jmcmichael

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens →

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

Public Computing and the Next Gang-of-Four →

The “Gang of Four” theory is one of the most interesting features of the modern consumer IT industry. In an article in TechCrunch in May, Eric Schonfeld sketched out the basic idea:

Every technology era has its four horsemen driving growth and innovation. In the 1990s it was Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Dell. Today, there is a new “gang of four,” as Google chairman Eric Schmidt puts it. They are Google (of course), Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and they are behind the consumer revolution on the Internet today.

Is the Gang of Four phenomenon real? In what way? Under what conditions do such gangs appear? When do membership shifts occur in the gang? Can we find the same dynamic in the brick-and-mortar world?

When you apply the Gang-of-Four theory and attempt to predict the future, you get an interesting conclusion: the next epoch of computing, dominated by a new Gang of Four, will be public computing. So the progression goes: personal computing, social computing, public computing. Too glib? Try my arguments on for size and decide for yourself.

-Venkatesh Rao, from his The Electronic Leviathan blog on Forbes.com

Steve Jobs: LSD Was One of The Best Things I've Done in My Life →

Speaking about his youthful experiments with psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”  He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s mantra was”Think different.” Jobs did. And he credited his use of LSD as a major reason for his success.

After approving NBC buyout, FCC Commissioner becomes Comcast lobbyist →

Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC.

The news, reported this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Politico, comes after the hugely controversial merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year. At the time, Baker objected to FCC attempts to impose conditions on the deal and argued that the “complex and significant transaction” could “bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms.”

In this March 24, 2011 aerial photo taken by a small unmanned drone and released by AIR PHOTO SERVICE, damaged Unit 3, left, and Unit 4 of the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are seen in Okumamachi, Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan. (Air Photo Service Co. Ltd., Japan)

(see the whole set at cryptome.org)

HBGary & Aaron Barr might have been brought down by a 16 year old girl →

“The girl known on chat forums as ‘k, and who spoke to me by e-mail as “Kayla,” is no figment of the Internet’s imagination: she helped all but destroy a company. When Aaron Barr, the now-former CEO of software security firm HBGary Federal, claimed in a press report that he could identify members of the Anonymous collective through social media, she and four other hackers broke into his company’s servers in revenge, defacing his Web site, purging data and posting more than 50,000 of his emails online for the world to see, all within the space of 24 hours.”

- Parmy Olson, in Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

Once we create the facility to lawfully intercept terrorist communications, or to speedily take down copy-right-infringement or to interdict pirate software, or to remotely prevent bad radios from running, we create the tools by which tyrants, crooks, snoops and jerks will spy on and control us, even if for the best of reasons.

— Cory Doctorow, from his talk A Little Bit Pregnant: Why it’s a Bad Idea to Regulate Computers the Way We Regulate Radios, Guns, Uranium and Other Special-Purpose Tools

Renesys confirms that the 13 globally routed Libyan network prefixes were withdrawn at 23:18 GMT (Friday night, 1:18am Saturday local time), and Libya is off the Internet. →

Hand-built motorcycle designer/mechanic Shinya Kimura serves as the protagonist for this poetic documentary about creativity, workmanship, and riding.

An image of the SiTime SI8002AC MEMs gyroscope, similar to the one in the iPhone 4’s gyroscope.