io9′s Charlie Anders reports on Worldcon’s  ”The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?” panel.

Some highlights:

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it’s inevitable — so there’s no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to “telepathy or dianetics,” science-fictional ideas which some people adopted “with religious fervor.” A core question in science fiction is “where is our technology going, and what can we do with it,” noted Wilson. “The Singularity is just one answer.”

…

“The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?” says Wilson.

Interesting stuff, and questions well worth asking even if you’re not a Sci-Fi fan.  Me?  The only sci-fi stuff I read tends to either be so near-future that calling it Sci-Fi is just pointles genre-pigeonholing (like say Spook Country ) or transhumanist stuff.  But, by and large that’s because tranhumanist-themed books seem to be where the heirs to Cyberpunk ended up.

Iran is right, it is a conspiracy.

Only it’s the kind of conspiracy that Iran can’t or won’t understand.  The word “conspiracy” comes from the Latin “conspirare”, which means “breathe together”.   When people conspire through internet mediated means, their conspiracies, from going to the movies to spreading the word about a corrupt regime, take on the qualities of the medium.  The internet “routes around censorship as though it was damage”, and net-mediated conspiracies are learning the same trick.

The ruling Iranian government tried to silence dissent via traditional methods, only to find it as easy catching ghosts.  So now they are trying to make a case for aggressive foreign intervention and sabotage, (a so-called “soft overthrow”) because they can’t acknowledge what really happened.   Any nation-state admitting that hundreds of thousands of self-organized people with cell-phones can go toe to toe with an army, for even a moment, is tantamount to admitting that the age of the nation-state is over.   Even if the lumbering, fear and hate-mongering Iranian government does have a grasp on what really happened, it can never admit it.

This is what I’m talking about when I say that social-media can change the world.

The next time something like the Twitter-based uprising against the rigged Iranian elections happens – and it will happen again, somewhere – the reaction will be faster and more widespread and even harder to pin down and silence. And again, and again.

There IS a vast conspiracy against the Iranian government.   It’s not exclusively driven by heads of state and corporations.   It’s driven by people who are learning that tyranny is something to be routed around as though it were damage.

There are people undergoing mass trials right now in Iran, because the Iranian government needs to be able to blame someone.   It’s a horrible thing to see people have their lives on the line for speaking truth to power, and it’s an uglyness we’re all too used to seeing.  So I think it’s important to remember that there is a conspiracy.

It doesn’t require secret meetings, or government financing, and it’s open to everyone who is willing to put aside their fear to try and make, if only in small part, a better world. It’s a conspiracy that is learning to make itself heard even when its voice is silenced.  I’m a member, you could be a member, even the Ayatullah Ali Khamanei could be a member if he wished.  It’s a conspiracy that in some part succeeds by the simple act of being recognized as existing.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Welcome to the human conspiracy.

(My thoughts go out to those on trial and those who have been abused, detained, injured or killed in the attempt speak truth to power in Iran or anywhere else.)

Via ~Evidence~, who also has some great pictures in the Garden of Decay book.

From yankodesign.com:

Sang-Jang Lee is a dear old friend of YD and we have seen him give us some really great designs in the past. His current offering, the Blob Heater is a quite an eccentric personalized heating system. Kinda meant for a broken-hearted who craves for the body warmth of a partner. Something that Carrie Bradshaw would shy away from! Calling it a “hybrid between furniture and electric appliance”, this spandex covered blob measures 240” x 25” x 25” and is auditioning for the role of an alien.

Technabob.com, blogging about the “the frighteningly successful Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Autonomus Underwater Vehicles competition (AUVSI AUV)” :

The contest pitted robot submarines developed by competitors from various universities around the world, all of them eager to bring us closer to Armageddon, one torpedo-carrying robot at a time. The competition was judged by Kelly Cooper, program officer at the Office of Naval Research, and she said that this was the first year that a robot submarine was able to finish the obstacle course with time to spare. She seemed so scared of the results that she temporarily forgot what her department was. Here she is and her palpable fear caught on cam, along with a bunch of future Resistance members paradoxically cheering Skynet’s prototypes.

Earth. Check. Sky. Check. Water. Check. We now have no place to run from the robots.

From Sarah Brooks’ flickr stream.

Thanks to Doktor Andy for the tip to the link!

Via imgfave.com

Canstruction, whose motto is “one can make a difference”, is an annual international design/build competition in which architects, engineers, designers, and students compete to create and build gigantic structures made only from full cans of food. Post contest, the cans and money raised are donated to local charities.

