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Blogging makes your brain bigger?

March 17, 2005 By Leave a Comment

I’ve wondered for some time what effect the richness of the internet and the enormity of information at our fingertips might be doing to our brains.

A pair of physicians that blog have conjectured that blogging itself might very well be expanding our brains. Anyone that knows me (along with the several thousand people who’ve visited my blog over the last four months) would tell you that it’s obvious my brain has shrunk!  :-)

The pair, Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, have a blog posting that asks the question: “What effect is all this blogging having on the brains of bloggers?”

They cover a few points (to which I’ve added comments of my own) such as:

  1. “Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.” I agree. If I or another blogger are going to be taken seriously and nakedly put our ideas out there for the world to see, then having them thought through and supported is a good thing
  2. “Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.” Well…I think I’m already that way to a pretty great degree, but I’ll admit that blogging has caused me to think about my ‘connecting the dots’ in even more significant and different ways
  3. “Blogs promote analogical thinking.” I concur. For me, critical thinking is to blogging as strategy is to business: you better think through your positions and actions carefully but change fast if it becomes necessary, always be flexible and, most importantly, connect the dots that others don’t.
  4. “Blogging is a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.” Quality? Some times. Those bloggers that write their opinion and back it up with research (i.e., links citing material) are more believable and almost always cite reputable sources. Access? Absolutely. I find TONS of delightful and insightful sources through bloggers.
  5. “Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.” Agree with the solitary reflection. Would with the social interaction but my blog visits haven’t yet reached critical mass nor have comments flooded in.

So you may be thinking, “Steve, looking at blogging in a singular way demonstrates that your brain HAS shrunk!” You could be right. But let me add something to that thought of yours regarding my little brain and your curiousity about whether or not it’s probable that I’m intellectually equal to a rhesus monkey.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Brain/Mind

Blogs & Podcasts: the tipping point has occurred!

March 16, 2005 By Leave a Comment

I really enjoy being ever-so-slightly ahead of the curve on trends (but not fads…as my 16 year old daughter will be happy to point out since she submits that I dress “like an old man”). After observing in early 2004 that what was going on with blogs was accelerating — and that this new way of engaging people in driving opinions, media and grassroots efforts online was going to change communications and human connections in new and fundamental ways — I got in the game with my own blog in December. I believe you have to live something experientially to truly build an intuitive understanding of a technology, movement or opportunity.

Besides straight blogs with text and images, I’ve really been enamored with the acceleration in podcasting (and, I believe quite soon, videocasting in some new form) and am thinking about this a lot every day. The compression in cost around enabling technologies and tools that are quite high quality (3-chip camcorders, audio recorders, computer software, multi-megapixel digital cameras, mobile phones with cameras) along with new web offerings (Typepad, Blogger, iPodder, Audioblog, Flickr) is driving A LOT of innovation in this space. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Innovation, Podcasting, Web 2.0

Big news for Bloggers today…

March 15, 2005 By Leave a Comment

OK…so this news goes beyond bloggers. But with the flap over leaks of Apple’s trade secrets and the court ruling against bloggers and web site owners to cough up names, yesterday and today’s news from the Washington Post has two pretty fundamental and interesting news stories that I’d construe as good news:

  • Creative Commons is Rewriting the Rules of Copyright. This is probably the best article I’ve seen yet on the actual impact of this strong new method of providing balanced protection along with fair and new use of content available digitally. This is a big deal for musicians, bloggers and others facing the death of the public domain due to draconian changes in copyright law.
  • Fake News Gets White House OK (free registration required): The gist of this article is how the White House is and has taken some fundamental liberties with the gray line between "messaging" and unethical propaganda distribution. Big media is finally calling them on it as have the bloggers for some time. Of course, with the Jeff Gannon scandal still at the forefront of everyone’s mind, the motives of our current administration are rightfully suspect meaning our need for additional watchdogging is more important than ever.
Filed Under: Blogosphere

Doom…not *my* future!

March 14, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Above are screenshots of a fairly new video game called “Doom 3” which has just been released on my preferred home platform, Macintosh. Let’s see if you can follow my cognitive leaps as I traveled the Web from viewing videos and screenshots of Doom 3, thought about the future of gaming, and ended up at a site about a bunch of developers that are building a clock that will run 10,000 years.

I’ve been stunned at the cinematic quality of video games that have come out over the last few years (especially the recent Halo2). Though I’m not a huge gamer, my son is so I have ample opportunity to watch, to play, and to be amazed with the quality level of the hardware and software coupled with the true immersive and movie-like experience within these games.

In my first post about video games (see “Video games and the internet bubble. Is it time for dot com…the sequel?“), I reminisced about the early days of gaming and my personal experience using them. Man…is it ever different today! These thoughts about how far gaming has come led to thinking about the future of virtual immersion experiences (like Halo and even online worlds like There.com) and the impact of it on learning, social interactions and more. I predict that within 3-5 years, video games will be more immersive and a better experience than movies…and bigger revenue generators too.

