Web Tools to Ruin Your Life (and improve it)

One of the students put me onto something that is going to keep me amused during lunch hours for a while. It is called StumbleUpon, and it is an add-in for Firefox or IE which suggests funky web sites that you might be interested in. You assign a bunch of categories that you like and then press the Stumble! button. It then takes you somewhere you might find interesting. When you get there, you can rate what you see so that other people can find it later. Great fun and highly unproductive, in that I can see myself spending hours with this thing. Within minutes I had found this link. I'm sure there are thousands of others.

But if you want to use the interweb to improve your life productivity wise you should really take a look at del.ico.us. Stupid name not withstanding it is actually massively useful. Again, it installs buttons on your IE toolbar, but this time it lets you manage and tag web favourites that you find. When you find a site that you don't want to forget (perhaps one you Stumbled across) you press the "post to de.lico.us" button and it then lets you enter tags for the link. It also shows you a "cloud" of existing tags so that you can easily find related sites. Very useful. You can see my tags here.

Appliance of Science

Usually on a Saturday I go up town and think about buying things that I don't really need. Yesterday was slightly different, in that I actually bought something. Staples were getting rid of some external disk drives and stuff, and tucked away down the side they had a network storage device from Maxtor.

This is like an external disk drive, but rather than connecting it directly to your computer you plug it into your home network and it then presents network shares for you to browse to. The bad news is that it will work a bit more slowly than a directly connected device, the good news is that everybody on the network can see and use it at the same time, without a computer being switched on.

At only seventy quid for a 200GByte device I thought it was a reasonable deal. And so it has turned out. I've loaded all my pictures onto it and I'm going to use it as a media server for the house.  I can even plug in external drives (it has two USB sockets) and give myself around half a terabyte of storage. Wowzer. I can remember when 20MB was a lot...

Of course I've since found people on the web reporting that theirs lost all their work when the drives crashed, but so far it seems OK....

Hull Culture

If you live in Hull, and haven't been to Ferens Art Gallery, then shame on you. It is free to get in, they have a nice coffee shop and there are some stunning paintings in there. At the moment they have a special exhibition called "Darkness Visible" which is easily the equal of ones that I've seen at Tate Modern (that is to say that I didn't understand some of these exhibits either).

But that doesn't mean that I won't be going back. It really is a nice place. Right in the middle of town it is an oasis of peace and quiet and paintings and sculptures and installations.

I try to make a point of going into art galleries when I go places. Not because I am particularly artistic (obviously) but because it gives you a nice insight into the local area. Hull has some splendid galleries and museums and can really hold its head up with pride in this respect.

Students, a good place to take your parents if they insist on you showing them the neighbourhood. You can leave them with the impression that you are acquiring culture, which is always a good thing.

Run for the hills

I was thinking about writing a film in which Satan makes himself an outfit from the pages of a russian newspaper. I would call it, altogether now,  "The Devil Wears Pravda".

Prada and Profundity

Since that horrible Horizon program on Wednesday about artificial intelligence I've been pondering on what is really going to happen in the future, when megabrain computers are loaded with the minds of our greatest scientists.

Now, I don't know much about this stuff, but it seems to me that us ignorant humans have managed to prove that:

• some things you just can't predict (Quantum Theory)
• some things you have to take on trust (Godel)

In other words, no matter how clever you are there is a limit to the number of things you can work out using pure brain power.

Which means that our super intelligent machines are going to be in a bit of a fix because they won't be able draw any conclusions at the end of all this wonderful thought they will be doing.

And then it came to me; they will do what us humans do when we have nothing better to do. They will dabble in things like fashion.

Scene : Singularity Sixty Seven - outpost seventy three of hive mind five

Consciousness Alpha Four: "..then I said to him that recurring decimals were so last season and that all the really serious fraction action this year has got to be down with the vulgar's..."
Consciousness Beta One: "You are so right. Do you think my brain looks big in this?"