electron zoo

Here’s a “joke” that reflects my present geek-life:

Q: You know you’re a nerd when …
A: You’re having a bad day because you woke up and and realized all your Sims have died.

No, I don’t usually game, but for the last few days I’ve been playing a Palm OS game called Village Sim.

I don’t play video games much, but I often wish I did. For years I’ve suspected that by not gaming, I may be lacking some kinds of intelligence — such as the ability to navigate a virtual 3D world — that a younger generation (who grew up playing the fancy stuff) has. I figure that these skills that are gained by gaming will earn someone higher productivity and understanding of the systems that will be developed by this generation of gamers.

Just as the Windows and Mac desktop act a little bit like Lemmings, future operating systems may behave like Unreal … or whatever those crazy kids are playing these days. And I don’t want to be left behind.

These suspicions found some ground when I read an article in Discover magazine about some new brain research. This research concludes that playing video games is like going to the gym for your brain — it builds problem solving ability.

Additionally, some virtues can be learned by gaming, such as patience. As an adult who stopped gaming years ago, I completely agree. I can pick up a game and put it down again faster than a baby with a business management book. Why? It takes a lot of hard hard work to master a game — in fact, just learning the controls can require major effort. (This research was about video games, but I would argue that Linux users also demonstrate extreme patience!)

I know I’m not going to master these skills by playing a Sim on my Palm Tungsten, but it does take some patience and problem solving ability to keep my group of virtual islanders alive. To all you grown-ups out there who haven’t been giving video games a chance: try to endure one for a little while, and you might learn something new.

Or maybe you’ll kill off a bunch of innocent Sims in your sleep. And then when the robots rule humans in 2015, you’ll pay — oh yes, you’ll pay dearly for what you did to the ancestors of your new computer overlords.

Uh oh …

Imagine using Google to find out where you stuck your phone bill, or when you last used your checkbook, or to tell you that your keys are underneath the folded newspaper to the left of your keyboard. This has long been the dream of disorganized internet junkies.

And thanks to the work of researchers whose desks contain some of the best analyzed clutter in the world, this dream will likely become a reality … in a couple of years.

These researchers use a webcam mounted above a desk to record where the items on the desk are moving, which then syncs with a computer to interpret which papers are which, how they’ve been moved, and where they might be found.

The system could also be used to interpret how a document has been organized — for example, you could use it to organize your vacation photos. If you went through your vacation photos, putting all those that are “safe for co-workers” to the right and all your wild and crazy party photos to the left, you could automatically organize the digital versions of the same photos at the same time. (Then again, who has the cash to have their photos printed these days, anyway?)

As exciting as this sounds, I’m not so sure these researchers are fully aware of all the challenges they face out here in the Real World. Take my desk, for instance — they can give me a call when they’re ready for this:

Before going on, I just want to point out that I am not one of those bloggers that posts links to other blogs all the time. I don’t even read a lot of ‘em. But anyway …

One of the Yahoo! Picks this week was a link to Planet Dan’s Senior Photo Collection, which was pretty cool. I followed his link to his blog and really enjoyed reading a post about a few new bipedal animal celebrities.

I remember when I took an anthropology class in college about human evolution, I was very impressed with the behavior and biology of bonobos. In the analogy in which humans are “the Third Chimpanzee”, bonobos are the second. They sometimes walk upright, which is interesting when studying primate locomotion, but what really interested me about them was their behavior. They are lovers, not warriors. They have a lot of sex, sometimes even homosexual sex, and they really don’t fight often. It’s nice to know that at least some primates know how to live

The future is now — a five-year-old child who is genetically mutated to be twice as muscular as average children and have half the body fat has been discovered in Germany. I assume a lot of people are thinking that this is the result of some kind of pollution (like in X-Men), or alien experimentation with our race (like in X-Files). Well, that would of course be fascinating, but if science fiction is the magic eight ball in this case, shake shake, would we ever hear about it? Outlook Not Good.

However, science fiction and ancient legend are in agreement about the existence of people who are unnaturally strong. When looking at a story about Hercules, for example, people today just assume the storytellers exaggerated the character’s strength. That’s probably still true, but wouldn’t it be pretty fascinating if historians began to use this information to see ancient Greek and Roman myths in a new light? Every culture has it’s own tall tales about strong men that no one believes anymore, so perhaps this discovery will lend new credibility to those legends?

Some articles are suggesting that this discovery could potentially lead to potential genetic treatments of disorders like muscular dystrophy. But if they could treat patients with muscle problems, what’s to stop this vein of genetic modification from becoming the next steroids, or even worse, from becoming a kind of genetic modification that children are not to be born without? Speaking of science fiction, I am terrified of living in a world like that of Gattaca.