From there I thought about future predictions and what else was occurring in technology and, especially, in other areas of human existence. The world of 2088 was one of my first stops. Next was a brief history of the apocalypse (pretty depressing). Other visits included one of my favorite authors and futurists Ray Kurzweil; Batelle’s top ten prediction lists; Humanity’s Future; and a fun look at predictions that never happened.

Most of the above sites take fairly negative and gloomy views of the future. In fact, many of the other sites I went to are in that same vein. Then I remembered a show I’d watched some time ago that profiled Stewart Brand and his role in The Long Now Foundation. Their purpose? To build a clock that will run for 10,000 years and a library that will preserve digital media for millenia. The goal? To get the human race to think in 10,000 year increments…the long now. To do so will compel us all to think about what we do now and its impact thousands of years in to the future.

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, Technology

Internet from any electrical plug?

March 13, 2005 By Leave a Comment

This is potentially life changing in positive ways (faster internet = good) and quite possibly so negative as to negate this positive (faster internet killing HAM radio, amateur bands, maybe WiFi = bad).

If you think your cable internet connection is fast at, say, 3 megabits per second (mbps), how would you like to plug-in your computer to any electrical outlet and have a 170mbps internet connection? When I think of THAT kind of bandwidth, my immediate reaction is “Oh please, oh please” as I begin to think of what I could do with it! (Home servers, video-on-demand, etc.).

Though broadband over powerlines (BPL) has been talked about for years (and the challenges outlined have been formidable), only one key alliance of companies who’d benefit from this technology — the HomePlug Alliance — had been formed. Though Sony was a part of HomePlug, at the CeBit trade fair in Hannover, Germany, Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic) and Mitsubishi announced a technology to coordinate the use of BPL with common transport mechanisms and standards.

You may have noticed that my blog is about connecting the dots. So connect that “announcement dot” with a report (PDF) released in February from the New Millenium Research Council (NMRC) and you have opportunity meeting incentive.  NMRC has several interesting news articles written about their report including this press release from them that “2005 could be the breakthrough year for broadband over powerlines.”

It looks like BPL regulatory openings are going to happen and fast…and fulfill a promise made by George Bush during his campaign for re-election.

BPL is not without detractors like the National Association for Amateur Radio or pundits like David Coursey or the “BPL makes no sense” naysayers offering up pretty compelling arguments. I don’t purport to be an expert on the technical ramifications of BPL signal pollution interfering with amateur radio, AM, FM and more — but there is one simplistic yet compelling 3 1/2 minute video here that makes the case pretty strongly about the potential negative aspects as well as a listing of issues here.

I’m torn. My belief is that ubiquitous broadband (and fast broadband…not the wimpy stuff I have at home via cable) will undoubtedly be THE enabling technology to kickstart innovation and drive the Web 2.0 forward as it could’ve been the first time around. But if it crushes and interferes with WiMax or WiFi ubiquity, kills AM/FM & amateur radio (because, after all, powerlines are alongside most roads!) and stifles wireless innovation, we’ve got a problem. If it further hands a broadband monopoly to the inept power companies that seemingly can’t find their butts with both hands — and is shoved done our throats by the FCC and the Bush Administration without full and complete public discourse and diligence — I’d rather stay with my cable broadband (as painful as that is to say).

Filed Under: Technology

Clean water filtered with nanotechnology

March 11, 2005 By Leave a Comment

When I started this blog last December and crafted my “About” page, I described some of the observations which I’d be blogging on and nanotechnology was (and is) a highly intriguing technology to me. I’m always interested when I see any results that demonstrate manipulation and creation occurring at the molecular level. I hadn’t written about nanotech yet since there were so many other compelling items on my radar screen.

But tonight there was one specific application (using nanotechnology to filter water) that I stumbled across and it sparked my interest in writing about it. This topic also ties directly in to my post a few days ago (Could Water be the Oil of the 21st Century?) as it holds the promise of a solution to the scarcity of this precious resource.

There was a conference last September and an organization called NanoWater looking at ways to accelerate and create breakthrough filtering technologies to help solve one of the world’s most vexing problems: too many people…not enough clean water.

According to NanoWater.org’s ‘about’ page, there are attractive spinoff incentives (fuel cells, batteries, textiles, pharmaceuticals) for companies to apply nanotechnology expertise to this problem which may be enough to kickstart investment and human energy applied toward this global problem.

There is a balanced and insightful article in Wired magazine about this topic too. According to the article, one company’s filtration product, “…create(s) a permeable surface of nano-sized pores. When
pressure is exerted, water pushes through the pores but viruses and bacteria do not pass through.”

It continues, “The same technology is allowing desalination — the process of removing salts from fresh or sea water — to occur at a much greater rate. The largest desalination plant in the world will begin operating in Ashkelon, Israel, in March 2005. Israel consumes 400 million cubic meters per year more water than it has…” which means they have quite a compelling reason to focus on this promising technological fix.

