After moving into a new place, Google Maps has shot up towards the top of my most-viewed websites. I’ve also been helping my parents set up Skype and looking up some basic recipes.
So, what happens to my Gmail ads?
Ancient cosmology, like Aristotelian physics, has become a modern archetype for ‘wrong’ science, primarily because in our present-day arrogance we have applied Occam’s razor retrospectively and concluded that those old astronomers were idiots. (Funnily, Occam himself never applied his razor to astronomy, so there we are: we’re better at being Occam than Occam was.) But this is tremendously unfair, because actually the ancients weren’t wrong, at least not in the sense we usually mean.
You can’t exactly blame [them], can you? To the naked-eye observer, it really does look as if the Earth stands still and everything else circles around it. We, who are so big on Occam’s razor, can hardly criticise the ancients for assuming this simplest of theories was the correct one. They saw what appeared to be the skies circling round the Earth. There was no good reason, at the time, to question this simple and elegant explanation of observed conditions.
Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor (see article). Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.
More here. Yes it’s only bacteria, and yes it was merely a reconstituted, already existing genome – the argument over whether this act constitutes creating life will be one for the philosophers. But what is important is the development of a platform for creating organisms with custom-made genomes. Instead of laboriously inserting genes one by one via plasmid recombination, we can now create a bacterium with any combination of genes we choose – provided of course that they can survive. Genomics research will get a big boost, potentially followed by a lower barrier to entry for DIY genomics hobbyists. This is a Big Deal.
Here’s an article on Facebook as MMORPG.
A lot of the praxis around virtual worlds — and indeed, games in general — has been co-opted by social media….
- Formal group identity is taken to a level well beyond that of the typical virtual world on social networks. (We’ve been saying for years that we should support multiple guild membership in MMORPGs… check out the typical number of groups a Facebook user belongs to…)
- Points and quantified reputation are rampant. Arguably, excessive.
- Similarly, publicly visible profile data has become the defining characteristic of much of the social web. Facebook is a collection of “avatar” pages where you can browse only one’s clothing, achievements, guild memberships, and skills — in a manner of speaking.
- Formalized user roles are also the norm, on the admin-vs-user level.
- And perhaps most pleasantly, malleability of environment is also a key characteristic. Even the most simplistic of farming games on Facebook ranks higher on the “affect your world” scale than World of Warcraft does… and this sort of personalization of the environment is standard not only in social games but across the social web today.
