Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing

I'm "XRanked" on Live.Com Search -- Link broken

Bruce Eisner — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:02:55 -0700

Broken Link: X-Rank is based on a search algorithm of change in the volume of searches for various persons, ideas, places and things of interest to the public. I'm listed among 567 most-searched for bloggers on Live Search (and we all know how good Live Search is).

Actually I'm happy to have made the cut. Its probably only natural that I would be "XRanked" since I wrote the first book on "X" which is what we used to call Ecstasy when it was legal (way back when).

Mattel Will Release Neurofeedback Brain Game -- Brain Flex -- CBS Video on YouTube

Bruce Eisner — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:55:32 -0800

Links for ths Post include embedded video below plus:

Mind Flex Like Basketball for Your Mind on Gizmodo

Odball Gadgets: Mattel Mind Flex by Melissa Perenso on PC World

Video: Mattel Mind Flex hands (and heads) on Engadget

The Mattel toy company (which is also releasing its 50th Anniversary Barbie Doll this year) announced a new "adult" game at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The game called Mind Flex, scheduled to be release in the next month or two features a brainwave guided ball which you maneuver through an obstacle course.

Actually you control the ball with a combination of plain old hand-eye coordination but with the addition of additional control through EEG biofeedback. Your brainwaves are measured by a headset supplied with the game and your ability to control your brainwaves contributes to your success in guiding the ball through the course and to its goal.

The technology behind the Brain Flex is made by Neurosky. I first wrote Neurosky in my March 2006 post on the Mindware Forum, NeuroSky: Convert Your Brainwaves & Eye Movements Into Useful Electronic Signals To Communicate With Electronic Devices Such As Your Phone or PC

In the CBS news video below, Daniel Sieberg speaks with Mattel's Jim Sheridan about their new mind control toy.

What Type Is My Blog? Find Out With Typealyzer!

Bruce Eisner — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:46:00 -0800

Links for this Post:

Typealyzer Blog Personality Analysis

'What Am I Like?' personality test

Are you a regular Vision Thing reader and have been wondering about what I am really like? With Typealyzer you can find out almost instantly.

Typealyzer is an online application that can analyzer any weblog based on its content and assign a personality type to the blog. The personality type is based on the sixteen type model of Carl Jung which was popularized by several personality tests including the Myers-Briggs.

As you can see by the image at the top of this post, it turns out that Vision Thing is an INTP blog. Since the blog has only one author (that I know of), the personality of the blog probably reflects to a large extent the personality of the blogger who does the blog)

The analysis is fairly accurate as I usually test out on Myers-Briggs as INTP. It is interesting to speculate whether a blog done by several people would be classified as multiple personality disorder.

So if you want to find out your personality type, you have several choices. Among them is doing a blog (which is a lot of work) and then using the Typealyzer to find out.. Or you could take the BBC "What Am I Like Test" (link at the top of the post) which is a lot easier.

Note: Myers-Briggs Personality Type diagram by way of this site.

Gaia - The future of politics -- YouTube Video

Bruce Eisner — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:59:38 -0800

Gaia - The future of politics (embedded below)

I've been digging through my email bin trying to reach the bottom. It is getting closer or so I believe.

I found a video sent to me late last year via this email:

Dear Bruce, we just published a new video on the Future of Politics: how communication, knowledge and organization are changing through the Internet and what this means for the politics we know today. (subtitles in English and Spanish) I'd love to have a comment from you on it.

Best, Davide Casaleggio (video follows:)

The New Timothy Leary Archives Website -- Plus YouTube Video Interview with Webmaster of Leary.Com

Bruce Eisner — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:28:18 -0800

Link for this Post: The New Timothy Leary Archives Website

My long-time friend Dennis Berry along with an assemblage of Timothy Leary's friends including Joi Ito, Ken Gofmann (RU Sirius), Joey Cavella and Chris Graves (the later two featured in the video below) has launched a new Timothy Leary site which promises to replace the void left when Leary.Com went off-line a in the late Nineties.

Denis Berry is a woman who Timothy Leary entrusted to be the excectuor of his estate. She set up the Futuiqe Foundation to overlook Leary's heritage. The new website is their first public gesture but they have been networking privately for a while now.

