ninme

“HOLY sh[*]ts. Go to google maps and search for SF then click the street view thing”

I found the bench where I ate a crepe when I was in the city the other week. Relive your San Francisco experiences too!

“Holy crap, good job Kotaku on the utterly unknown British TV reference:”

Kotaku - Doak: British Government Driving Industry Out Of Business

“I’m stunned.”

Click to see why! And why the British government is making an ass of itself this time.

I Can Has Cheezburger - Invisible dining chair

This is the best “invisible” of them all, I think.

Peter likes the future. I like horses.

Fortune Magazine - The smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth
Ray Kurzweil is a legendary inventor with a history of mind-blowing ideas. Now he’s onto something even bigger. If he’s right, the future will be a lot weirder and brighter than you think.

(Fortune Magazine) — If you went around saying that in a couple of decades we’ll have cell-sized, brain-enhancing robots circulating through our bloodstream or that we’ll be able to upload a person’s consciousness into a computer, people would probably question your sanity. But if you say things like that and you’re Ray Kurzweil, you get invited to dinner at Bill Gates’ house - twice - so he can pick your brain for insights on the future of technology. The Microsoft chairman calls him a “visionary thinker and futurist.”

Kurzweil is an inventor whose work in artificial intelligence has dazzled technological sophisticates for four decades. He invented the flatbed scanner, the first true electric piano, and large-vocabulary speech-recognition software; he’s launched ten companies and sold five, and has written five books; he has a BS in computer science from MIT and 13 honorary doctorates (but no real one); he’s been inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame and charges $25,000 every time he gives a speech - 40 times last year.

Nice work if you can get it.

He has plenty more ideas that may seem Woody Allen - wacky in a “Sleeper” kind of way (virtual sex as good as or better than the real thing) and occasionally downright disturbing à la “2001: A Space Odyssey” (computers will achieve consciousness in about 20 years). But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true.

Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening). His current vision goes way, way past the web, of course. But at least give the guy a hearing. “We are the species that goes beyond our potential,” he says. “Merging with our technology is the next stage in our evolution.”

He’s Joe Morton in T2, and I’m Linda Hamilton out to stop him. No, just kidding. I’m way too lazy to take the future into my own hands. I mean, did you see how ripped she was in that movie?

Oh, oh, nothing to do with the article, but the Sarah Connor in me has just relented:

Kurzweil never left the Boston area after college. He and his wife, Sonya, live in a suburb about 20 minutes west of the city in a house they bought 25 years ago. Both of his children are grown and out of the house - Ethan, 28, is at Harvard Business School and Amy, 20, is at Stanford - so it’s just the two of them and 300 or so cat figurines. (Kurzweil says he likes the way cats always seem to be “calmly thinking through their options.”)

I always knew he was a good guy. Even if he is planning on never dying. (You’ll have to read the whole thing. It comes down to vitamins and antioxidants, apparently.) (At least he’s not a vegan.)