Ministry of Intrigue

This io9 article is reporting on research being conducted in Spain on a drug that enhances visual memory.

From the article:

Mice with the RGS-14 boost could remember objects they had seen for up to two months. Ordinarily the same mice would only be able to remember these objects for about an hour.

[snip]

If this protein boosts visual memory in humans, the implications are staggering. In their paper, the researchers say that it could be used as a memory-enhancer…

It’s interesting that this drug only enhances visual memory, and I’m very curious about any potential parallels this research has with the memory editing/enhancement research that has been going on in Brooklyn.

It now seems almost a certainty that we’ll all be taking memory enhancing drugs at some point in the future, as well as utilizing technologies that make direct use and manipulation of our memories possible. This raises a number of ethical questions, of which I’m not confident we as a society will answer appropriately. That’s a larger subject that I am not prepared to address in this post, but definitely worth thinking about.

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Quite simply, I think this is one of the greatest advances in library science and computing in recent memory. This isn’t just a toy or a search engine, this is a knowledge processor that makes any factual data in its system instantly computable.

If you are a teacher or scientist, you need to be paying attention to this. In fact, if you are a human being who is engaged with any sort of data, you need to be paying attention to this as well, because while Wolfram|Alpha may not live forever, this advance, as well as any of its inevitable successors, are the future of information computing.

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Prepare for some serious escalation on both sides of the file sharing issue. This doesn’t end the debate, it just upgrades the weapons on both sides. It’s going to be ugly, and neither side is totally in the right. Try not to let yourself become a legal casualty.

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This is a very interesting social experiment being conducted where cute little robots are sent on a mission to reach a certain location, but are dependent on assistance from the strangers they encounter on the way. The reactions people have to the Tweenbots say a lot about us.

From the article:

The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object.

Go read the article and watch the surveillance footage (available at the site) of Tweenbots attempting to make their way through the crowds.

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This article describes a fascinating new framework for understanding human cognition and decision making based on principles of quantum probability. Experiments described in this article suggest the classical model of human decision making does not effectively take cognitive dissonance (“wishful thinking” in this case) into account. The resulting quantum model proposed makes a lot more sense to me, and certainly helps explain some of our seemingly irrational impulses.

It’s worth noting that this is just a framework, and in time we may discover the reality to be different, but I find this new model very intriguing.

If you are at all interested in understanding the reason why we make the decisions we do, it is worth your while to give this article a read.

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Those of you who already read Ellis’ work will find no surprises in his first column for Wired UK, but this piece is worth reading regardless. There’s a lot of meat in this column, but it would be easy to discount it as simply strange. That would be a mistake, because while Ellis shows us how the world is changing, demonstrating his clear fascination with the bizarre, he begins to make a case for why the slower approach to news gathering and reporting as typified in the print publishing industry is essential in a way that blog networks are not.

For the record, I agree with Ellis on this point, but I wish he had taken some additional time to fully illustrate the differences between the two publishing styles as opposed to assuming implicit understanding of the reader. Although, perhaps that is not his purpose. Like most of Ellis’ commentary, there is mental current to this piece, and getting the reader carried away in that flow of thought usually seems to be more important that knocking off bullet points like some academic. It’s good reading material, and full of Warren Ellis’ wicked (some might say twisted) sense of humor.

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This post from Roger Ebert about snark both in print and on the Internet is worth a read for all of us, especially those of us that pride ourselves on our wit. You and I may not agree with all of his examples, but it has several core points that are worth considering. It’s not that I (or Ebert for that matter) think that snark should be done away with, it has more to do with confronting the dark intention of snark and understanding that before we engage in it. That dark intention is identified by Ebert as:

[Snark] functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, non-conformity and simple error.

Read it, and let me know what you think. (Comments will hopefully return sometime soon.)

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This New York Times article by Benedict Carey is reporting on a fascinating discovery in the field of neuroscience: a specific molecule that appears to control the way memory is formed in the brain. This is huge, especially since it appears that researchers have already been conducting research with a drug that can inhibit this molecule, effectively limiting the formation or retention of a particular memory. The article talks about some practical uses for the drug, but I’m not clear on how researchers would go about targeting specific memories to block or erase.

Obviously, there are a ton of ethical and practical concerns related to this, and the article hints at them effectively enough without going into a terrible amount of detail. I won’t dive into them yet either, it’s far too big an issue to address in a bookmark, but it is something we should all be discussing.

One other point I found quite interesting is that Carey makes the statement:

Artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists sent men to the moon and spacecraft to Saturn and submarines to the ocean floor, the instrument responsible for such feats, the human mind, remained almost entirely dark, a vast and mostly uncharted universe as mysterious as the New World was to explorers of the past.

There’s some judgement implied here, but I find the assignment of roles fascinating. Once again, that’s for a longer post. Sorry to be a tease, but the gears are turning and attempting to yank my thoughts from them prematurely will almost certainly result in broken fingers.

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I love this post from John Gruber on how to block the DiggBar, and in effect, Digg itself. I’m also highly amused by the message he displays to users that try to access his site via the DiggBar.

There is already some Django middleware available for this that can be easily adapted to forward users to any custom view or external site you wish. I’ll definitely be setting this up on my site soon.

UPDATE: I decided to use frame-busting JavaScript instead since that takes care of Facebook and other sites that do framing as well. Like anything else it can be countered, but it’s a start.

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This is just the beginning, folks. You can’t treat marketing in social media as the wild west anymore. Those of you using affiliate links should also pay attention, because I guarantee that you are next.

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