nanotechnology and web 2.0 9:15 pm
Nanotechnology Island has been launched in SecondLife. Other SecondLife venues to launch soon include:
See screenshots and other stuff of Nanotechnology Island here. Looks cool. Too bad SecondLife entails prohibitively long loading times.
I was interviewed by George Dvorsky of Sentient Developments the other day. He interviewed me about the Lifeboat Foundation, existential risks, transhumanism, this blog, etc. Check it out.
Also, you can find this blog syndicated on LiveJournal, if you like that sort of thing.
While I’m on the subject of this blog, here are my favorite posts from last year, in case you missed ‘em:
Comments are working again, by the way.
transhumanism and web 2.0 6:12 am
The story of my virtual attendance at Transvision ‘06 got picked up by a small, online alternative weekly called the NY Inquirer. Go check it out here. In other news: supposedly Ray Kurzweil was on the Daily Show just the other day, but I’m afraid to watch. I heard it was a PR disaster. Anyway, here is a clip of the Inquirer piece to provide you with titillation:
I was pleasantly surprised at how interconnected the Second Life conference was with the real world. In the virtual conference room, there were dozens of seats. What began with only a few people ballooned, at times, with almost twenty virtual attendees.
web 2.0 8:17 am
Do you read more than one blog on a regular basis? If so, you should be using an RSS reader. I discovered RSS readers about a year ago, after many millions of slick geeks had already started using them, but there are many millions of people who still need to adopt this wonderful technology. The basic idea is that you only need to visit one website to see all your blogs, instead of visiting many.
The RSS reader I recommend is Bloglines. It works perfectly. Many Mac users seem to prefer Newsfire, which is basically the same thing.
Here is a screenshot of me checking out one of my favorite sci/tech/future blogs, the Speculist, with my RSS reader:
The RSS reader automagically updates when there is a new post. So there is no need to constantly run around from blog to blog. With an RSS reader, there is barely any need to visit actual websites at all. In fact, I recommend against it. All modern sites offer RSS feeds to keep you up to date on all the latest haps, so you needn’t fret.
RSS feeders are crack for your mind on the same order of strength as Wikipedia.
I follow about 100 feeds personally, which is about average. Since the average blog post nowadays is only around one paragraph, and the average poster posts about twice per week, this only adds up to about an hour of extra time per day, half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening.
In Bloglines, click “add” and paste a URL to get your feed on. Here are some frequently-updated feeds I’m particularly fond of, to get you started:
Smart stuff:
Phil Bowermaster’s Speculist
Brian Wang’s Advanced Nanotechnology
Mike Treder’s Responsible Nanotechnology
Melanie Swan’s Broader Perspective
Reason’s Fight Aging!
Anne C.’s Existence is Wonderful
George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments
Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Nobel Intent
Damn Interesting
Webcomics:
Toothpaste for Dinner
Red Meat
Sinfest
Enjoy.
technology and web 2.0 7:38 pm
In the spirit of George Dvorsky’s recent blog post on the same topic, here’s a picture of me in Real Life a couple Christmases ago:
Followed by me in SecondLife:
Click on either for a larger version.
transhumanism and web 2.0 2:51 pm
Every year since 1998, a bunch of transhumanists from all over the world get together in one place, in a conference held by the World Transhumanist Association, called Transvision. This year, it is in Helsinki, Finland, but is also being held as a virtual event on Internet Relay Chat and the virtual world of SecondLife. I was wandering around the venue (uvvy island) from about 1AM-3AM my time, which would have been about 11AM - 1PM Helsinki’s time. There was a live video feed of the conference from inside SecondLife, but I couldn’t get it to work, so I checked out the feed using the old-fashioned browser method. Here are my screenshots of uvvy island:
That’s it for now. Some screenshots with the actual streams in view are located here. I would attend again tonight, but the conference just starts getting going at 1AM my time. I hope that video of the whole thing is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, in any case.
