Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I've been wondering where the new front page background on Dopplr was. There was something very familiar about it, but there are lots of airports in the world.

Then I found a gallery of photographs at Gadling, a look at some of the best airport architecture around. One picture caught my eye - the original for that image on Dopplr.

No wonder it was familiar, it was the recently remodelled concourse at Seattle-Tacoma. The original picture shows the wonderful spiralling sculpture that fills the void behind the coffee bar. The sculpture is rather amazing: a mobile composed of small plastic toys, it's a 3D image of a bald eagle reaching for a salmon, and its reflection. The rippled reflection is made out of fish, the bird of soaring gulls. Suddenly you realise that some of the outlying components aren't fish or birds - instead they're random plastic toys.



The photo is marypcb's - from her excellent Airport Art group on Flickr. It's a small community, but growing, now with nearly 100 members and over 300 shared images.

And if anyone wants a Dopplr invite, drop me a line...

What did they put in this year's flu vaccine? They must be expecting something pretty nasty, as I had a shot this morning, and it's left me wiped out for the rest of the day...

In other news, while dinking around the interwebs I came across an Arthur C. Clarke short short on Forbes' site as part of its Futures special (I suspect taking a leaf from Nature's book) - The View from 2500 AD

Fortunately, technology--which had caused the problem--came to the rescue. With the development of reliable psychological probes, any suspected individual could now be painlessly and accurately interrogated, by being asked to answer a series of questions. Most of these would be innocuous, but some were obvious lies, which the subject would be asked to repeat in order to calibrate the "Psi-probe."

The next step was a highly controversial one. Individuals were selected at random and interrogated painlessly, then rewarded for their cooperation. The difficulty here was determining the size of the sample needed in any given nation, to make sure that the overall result was accurate.

One outcome of this--the greatest psychological survey in the whole of history--was to demonstrate conclusively that the chief danger to civilization was not merely religious extremism but religions themselves. This was summed up in a famous saying: "All Religions were invented by the Devil to conceal God from Mankind."

Billions of words of pious garbage spoken by statesmen, clerics and politicians down the ages were either hypocritical nonsense or, if sincere, the babbling of lunatics. The new insights enabled by the Psi-probe helped humans finally recognize organized religions as the most malevolent mind virus that had ever infected human minds.