The Great Geek Manual

Individuals are turning ever more aspects of their lives into managerial problems that require technological solutions. We have access to an ever-increasing array of free and inexpensive technologies that harness incredible computational power that effectively allows us to self-police behavior everywhere we go. As pervasiveness expands, so does trust. Our willingness to delegate tasks to trusted software has increased significantly. Individuals are growing increasingly realistic about how limited their decision-making skills and resolve are. Moreover, we’re not ashamed to discuss these limits publicly. Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we’re doing, whom we’re doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities. Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become “design space.” We’re now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today’s apps are more harbinger than endpoint.

[...] Their [philosophers] comments suggest consuming digital willpower may not be as innocent or simple as it may first seem. However, an emerging strain of philosophical inquiry could upend these traditional criticisms and open the door to guilt-free willpower enhancement.

[...] the will is a flexible mesh of different capacities and cognitive mechanisms that can expand and contract, depending on the agent’s particular setting and needs. Contrary to the traditional view that identifies the unified and cognitively transparent self as the source of willed actions, the new picture embraces a rather diffused, extended, and opaque self who is often guided by irrational trains of thought. What actually keeps the self and its will together are the given boundaries offered by biology, a coherent self narrative created by shared memories and experiences, and society. If this view of the will as an expanding and contracting system with porous and dynamic boundaries is correct, then it might seem that the new motivating technologies and devices can only increase our reach and further empower our willing selves.

- “Why It’s OK to Let Apps Make You a Better Person” by Evan Selinger, March 9, 2012.
Originally published by The Atlantic

When it comes to running a business, there are a number of IT options that you’ll have to consider. Not every business should be run exactly the same way when it comes to developing a server usage plan or how the computer systems are used. Dell Server virtualization is one method that many companies are opting for. With this process, multiple operating systems and processes are performed on the same physical server. Why would a company want to use this method instead of simply going with multiple servers?

It Saves Money

Perhaps the most obvious reason you’re considering using server virtualization is that it can save you quite a bit of money. Instead of having to invest in multiple servers for your business, you may be able to get by with fewer. One server could host a number of different operating systems and be used on many different computer modules. This means that you will have to buy fewer servers in the beginning stages of your business. You’ll also be able to save money on electricity costs because you won’t have so many different servers running at all hours of the day and night. Although server costs have dropped dramatically in recent years, virtualizing your server means not having to invest as much in the equipment for your business.

It Saves Space

Another big advantage of using this type of virtualization is that it can save space. Depending on where your business is located, space may come at a premium. Instead of having to devote a large room to holding all of your servers, you may be able to fit them into a utility closet or another small room. That means that you can rent less space and save even more money on a monthly basis.

It Allows for Different Operating Systems

A big benefit of using this strategy is that you can implement different operating systems on the same server. Instead of having to install Windows or Linux on the entire server, you could use a different operating system for each section of the server. This allows every employee or department to have the operating system that they want or need.

It Requires Less Maintenance

When you have fewer servers stored about, you also have less maintenance to engage in. When there are multiple servers to deal with, you may have to perform regular maintenance on them more often. This will take up more of the limited time that your IT staff has to deal with these problems. If you’re outsourcing your IT work, this will result in fewer billable hours, which again helps you save money.

Other Concerns

Using virtual servers has the potential to change the landscape of your IT configuration. However, it is not always appropriate for every business. If you do not use applications that require a lot of resources from your server, it can work well. Check with your IT professional to make sure that creating a virtual server is in your best interest before moving forward.

[...] simply by sharing their conscious experiences, people can arrive at a more accurate view of the world.

Our consciousness is not a prison cell where we live, isolated from other minds, but a doorway into a social world where we can work together to achieve a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

- “Consciousness: why bother?” by Chris Frith, March 2, 2012.

For the entirety of human history, we have operated on small scales and in relative anonymity. Our words are heard by the few people close to us and most are quickly forgotten. We walk down the street without passers-by knowing our names or history. The internet has started to change that. Our words and actions can easily be shared with billions of people around the globe and archived indefinitely. The details of our lives can be found simply by typing our name into Google.

We need to understand the risks of this type of technology so that we can fully gain its benefits. We need protections, both technical and legal, so that a small mistake cannot devastate our lives. We also need education to help us function in a world where privacy is no longer the natural state of being.

- Joss Wright in “As Google acts, the question is: have we lost our privacy to the internet?” by Joss Wright and Tom Chatfield, March 3, 2012.
Originally published by The Guardian.

‘We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.’

If understanding the brain really makes a difference, then those changed understandings should be coming through in novels and other art forms—just as they did with other paradigm shifts in our understanding of humanity, such as Darwinism and psychoanalysis. Maybe what happens in fiction over the next ten years or so is actually the big test. Comparing the kinds of fictions that work and don’t work should tell us something about the sorts of explanations that we, as human beings, need for ourselves. We should fix to do this again in 2022!

Fiction is a way of doing science on the human character – although of course there are so many important differences between the truths of science and the truths of literature.
In going deeper into the neuroscience, fiction won’t obviate itself. Art will always contribute something special: subjectivity, and the means for articulating the subjective alongside the objective. It’s not just fiction that can gain from this deepening relationship; the science can become better too.

- “What Can Novelists Learn From Neuroscience?” by Jonah Lehrer, March 7, 2012.
Originally posted to Wired’s Weird Science Blog.

Art

• Chameleon is a short sci-fi film with a great twist worth watching.
• Functional NES Controller Coffee Table Made From Wood
• Joss Whedon’s Avengers Diorama
• Mash-Up Dinosaurs and The Avengers and what do you get?
• Star Wars by the Numbers
• Top Ten Comic-Book Movie Posters

Comics

• Interview: The Nerdist talks to Legendary Comics’ Bob Shreck

Read the rest of this entry » » »

Within a decade, personal robots could become as common in U.S. homes as any other major appliance, and many if not most of these machines will be able to perform innumerable tasks not explicitly imagined by their manufacturers. This opens up a wider world of personal robotics, in which machines are doing anything their owners can program them to do — without actually being programmers.

- “Teach your robot well,” March 8, 2012.
First posted to ScienceDaily.

Poetry and science have more in common than revealing secrets. Both depend on metaphor, which is as crucial to scientific discovery as it is to lyric. A new metaphor is a new mapping of the world. Even maths uses metaphor; and this is where more condensed forms of poetry join in. John Donne, living through exciting new scientific discoveries, relished the door-opening powers of science. “A mathematical point is the most indivisible and unique thing which art can present,” he said. His lyric uses science as image rather than exposition. [...]

Scientia means “knowledge:” science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts. Equally, poetry might or might not be driven by feeling but what it is “about” is relationships – between word and sound, word and thing, word and thought, sound and meaning, words and other words. So is science. Darwin wondered constantly about the relationships of organic forms – in earth, in stone, in what happens between red clover and bumble bees, orchid and moth.

The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they’re right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. “A scientist should be the first to say he doesn’t know,” a tiger biologist told me when I asked some detail of tiger behaviour. “A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there.”

Which is roughly what Donne said too. “On a huge hill, / Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will. / Reach her, about must, and about must go.”

- “The science of poetry, the poetry of science” by Ruth Padel, December 9, 2011
First published in The Guardian.

Voltaire was mistaken when he stated, elegantly but erroneously, that “writing is the painting of the voice: the more it bears a resemblance, the better.” A written text is not a high-fidelity recording. Its goal is not to reproduce speech as we pronounce it, but rather to code it at a level abstract enough to allow the reader to quickly retrieve its meaning.

- Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene, 2009.