Things

I'm really getting tired of the Google soccer animations.  Part of it is that I'm not into soccer, part that their animations (not just these, but globally) frequently strike me as inane, and part of it was a comment I saw in a comic to the effect that they highlight something distressing: I no longer have the patience to wait all the way through a ten second clip.

Reading an issue of MIT Tech Review.  I had subscribed to it again, about six months ago, digitally, only to realize about three months later that  a) I was forgetting to look when a new issue 'arrived', and b) when I remembered, I had to go to their site to read it -- my RSS reader couldn't get it for me. Quelle horreur. So I told them to switch it to a paper subscription, which doubtless means that someone there marked me as a neo-Luddite.  The magazine was as always interesting, though, since this issue was almost entirely about the intersection of psychology and the workings of the brain, not that fascinating; personally, I felt a little squeamish, reading about the 'optogenetics' (I may have that word wrong) research into determining which neurons in the hypothalamus are involved with fighting, which with mating, and which (intriguingly) with both.  They're working on being able to tickle those neurons, leading to, say, a mouse becoming suddenly enraged by an inert object, or becoming abruptly amorous with the same inert object.  Okay, the concept is intriguing, but - I guess its me - I kept thinking of science fiction movies where people are remotely controlled and have little wires sticking out of their heads.  Silly, I'm sure: they'd be wireless.

Also read about a company that wants to sell a device that will plug into the diagnostic port of your car's engine, tracking info on the car's utilization and performance, streaming it on command to a smart phone. Nice.  This being America, there is another company that wants to piggyback on that driving information so as to present ads to you on that smart phone, based on how you drive.  And of course, there's the implication that the cops might be interested in that data.  Neo-ludditism starts to sound good.