skullduggery

Failure to adapt to changing economic conditions, both on the part of predators and prey, give license for a lot of failed schemes to stick around like blots of quicksand: pawn shops, bail-brokers, pay-day loan offices and other lending sharks intent on unending swim.  This too has made those forces determined to glean whatever profits they can from one's privacy even more firmly entrenched and desparate to try the most distasteful and tactiest of tacits.  I imagine that tombstones (pepperoni and cheese) of the future will be equipped with USB ports where visitors can plug in and download the archives of departed loved ones' tweets and other exhaustively monitored cyber spasms.  Reminscing, of course, will be peppered with targeted advertizing.  The interwebs will be a very poor executor and not many secrets will be secreted away.

minority report or farce protection

As Wired Magazine reports, Google and the CIA are exploring a partnership with a cyber-security firm, which I am sure was already double-dipping and in the rolls of the Washington Post's revealing exposé on US intelligence's poorly-constructed parade float of an operation, that promises to deliver reconnaissance on future crimes. By trawling blogs, tweets and other social networking sites, the firm hopes to project and predict potential threats before they happen through examining the broader network of connection and links. I was under the impression that intelligence analysts fight crimes by looking at these same context clues and making projections. With all the other surplus and redundancy, it is a challenge to imagine that these techniques could produce anything original and would only reduplicate different drafts of the same information already in circulation. I am not sure what Google's interest in this enterprise is. Besides the role of technical advisor, as the company reinvented Project Keyhole as Googlemaps and makes it freely available though with possible, I can only think that such prognostication could maybe catch future file-sharers and copy-fighters. For the intelligensia, possibly the biggest benefit could be in plugging leaks and nabbing the snitches.

Oedipus Rex or was not was--everybody do the dinosaur!

The Sphinx challenged Oedipus on the road to Thebes with a riddle: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three? Paleontologists have found themselves confronted puzzle, as New Scientist reports, and this is really mind-blowing and disabusing. Certain specimens that researchers have always held to be examples of different species may actually be the same animal at different stages of growth and development. If people did not have the experience of frogs and butterflies contemporarily, who would have thought to connect them to fossil evidence of tadpoles or caterpillars?

it's time to play the pyramid

I've think that a word cloud has been a good and accessible way to present a concept scatter-shot.  Maybe one's CV or résumé in the future could be in word cloud form, plastered here and there like the translucent advertizing film that they preserve mass-transit busses in.  I stumbled across a snazzy, aesthetic word cloud generator called Wordle quite by accident.  I pasted the text from the last two months of blog entries in it and it spun out this picture.  It's funny to see one's words parsed this way and what tags are tops.