The new site has the outlines of a living Timothy Leary site with sections on media, video archives, people and events with a blog as the front end. The latest feature on the blog is an interview with Joe Cavella and Chris Graves, Leary's creative team. I posted the Youtube video of the first portion of the interview below.

Future Internet: Duncan Campbell examines the technology that will one day bring about the “thinking Web”.

Bruce Eisner — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:17:39 -0700

Link for this Post: Future Internet - Internet - NetGuide

I liked the picture that is featured at the top of this article by Duncan Cambell on the future of the Internet so I republished it at the top of this post. It shows an artists conception of what our computer interface will look like in the year 2018.

Freud said a century ago that humans have an unconscious instinctual desire to return to womb. As a psychologist trained a long time ago in old school psychology, I would have to say that the woman in the picture looks like she has done exactly that. Her fetal position is also similar to that imagined for the "enslaved" humans in the movie, the Matrix immersed in their virtual reality pods. Except that the woman looks alert and working rather than vegetative.

She looks extremely comfortable. The only thing that looks like it might not be needed is her fingers at the keyboard. Hopefully by 2018 that speech recognition or even brainwave recognition will have advanced far enough to the need for repeated pressing of fingers.

Here is a snip from the post that I thought was particularly interesting:

Up in the clouds: “Web 3.0 will not just be using the data in innovative ways, it will be abstracting away things formally done on individual computers,” suggested a forum posting at Resourceful Idiot. “Cloud computing will become more common and you will see the Internet become a much more mature medium.”

Cloud computing is fundamentally about the location of storage, services, operating systems and information. All this data has to go somewhere and if the future Internet is going to be intuitively interactive, it’ll have to be readily accessible. Plus, individual users may not wish to have large (and expensive) storage systems in their home.

Online storage systems are already widely available; a Web-based email system is a simple example. The system provider allocates you storage space with your email address so you can save material for future reference (some email services no longer put limits on storage space). As more and more data is created, computing facilities whose physical location is irrelevant will be the points of access.

“You don’t necessarily know where services are coming from; you don’t even care as long as you get a certain quality of service,” says Nick Jones.

Virtualisation comes into play here; cloud systems will contain virtual networks of computers that don’t require hardware because they’re actually data stored on larger computers (known as servers). For a fee, you can store all your information in these networks with password-controlled access. It frees you from the expense of upgrading your computer hardware periodically to add storage space, and also means you can access your information from any computer with a Net connection.

You can read the entire article at the link at the top of this post.

Create Instant Mindmaps From Wikipedia with WikiMindMap

Bruce Eisner — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:51:41 -0700

Links for this Post:

Bruce Eisner Wikipedia WikiMindMap

WikiMindMap home page (make your own WikiMindMaps)

Here's a site that combines a couple of cool technologies, wiks and in this case specifically Wikipedia plus mind maps .You can generates a mind map from any page or entry in Wikipedia.

I used the entry for Bruce Eisner on Wikipedia to create the map below (image had white space removed).

Findings - Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology - NYTimes.com

Bruce Eisner — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:33:16 -0700

Link for this Post: Findings - Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology - NYTimes.com.

Here is a bit from the beginning of this piece.

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy

I'm certainly in favor of the idea that scientific progress can bring us the benefits that Kurzweil suggests will occur. However, when he gets into his ideas about artificial intelligence, the article begins to be a bit more skeptical and so do I. The problem when talking about intelligence is that you start having to consider the related area of consciousness and personal experience.

I'm have become a slow book reader and have been reading a book by Susan Blackmore called Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore for what seems like forever but is probably closer to a year. Its not an easy book to get through but has a lot of food for thought. Perhaps because the book is about thought, or something closely related to it which she calls consciousness and which I have come to think about as personal experience.

The semantics and conceptual maze which is the study of consciousness makes my head spin. Not because there is so much known about it but the fact we hardly know anything about it at all.

With so much of science having its foundations based on clear borders between objectivity and subjectivity, the fact that we know so little is quite remarkable. What is even more amazing is that people like Kurtweil can talk about artificial intelligence without considering these questions with more than placing bets on whether some computer will pass the Touring Test.

Note: Image at the top from the Times article