Filed Under: Nanotechnology

Your brain + tunes = I can’t get that song oughta my head!

March 10, 2005 By Leave a Comment

UPDATE: Came across some fabulous stuff here, here and here.

Yet another “brain wiring” development…

In a study titled “Sound of silence activates auditory cortex” published in the March 10 issue of Nature, a Dartmouth team found that if people are listening to music that is familiar, they mentally call upon auditory imagery, or memories, to fill in the gaps if the music cuts out. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity, the researchers found that study participants could mentally fill in the blanks if a  familiar song was missing short snippets. Dartmouth release here and a good BBC News article here.

Reminds me of the big craze about the Mozart Effect that purported to change the wiring of a baby’s brain and a child’s spatial cognitive abilities. After learning of this in the late Eighties, I remember putting headphones on my wife’s stomach in 1988 when my daughter was in the womb — in the hope that classical music would somehow stimulate her cognitive function.

Maybe it worked! Our daughter is a talented musician that absolutely loves music.

Filed Under: Brain/Mind

The youngest podcaster?

March 8, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Tonight I had quite a delightful experience watching my 10 year old son Alex get excited about podcasting. He ended up creating a “radio show” about video gaming using Garageband and made me his first interview (I shared with he and his listeners my early experiences with videogames).

He was really in his element and running the gear well and he was flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants (i.e., no script) and received remarkably little coaching by me. I encouraged him on certain elements (doing a bumper at the beginning; having a slight music transition between segments; fade-in and fade-out on music, etc.) but he did 90% all by himself.

As I watched him assemble his show, I was struck once again by how much further he is cognitively and experientially with technology than I was at 10 years of age (the most sophisticated thing *I* was doing at 10 was reading Hardy Boys books by the dozens). I get pretty pumped thinking about where he’ll be by the time he hits college age and where the technology will be at that point.

Filed Under: Podcasting

Laughter: Your best workout!?!

March 7, 2005 By 1 Comment

OK…so maybe it’s not your ‘best’ workout. This article in New Scientist claims that laughing appears to be almost as beneficial as a workout in boosting the health of blood vessels.

“Thirty minutes of exercise three times a week and 15 minutes of hearty laughter each day should be part of a healthy lifestyle,” says Michael Miller of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, US, whose team has shown that laughter relaxes arteries and boosts blood flow.

In the interest of our respective arteries being relaxed and blood flow optimized, I offer you the following:

Enjoy.

Filed Under: Brain/Mind, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

Could Water be the Oil of the 21st Century?

March 6, 2005 By 1 Comment

Two and a half hours north of Minneapolis/St. Paul is Duluth, MN. Sometimes called “San Francisco of the North” (which is a HUGE stretch as far as I’m concerned), it nonetheless is the gateway to the scenic north shore of Lake Superior. I’ve spent several decades on the north shore hiking, scuba diving (some of the best wreck diving in the world is in this freshwater sea), going to the Boundary Waters Wilderness and hanging out at beautiful lodges like the one at Lutsen.

My son and I are up here for our delayed-from-last-summer Dad & Son Adventure (something we do every year) and I’m looking out at the lake which is one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. It’s mostly open water with ice around the shoreline…but is still incredibly beautiful. As I sit here, I’m comparing-and-contrasting this experience with my family’s love of Scottsdale, AZ, the beauty of the desert, our intent to have a second home there and eventually retire, all rolled together with the crisis occurring with water in the southwest (most notably the drop in water levels in the Lake Mead reservoir) and water issues throughout the world.

Consider this from the BBC site on the world water crisis:

  • Ninety-five percent of the United States’ fresh water is underground.
  • North America’s largest aquifer, the Ogallala, is being depleted at a rate of 12 billion cubic metres (bcm) a year. Total depletion to date amounts to some 325 bcm, a volume equal to the annual flow of 18 Colorado Rivers. The Ogallala stretches from Texas to South Dakota, and waters one fifth of US irrigated land.
  • Today, one person in five across the world has no access to safe drinking water, and one in two lacks safe sanitation.
  • We use about 70% of the water we have in agriculture. But the World Water Council believes that by 2020 we shall need 17% more water than is available if we are to feed the world.

So tying this back to me personally — and the dichotomy of being here by Lake Superior vs. in the desert in Scottsdale — is a discussion some time ago about potentially building a pipeline to divert water from Lake Superior to the Mississippi river (to replenish the Ogallala aquifer) or to the desert southwest to feed the thirsty inhabitants.

Thus far, it’s been defeated for environmental reasons and the Province of Ontario, Canada was one its biggest detractors. Still…the Canadian government is considering selling Canadian water. If so, it’ll be very interesting to see if water truly will be the oil of the 21st Century.

Filed Under: Earth
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