On the 8 Spot

Tonight we will be covering the 81st Academy Award live beginning at 5:00pm pt / 8:00pm et. For now, please leave your predictions in the comments below!

Here is the planned schedule according to Cinemascopian:

2009 Academy Awards Winners | /Film.

I played guitar hero the first time last night, at a house/birthday party of a friend. What struck me was the intensity of the people playing guitar hero. Let’s just say that most things we have in modern society is distractions and we seem to be concentrating so much in these distractions that we seem to lose energy to do the hard stuff, or maybe we use these distractions to not face having to deal with the hard stuff, as for me, I’m not playing guitar hero any time soon, I’ve been slowly saving up for an electric organ and in 8 month’s I’d probably saved enough for both an instrument and the turntable i’ve been dying to own.  Hope I can create stuff!

Inspired by his preteen Super-Sexual Mario Brothers project, West makes a pop-Freudian self-analysis. “People ask me a lot about my drive. I think it comes from, like, having a sexual addiction at a really young age,” he says. “Look at the drive that people have to get sex—to dress like this and get a haircut and be in the club in the freezing cold at 3 A.M., the places they go to pick up a girl. If you can focus the energy into something valuable, put that into work ethic . . . “

THE UNRAVELING OF KANYE WEST: DETAILS Article on men.style.com.

Personally I think they need to read the I,Robot novels.

The artificial morality of the robot warrior

February 21, 2009

Great strides have been made in recent years in the development of combat robots. The US military has deployed ground robots, aerial robots, marine robots, stationary robots, and (reportedly) space robots. The robots are used for both reconnaissance and fighting, and further rapid advances in their design and capabilities can be expected in the years ahead. One consequence of these advances is that robots will gain more autonomy, which means they will have to act in uncertain situations without direct human instruction. That raises a large and thorny challenge: how do you program a robot to be an ethical warrior?

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The artificial morality of the robot warrior.

scary.

Elsewhere on the robotics front, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is making good progress towards its goal of turning insects into remote-controlled surveillance and monitoring instruments. Three years ago, Darpa launched its Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) project, with the intent, as described by IEEE Spectrum, of creating “moths or other insects that have electronic controls implanted inside them, allowing them to be controlled by a remote operator. The animal-machine hybrid will transmit data from mounted sensors, which might include low-grade video and microphones for surveillance or gas sensors for natural-disaster reconnaissance. To get to that end point, HI-MEMS is following three separate tracks: growing MEMS-insect hybrids, developing steering electronics for the insects, and finding ways to harvest energy from the them to power the cybernetics.”

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Secret agent moth.

I’m turning into a stubborn luddite, ouch. Read the whole mashup, makes you think.

The free arts and the servile arts

February 22, 2009

I have taken it upon myself to mash up the words of Steve Gillmor, posted yesterday at TechCrunchIT, and the words of Andrew Louth, published in 2003 at the Times Higher Education site:

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The free arts and the servile arts.