Four more miscellaneous bits

Posted on by Luis Villa

Morning blogging sprint is over, nearly:

  • Tangential to the facebook privacy issues, someone posted on craigslist announcing that they were a female looking for sex. Very predictable results, except that they were a guy, and they posted all the details. Not much substance there, but funny, and maybe a bit scary for our expectations of privacy.
  • I really, really enjoyed Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End. He spoke on the subject of virtual reality at the Austin Game Conference; here is a transcript. Interesting read- stimulating, very plausible thinking about what computing UIs might look like in 20-30 years. Sample: “I am convinced that the day we really get high resolution heads up displays, most people who nowadays are carrying a bluetooth earphone and microphone would have no problem with wearing eyeglasses that gave them a heads up display of something like 4,000 by 4,000 if the infrastructure had moved along in concert. Then high resolution HUDs could be exploited. That’s an example of a highly disruptive technology. It essentially destroys all other display technology except as emergency backups.” He is thinking very, very big thoughts- that for the first time, at least that I’ve seen, aren’t completely implausible like most VRs posited by most SF authors.
  • New York continues to rock. We ate at Pukk the other night, and it was delicious, and even plausibly reasonably priced- could happily have eaten a very filling meal for $13 if we hadn’t had desert. Met tomorrow, likely. And our local crazy indy film place served up some spectacularly bizarre film for Friday night date night.
  • John Fleck, my personal master of all things media, has a fascinating observation on the relationship between blog, scholarship/academia, and media. Mike Madison has a related post here, on how law journals are turning towards the web– but all in an effort to save the law journal, instead of to actually advance scholarship.

Published by Luis Villa

4 thoughts on “Four more miscellaneous bits”

  2. Sorry, since when did high resolution eyeglasses count as very, very big thoughts? Hell, William Gibson had neat vision shades in his 1980s books. It’s an old and extremely obvious idea, and one that I’m 100% sure will never ever happen; it’s a logical extrapolation of current technology, and that’s the most dangerous prediction to make more than ten years in advance, because some smart bastard will always come along and invent something completely different in a decade which makes your future vision irrelevant.

    (This is the fundamental reason why absolutely every ‘home of the future’ exhibition ever has been completely wrong).

    You want very, very big thoughts? Try a Greg Egan book sometime. Dude can’t write for toffee. He’ll blow your mind, though.

  3. […] My friend Luis, who was thinking hard and well about this stuff before he went to law school, co-links to my recent post on the blog-media-scholarship nexus and this Mike Madison post. There apparently is a discussion afoot in academic law circles about the blog, to whit: Is it scholarship? Madison suggests the question is ill-posed: Can we talk? Have a real conversation about the future of legal scholarship? I don’t know. But there have to be some ground rules that don’t put the law review genie in the bottle. […]

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