For an interesting range of articles, video clips and other things relating to the speculative concept of the technological singularity see IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity.

Related links:

• Greenflame · Three Major Singularity Schools
• Greenflame · Pondering the Singularity (Again)
• Greenflame · Transhumanism

When the combination of WYSIWYG graphical user interfaces, scalable fonts, laser printers and desktop publishing software started to make its presence felt at the end of the 1980s it was a time of serious typeface abuse in newsletters, invitations and home-made greetings cards. It seems everyone wanted to go and put as many jarring and clashing typefaces on a page as they could. Some of my friends even when to far as to use things like Fontographer to create their own typeface variants, but then they tended to be over-zealous about things like that (and actually read up on things like kerning etc.) (Of course, all that came in useful when we had a couple of assignments in computer graphics class writing Postscript by hand to generate graphic objects and in order to understand how a Postscript laser printer or Sun’s NeWS GUI worked.)

(Equivalent things to this typeface abuse still happens today in Powerpoint presentations you encounter every now and then, along with the evil that is the blink tag in web pages.)

Anyway, the other day I saw this news article, F is for do-it-yourself fonts – Stuff.co.nz, which pointed over to FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts. This is a web site that allows you to design your own typefaces and share them with the world. Suddenly it’s 1986 all over again.

Related link: At some point I want to see the film, Helvetica, as I’m always intrigued by the effort and history that lurks in the stories about things like typefaces.

Picked up the following book from a sale pile today at a book clearance store. Hoping to find some time to flick through it at some point – perhaps on the train traveling to and from the SBL international conference in a week’s time. Must have a hunt through the conference programme book and see if there’s anything in there relating to popular culture.

“Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe” (Lincoln Geraghty)

The fusion of technology from Weta Digital’s work on animation technologies using human subjects finds an application in helping doctors understand children’s motion with a view to corrective surgery and other therapy. See Wellywood technology helps children to walk – NZ Herald: Technology News

An interesting article over at Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Designing Accessible Games. You see articles about making things like web sites usable or accessible, but not so much about making computer/video games accessible for people.

Something I didn’t know when making MP3 disks in iTunes – Macworld | Playlist | Creating navigable MP3 discs.

A couple more robot links to go with a robot girlfriend link from a day or two back.

The first, Robotic Navi-Bear as Annoying as It Is Cute | Autopia from Wired.com, is the fusion of a talking teddy bear with a navigation system for drivers.

The second, Tartalo the robot is knocking on your door, is about a robot being built in Spain the can navigate around the wider community by recognising people’s homes.

ALA | Select Bibliography of Children’s Books about the Disability Experience is a list from the American Library Association that “contains some outstanding books that portray emotional, mental, or physical disability experiences, most published between 2000 and 2006.”

Just filing the link here because it might be useful at some point for the “Spirituality and Well-being” course I’m co-teaching next semester.

Hat tip to: Select Bibliography of Children’s Books about the Disability Experience « Nano, Bio, Info, Cogno, Synthetic bio, NBICS

Another step in the direction of virtual companions? See Japan makes robot girlfriend for lonely men

Related links: Greenflame · Computer companions: Are they possible?

Great little article by Sam J. Miller over at mental_floss Blog » Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek looking at the difference in anthropologies underlying Star Trek (pretty positive) and the new Battlestar Galactica (pretty negative). Worth a quick read.

Miller argues that Galactica doesn’t hide the warts or flaws in human nature and relationships, or paint a rosy picture of some kind of trajectory towards perfection achievable through the myth of progress. He says of that,

Galactica is sci-fi without that BS. Sci-fi with all the anger and stupidity and sadness that real people experience. Sci-fi without the conviction that we will conquer our own ugliness. Sci-fi for the age of peak oil and 9/11 and natural disasters compounded by climate change to the point where they can completely destroy major cities. Galactica’s message is that unless we come to terms with our own history, we are doomed. Mankind created the Cylons to fight our wars and to do our grunt work for us. Eventually they rose up and wiped out 99.999% of us. This basic lesson is one we still haven’t learned: that exploitation leads to exploitation, that if you oppress someone you sow the seeds of your own oppression. “You can’t play God and then wash your hands of the things you’ve created,” says the Galactica’s commander, William Adama. “Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.”

It’s similar to the flaws in humanity that Joss Whedon brought out in Firefly or J. Michael Straczynski kept in Babylon 5.

Hat tip to Exploring Our Matrix: Around the Blogosphere (The End of the Banana Argument)

Related link: Greenflame · Science fiction as safe(?) space to explore unpleasant questions