I can’t help but think that the whole RFID tag phenomenon is just going to get weirder. You know, those miniature data tags that are getting stuck in everything. Hit ’em with a radio signal and they ping you back with a tiny scrap of info. Companies like Wal-Mart stick them in products to help with supply chain management. They’re in …
I’m not doing one. I’m not feeling it. I’ll leave it to someone else to make fun of Google’s L-less Valentine’s Day logo. (Googe responds to the controversy here.)
Note that with a little Firefox-related cleverness you can permanently endow Google with an Achewood logo. I don’t know, there’s a little too much cat-tongue in it for …
I find computer viruses endlessly fascinating. This is partly because as a smug, self-satisfied Mac user, I don’t see them very often. It’s also because my first cover story at Time was about the Love Bug, the 2000 megavirus that at the time seemed like the harbinger of the coming cyberapocalypse. (I still don’t see why, given the …
I reviewed it. I reviewed it here.
It’s interesting to watch reviewers chew on this book — the New York Times liked it here and didn’t much care for it here. Partly because of Hill’s parentage — he’s Stephen King’s son — but partly because Hill isn’t a wordsmith. Book reviewers — and I’m one — like writers who toss out lapidary …
Bookslut points me to this — to all appearances — justifiably savage review of Spider-man: Reign #3. The Reign mini-series is set 35 years in the future, with a middle-aged Spidey — yaar, spoilers — mourning the death of his beloved Mary Jane. (There’s a 10-page preview from the first issue here.) What killed Mary Jane? Cancer. From? …
I know I’m coming late to this story, but is it intriguing to anyone else that someone or -ones tried to kill the Internet last week? Last Tuesday, at 5:30 in the morning, a massive denial of service attack was directed at the root servers that route traffic on the Internet. The Internet did not, of course, perish, but three of the …
On April 17 Houghton Mifflin will publish The Children of Húrin, a “new” work of fiction by J.R.R. Tolkien:
Apparently this is a narrative he noodled with extensively during his lifetime but never completed to his own satisfaction, though he left behind a lot of manuscript pages; I think some version of it also appears in The …
My knowledge of physics and engineering is shaky enough that sometimes I forget that stuff like neutron stars and superconductors is actually real and not made-up. (If Slaver stasis fields are real and not made-up, somebody needs to tell me.) Scheduled to cross the fiction/non-fiction barrier shortly is a commercially available quantum …
I remember being assigned a review of Manhunt with the warning that it would be the next great hyper-controversial lawsuit-engendering game, a la Grand Theft Auto. And it is pretty brutal, what with, you know, the slitting of throats with stray shards of glass and such. But as with Bully, it never actually generated much legal paperwork …
Somebody hooked up a big industrial arm to a Wiimote, then gave it a sword.
Then they strapped a guy on it.
Meanwhile, these robots spin records. Not shown: the robots’ emo phase, when they put on turtlenecks and cried.
People who work at Bungie are happier than you. Somehow it seems wrong that 4×4 Halo 3 matches are being played somewhere in the world, and I am not at that place. All I can do is press my nose against those smeared-out .jpegs and whine like a whipped puppy.
But remember, happy Bungie people: it’s all fun and games till somebody …
I don’t know if anybody but me followed this story arc in Doonesbury, or indeed whether anybody besides me under the age of 50 reads Doonesbury anymore. Anyway, Trudeau seems to be paying more attention lately to Mike’s nerdy daughter Alex, who goes to MIT. Granted, the whole Battlebots-esque scenario is about 9 years out of date. Man, …
