Imagine for the moment that instead of being a bloviating, gossip and porn-filled time sink, the Internet were a giant game with teams creating and re-appropriating content and services to find new and novel ways with connecting with strangers and you'll get an idea of what ZeFrank's latest venture, Colorwars 2008 is all about.
I've been trying to figure out how to explain Colorwars for a week or so now. Users sign up by following "teams" on Twitter and then engage in various contests. Games so far have included a virtual game of rock, paper, scissors, bingo and a nerd rap. Upcoming challenges include a Gogle Earth scavneger hunt and smack talk haikus. And there are prizes; Jet Blue gave out free tickets in a recent contest. But the point of the game, already a darling of Web 2.0 types is to get people to play with each other and instead of developing elaborate new tech to do it, use exisiting tools like Twitter and GarageBand.
That's the wonky explanation I've been trying to avoid. So let me just walk you through it.
Then I started playing games. For instance, there's a game called YoungMeNowMe where you take a picture of yourself when you were young and restage it. Here's my entry.
Another game invites you to design your own merit badge, which as an Eagle Scout, I couldn't pass up. Presenting the Irony Merit Badge:
And finally, one of the contests going on right now is to create remixes of the Nerd Raps. I was aiming for a Gnarls Barkley-sound (that's me doing an embarrassing falsetto), but sort of wound up with Moby. Someday I'll graduate to Cee-Lo. Click on the photo below to listen:
Not all of the contests are this involved, but while I love that my work requires me to use my creativity, it's a lot of fun just play around and goof off now and then. At the same time, I'm connecting to other like-minded people and seeing how they respond to the challenges. The YoungMeNowMe photos, for instance, are amazing.
Colorwars is ongoing and you can join with no commitment. If this sounds super-rad (it is!) I would love for you to join Team IKB, but you can join any team here. All you need is a Twitter account (which you should have anyway--it's this month's Facebook).
It's every boy's dream to have a robot to call his own. My crowning achievement as a kid was creating a AudioAnimatronic out of Robotix and a Boglin. It was pretty cool but not very autonomous. This little dude however, is the real thing; that is, he's not being controlled by you, but rather responds to his environment. Learn to make him and his brothers at Let's Make Robots.
With Apple's release today of the iPod Touch, a music player with the style and features of the iPhone, the urge to give Bill Jobs more of your paycheck is as real as ever. Well, hold your polished chrome horses a second-- I've got a free (yes, free!) way to make your phone more like the iPhone.
I use the Blackberry Pearl, which is cheaper and does most of the things the iPhone does, but on a much faster network. The one thing the iPhone has that beats out the Pearl is "visual voice mail", a system that allows you to see who called you at a glance. Well, now the iPhone's been beat. And you don't need to buy a new phone to get this service. And for the moment--it's free.
Meet Callwave, the voice mail system that's wherever you need it to be. What Callwave does is replace your cell-phone companies voice mail with their own proprietary system. There are no ads and you can always switch back. What Callwave does is give you the same at a glance functionality as the iPhone and then takes it a step further. Somebody calls you and after leaving a message, a text message is sent to your phone telling you who called-- and here's the iPhone killing part: It also tells you what the person said.
Well, sort of. The voice recognition software is a little buggy so you wind up with message like:
"just got home from North Carolina then. On since last Wednesday almost an entire week and the deep South and now I'm back to landed no humidity so how are you honey wanna catch up with you only see what's going on which - what's what's Cathy grants day to day now so what are you doing sir or say nights thinking maybe we should have a drink maybe some dinner I don't know at least a drink."
Which gives you the basic gist of the message. Just imagine that Charles Bukowski is your receptionist. With the ability to check your messages online and through a handy Mac widget, Callwave offers enough useful toys to keep you out of the Apple Store for a few weeks-- or at least until Callwave starts charging a fee for their very handy and very clever service.
Very sneaky article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times about robots called The Real Transformers. I'm a big robot dork, so it was great to read about the sociable robot revolution. I knew about Kismet, but knew nothing of Mertz, Leo and Domo, a robot who is basically all arms and was my favorite. There are YouTube clips throughout the article and watching Domo slowly stick a bottle of whiskey into a Styrofoam cup all on his own (see above) is thrilling because the movement is fluid and yet so dumb.
The article is sneaky because while it does an excellent job of catching the casual reader up on current trends in robotics, it's really a feint to get into a deeper discussion about human emotions and consciousness. Read the article for yourself. It argues that current robot development, which has by and large abandoned the idea of creating a "thinking brain" A.I. in favor of creating robots which express human-like behaviors, is so successful because in reality, that's what humans do. Fake it till you make it, baby. 'It', here means "a soul".
There's a trend right now in philosophy to take a mechanistic and adaptive view of human intelligence. Oh, that sounds boring. Okay- so scientists nowadays are pretty certain that there is no "you". Daniel Dennett leads the pack on this- arguing in Freedom Evolves(probably the world's only page-turner about free will) that rather than the old-fashioned notion of a solid cohesive "self", the reality is that the thing you look at in the mirror every morning is made up of millions of little programs, behaviors, learned reactions, embedded flight or fight instincts, etc...
This ad hoc homminem theory doesn't deny the complexity of human experience, but it does reject that the human consciousness is one blended smoothie of self-awareness. There is no sum to our parts. Our perception of self is powered by the same ability we have to see animals in clouds and it's just as illusory.
It's taken me a long time to come to agree with this. The whole of Western culture is built on the nobility of the human soul. Not to mention, I can be pretty egotistical. There's something downright inhuman about stripping away the soul, to admit that our emotions aren't coming from some Apollonian well of spirit, but rather from millenia of trial and error by our ancestors (well, the ones who managed to breed). If you believe in evolution at all, however-- you can't hide from it. Art, poetry, music, greed, betrayal, kindness and imagination all resulted from the same process that gave us the opposable thumb.
There are all sorts of interesting questions posed by this world view. For one, if the Rube Goldberg contraption we call consciousness really does result from the same adaptive processes of evolution, then how does our own altering of the environment effect that? For instance, the Internet and the digital age in general has changed the way we communicate and has reshaped our social environments dramatically. As we adapt to these new technologies, are we reshaping our intelligence, reasoning and behavior? That is, are we reprogramming our brains? Are we changing the definition of human?
I, for one, take a bit of peace from the idea that I'm soulless. My failings are not the result of corruption, but faulty adaptation. It doesn't divorce me from being responsible for my actions and behavior, but it does allow me to be more self-aware and hopefully spend less time bemoaning my fate and more time adapting to and changing my environment, and making informed choices about integrating successful strategies and jettisoning those which don't work for the situation at hand.
I don't think (end of statement?) that this is a call to be a self-serving opportunist. It's a call to look around at the world and at yourself and decide (based on you know, all the cognitive resources you've picked up along the way) who you want to be and where you want to be and figuring out how to achieve those aims.
Wouldn't it be totally awesome if there was something that looked at your iTunes and gave you a list of upcoming concerts in your area of bands and artists in your music library? Yeah, the people who developed iConcertCal thought it'd be awesome, too.
The always amazing machine project is holding a workshop this Saturday on sewing with wires and LEDs. 95 bucks gets you all the materials and you'll walk away with a customized piece of sexy tech wear. More info.
The always amazing machine project is holding a workshop this Saturday on sewing with wires and LEDs. 95 bucks gets you all the materials and you'll walk away with a customized piece of sexy tech wear. More info.
