Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.

The incident itself is hilarious, but this description (by then Press Secretary) is pure genius.

Also on e-poetry, there will be a work by Maria Mencía in which I was a technical collaborator. ^^

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

[...]

Ritter’s report will warn that an unreliable internet is merely a toy. “For business purposes, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it’s useless,” he said.

So, bandwidth is becoming scarce again. We heard all this less than a decade ago: sure, the Internet as it was could still be used for e-mail (the object of choice for derisive comparisons), but when media-rich applications came around, which were just around the corner, things would change. Videoconference research by 2002 assumed expensive hardware and expensive pay-by-minute corporate plans; telephony might change its piping radically, but would still end up being charged as usual; video would be bought and downloaded on-demand. The bubble burst only reinforced the notion that the Internet business model was untenable, and that it was just a matter of time till online services were normalized into the old modes.

Sure, it is possible that at some point availability will be overcome by demand. There will come a time the tubes will be clogged, and we will have to unearth all those regrettable QoS protocols of yore, perhaps even the beast that went by the name of RSVP, and leave anarchic ol’ Internet for people who use email. I suspected at the time, though, and even moreso now, that this was not so much about a short-sightedness over the exponential growth of transmission capacity (brought by innovation in software as well as in hardware), but that there was an eagerness to see infrastructural scarcity back into the game. It was a problem people saw too big an opportunity to cash in with. One will need to do better than this to scare the public into buying it - once people do, though, there will be no technological revolution to revert it.

Title: Dead pixel in Google Earth
Year: 2008
82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

—

Bruce Sterling once wrote the sentence: “It’s war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace.” And much else besides.

He could write the next Palmer Eldritch, which he won’t; he will still be the guy who once wrote the sentence: “It’s war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace.”

—

I would like to found the José Saramago Award for the obvious and heavy-handed, so that I could hand it to Richard Powers every year. I read Galatea 2.2 a few years ago; when I think of its last 50 pages - I’m being literal here: my jaw still locks, my teeth are still grinded.

—

Up to this date, William Gibson still thinks that Japan is the future.

—

Sure, you can add the cyber- prefix to the once fashionable word punk. You can associate yourself with Philip K Dick, the adorable schizophrenic hack. But Science Fiction, quote unquote, is perenially haunted by the ghost of Isaac Asimov. Being into it indicates an Asimoviness of the soul. The didacticism, the will to enlighten; the authoritarian exercise of the hypothetical society, with a clear-cut moral lesson in the end; the surrendering fascination-cum-despair over the thought of giant robots fighting. Daze over gimmicks, gadgets and devices (the most interesting thing about Batman is the bat-belt, right?). Nerds trying to be hip but never wavering nerdy self-righteousness, desire for control, anxiety, anal-retentiveness:  more heavy metal bands, more adventures of Hiro Protagonist.

—

Which is a pity; what is there to write about, in 2009, that is not about technology? That is not, in a certain sense, also science fiction?

Of course, producing such pictures of minors amounts to child pornography, even if the photographer is himself underage and the victim, himself. So teens are being brought to court over such self-pics. If found guilty, they are, you know, child molesters. Besides the jail time, and the social stigma, they are forced, for example, to keep a certain distance from schools and other places minors dwell. Note that in most Western countries, possessing these pictures and videos is also in itself a crime.

Zany, isn’t it? And 1 in  5 teens, report says. But let us stop for a moment and consider: what exactly needs to be changed in the laws? What legislation would cope reasonably with this new situation? You see, that’s not such an easy question.

(And by the way: declaring that “post-modernism is dead” makes little sense; po-mo was, among other things, when we became skeptical about metanarratives - periodization and the Zeitgeist being clear examples. In other words: post-modernism is when you realise that the avant-garde artist arguing that the current style is dead and must be replaced by the kind of stuff he makes - for such are the times, so dictates History - is just silly.)

meanwhile, there’s this and this.