They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Competition can be a very a good thing.

Google+, after a little initial hiccup, rolled out a highly functional mobile app (Android’s was more functional than the iPhone’s, from what I hear) with resharing, user tagging, and a nice interface. Facebook now responds with v1.7 for Android  after a number of incremental updates, albeit slowly, with tagging, a photo swipe interface, and a slightly more functional design, the former of which features should have been available a long time ago. Maybe Facebook would have done this eventually anyway, but their app has been notoriously mediocre for quite awhile now, until  today.

The more users Google or any other social network can siphon from Facebook the better.  If Facebook continues to feel meaningful pressure from its competitors, Zuckerberg’s crew will continue to add features and improve their own service.

Now if Google would only integrate Reader with Google+ I’d be … Read more

Water in the Pill

Pharmacist Scott Gavura reviews a paper titled “Against Homeopathy — A Utilitarian Perspective” from the journal Bioethics about when it might be ethical to use homeopathy in a clinical  setting.

Homeopathy is based on the “theory” that “like cures like.”  In essence, find a substance that produces symptoms similar to those of a cold, and that substance should help to cure the cold itself.  Furthermore, homeopathy states that the more a substance is diluted in water the  more potent it becomes, which is, of course, bunk.  Claims like these (and those of many other homeopathic fantasies) fly in the face of everything we know about basic physics.  (Here is a search for “homeopathy” from Neurologica Blog; Steven Novella has done more writing on the topic than anyone else I know of, and his blogs are a terrific resource for anyone interested in the evolving fight … Read more

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurleif/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

There are too many stimuli and no way to unhook from the Delivery System.  Every thirty seconds or so, TweetDeck chirps and notifies me that some Twitter entity or another has posted something to the web.  Facebook is running and constantly updating itself with video, status updates, and one friend who is rebuking me for becoming part of the background noise.  He doesn’t know that I’ve downloaded the Twitter plug-in that updates my Facebook status whenever I write a tweet, nor does he know that Brief, my Firefox RSS reader, keeps flashing feed updates at me for no good reason.  If I am constantly disseminating information, it is, perhaps, only as a form of purgation lest I suffer neuronal overload and slip into a vegetative state.

I can’t help it.  Neither can most of us who’ve fallen victim.  That we will suffer enlarged … Read more

When George Orwell’s famous protagonist from 1984, Winston Smith, begins to read The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, supposedly penned by the revolutionary Emmanuel Goldstein, Orwell writes that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know. Granted, Winston arrives at this revelation while hiding from the eyes [and telescreens] of the oppressive government of Oceania, but despite the obvious political differences between 1984 and life in our Information Age, Lawrence Lessig’s Code: Version 2.0 (also known as Codev2) often elicits the same sensation and serves, in no small part, to vocalize many of our nagging intuitions and fears about the internet.

When the World Wide Web first popped up in the late 1980s and 90s, there was a feeling that this was the new Wild West, that cyberspace would be unregulated and anonymous for the rest of its days. I was … Read more