum: Gaspard.
Me: HAH!
Mum: Bugger.

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‘nother one.

A couple of years back, I’d read an article about some guy who was a camp guard at Gitmo saying that the place was a hellhole and I’d jump for joy. I’d feel that here was the human spirit standing up and demanding to be heard. I’d say: “wow! That guy has some stones! He’s telling it like it is! Go, dude, go!” [For the record, many of these dudes are girl dudes. Don’t let language fool you.]

And I do still feel those things. I really do. I also think that, when we look back in twenty, thirty years, one of the things we will say is that this decade since 2001 was the graveyard of hope for a lot of young US servicemen, when what they saw smashed them up internally every bit as badly as anything in Vietnam or WWII or whatall else. Those people will look to the leaders who are supposed to be looking out for them and they will say “what in God’s name did you think you were doing, turning us into that?”

All the same, there are so many people coming forward now. So now, when I see an article like this one, I don’t call my wife and yodle at her and say how amazing that is. I say:

‘nother one.

Which is not to say that it is not an amazing and a heartening thing.

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