Slate: “Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.” “Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting “enter” to get our next fix.”

Slate: “Desperately Seeking Something.” “Slate magazine has an article on ‘how the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting’ which has become remarkably popular but buys into the dopamine myth and misapplies it to the nebulous concept of ‘information’. The piece is, on the surface, quite appealing because it seems to give a more sophisticated account of the dopamine = pleasure myth of old, suggesting instead that dopamine really equals seeking and it’s the system that motivates us to search out rewards…. This theory is not without its problems by the way, and it shouldn’t be assumed that this is really how it is.”

ZDNet: “Robots Make Themselves at Home.” “And you can expect a lot more chore-minded robots moving in to homes and workplaces in the not-too-distant (and not-so-sci-fi) future, as prices come down and capabilities go up. (The Roomba 650 sells for US$380.) NextGen Research has estimated that the worldwide market for consumer-oriented service robots will hit US$15 billion by 2015.”

Wired/Bruce Sterling: “Wiremap by Albert Hwang.” “It’s a video-projection augment installation. It blasts video onto simple white strings so that they look like a wireframe. Except they’re not inside a screen, they’re, like, standing there in the middle of the actual room.”

Sine wave program on Wiremap from Albert Hwang on Vimeo.

Wired/Bruce Sterling: “Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems.” Liking the convenient’ yet deeply monstrous aspects of this chimeric mashup of screens, augment popups, and everyday home appliances. Watch the boys from the lab turn a formerly-simple coffee table into a remote control for the remote controls!”

Wired/Bruce Sterling: “Augmented contact lenses.” “Tiny electromechanical MEMS hardware stuck to the surface of my eyeballs …
but the man’s right, that IS feasible. It doesn’t violate any laws of physics (except that you have to *beam some wireless power into them* — ouch…)”