Link and photo via inhabitat.com.

Bad day at the office? Put your cup of coffee to good use!

Via dvice.com.

Just one of many arresting images from Brian Ulrich’s Dark Stores project.

From New Scientist:

Stem cell tourism – patients paying for treatment at illegal “guerrilla” clinics – continues to be a lucrative racket. Police in Hungary last week arrested four individuals they suspect of running an illegal stem cell treatment clinic in Budapest.

Reuters reported the police saying that the treatments were unproven, based on stem cells taken from embryos or aborted fetuses, and cost as much as $25,000 per person.

Gabor Bucsek, leading the police investigation, was quoted as saying that the arrests were “on suspicion of a banned use of the human body”.

More details here.

via BoingBoing

Kick-ass scupltures by Peter Jansen:

Link via makezine.com.

For those sure-footed few:

Via inventorspot.com

A couple of the five featured interfaces on Technology Review:

Touchable Holography

3D Teleconferencing

Soon to be invading Japan, again. Via nationalgeographic.com.

All I can say is I want some.

via Beyond The Beyond | Bot Junkie

Rebooting your sleep cycle? Totally possible, according to Harvard researcher Clifford Saper:

Harvard researcher Clifford Saper explains that one’s body has more than just a single clock dictating some magical eight-hour sleep period. Sleep needs are regulated in part by exposure to light, but also by food intake. By fasting for 16 hours before your breakfast in a new time zone or on a new sleep/wake schedule, or perhaps after some really rough sleep nights, one can “override” the body’s other sleep clocks that have a really aggravating way of demanding obedience. The Wise Bread blog suggests 12 hours might be a decent compromise if you can’t hold off for 16 hours, though Saper seems to suggest 16 is the magic number.

Link and video via lifehacker.com.

Parts of an essay from Susan Blackmore, via newscientist.com:

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet – a third replicator – the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

What do I mean by “third replicator”? The first replicator was the gene – the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes – the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth’s Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

…Memes are a new kind of information – behaviours rather than DNA – copied by a new kind of machinery – brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages – copying, varying and selection – are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology?

There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains. But are all three critical stages carried out by that machinery?

We’re close. We may even be right on the cusp. Think of programs that write original poetry or cobble together new student essays, or programs that store information about your shopping preferences and suggest books or clothes you might like next. They may be limited in scope, dependent on human input and send their output to human brains, but they copy, select and recombine the information they handle.

..Or think of Google. It copies information, selects what it needs and puts the selections together in new variations – that’s all three. The temptation is to think that since we designed search engines and other technologies for our own use they must remain subservient to us. But if a new replicator is involved we must think again. Search results go not only to screens for people to look at, but to other programs, commercial applications and even viruses – that’s machines copying information to other machines without the intervention of a human brain.

Memes work differently from genes, and digital information works differently from memes, but some general principles apply to them all. The accelerating expansion, the increasing complexity, and the improving interconnectivity of all three are signs that the same fundamental design process is driving them all. Road networks look like vascular systems, and both look like computer networks, because interconnected systems outcompete isolated systems. The internet connects billions of computers in trillions of ways, just as a human brain connects billions of neurons in trillions of ways. Their uncanny resemblance is because they are doing a similar job.

So where do we go from here? We humans were vehicles for the first replicator and copying machinery for the second. What will we be for the third? For now we seem to have handed over most of the storage and copying duties to our new machines, but we still do much of the selection, which is why the web is so full of sex, drugs, food, music and entertainment. But the balance is shifting.

Agree? Disagree?

Only in Japan you will find researchers that build gadgets like the Wink Glasses: the clip-on device monitors your alertness by counting how often you blink. If it senses that you are dozing out (your blink frequency decreases), the glass will become opaque – and apparently, that wakes one up. Not that it won’t work if you’re completely asleep, obviously.

Words and photo via ubergizmo.com.

For crowd control, when a single taser won’t do:

The Shockwave is meant to “de-escalate/defuse violent crowd/riot situations,” although I have a feeling that if you Taser the first wave of a crowd, it might get a lot more rowdy — especially if they see that your Shockwave is a one-shot device, or three at the most (plus you can duck).

Photo and words via crunchgear.com.

Forget the geese control it’s designed to do: if it could be developed beyond the few shots it makes, crowd control would take on a whole new meaning.