Warren Ellis riffing on RFIDs, mobile phones and a singularity:
The Near Field Communication system that’ll allow you to get this stuff out of RFID tags is near-term, like within the next eight years. By 2012, in other words. We’re talking about the construction of the noosphere and literal, technological psychometry available to anyone with what will be a basic-level mobile phone. And by then, the only people without a basic mobile phone will be Alan Moore and fucking Tarzan.
What about… ?
I’ve got a small number of computer games, and I play practically none; last time I verged on addiction was probably in University, when I stayed home for a day playing Civilization (that should date me). Which might explain why I like this article, Designing Games for the Wage Slave, which argues that game makers need to make games more playable for people with no time.
Nature: Cat droppings yield chic coffee
A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world’s most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak
… The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature.…
Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born.
“It was something I was just dreaming up,” he says. “Where else do we have coffee and the cat in a similar place?” In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International1, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the faeces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.
I’m listening to a bunch of mp3s by Momus, found via his LJ (I reached him through a link to his appreciation of David Bowie) . His voice is familiar from the Bran Van 3000 song, More Shopping (there was a video, but it went away. He wasn’t wearing an eyepatch in it).
Being a heroic fantasy geek, I perked up to an odd song about Beowulf (lyrics). Looking on the web, I find He Explains:
I have no idea where this one came from. I read Beowulf at university. I think the word looks good on the page, and I’m rather drawn to the, er, otherness of Nordic epic. But in my version the hero sent to slay Grendell the monster is deformed, a monster himself. It’s not surprising, really; you don’t tangle on a regular basis with the earth’s most vile and vicious bullies without sustaining some damage. The trouble is, our deformed hero can’t get people to take him seriously. They’re too busy laughing at his ‘helplessly flailing mutant apalling prosthetic thalydomide limb’ to realise that he’s Denmark’s only hope. Actually, this song probably relates to my experience this summer of returning to my home town only to have eggs thrown at me for looking ‘different’.
And if I’m putting links to songs, I am obliged to mention William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, with Joe Jackson on backing vocals (an excerpt, but it goes as far as the first chorus. WMA file). You may shudder, I wanted more (link from Neil Gaiman, although I saw it elsewhere earlier).