Technology and "The Hunger Games"

Discovery News takes a look at technology in The Hunger Games movie, and ponders the implications of the technologies that were chosen to be part of the story's environment:

Some question why a post-apocalyptic North America filled with futuristic technologies would still rely upon coal for its electricity needs; others wonder about the story's complete absence of the Internet. One character in "The Hunger Games" books complains about "forgotten" military technologies such as high-flying planes, military satellites and robotic drones, even as he rides inside a hovercraft.
Such "gaps" in technology don't necessarily represent plot holes, according to historians of science and technology. Real societies have adopted or rejected technologies based on whether they suited their particular economic, political or cultural circumstances.

How Much Coffee Should I Drink?

I'm picking up this app today: How to Optimize your Caffeine Intake

Distractions - More Annoying Than You Think

The Dish points me towards an explanation of why we're dissatisfied at work, quoting Casey Schwartz writing about Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn:

We've been trained to assume that working hard means focusing on a single task to completion, then doing it again. But, says Davidson, "the new workplace requires different forms of attention than the workplace we were trained for."
The result is that we feel anxious and guilty, convinced we’re not getting enough done, not achieving an honest day’s work... As Davidson puts it, "We’ve inherited a sense of efficiency modeled on attention that is never pulled off track."
But these days, according to research, "the contemporary worker switches tasks an average of once every three minutes."

I know that after a typical day, in addition to feeling exhausted, sympathize with this view. It's probably what leads people in my generation or younger to start screening their phone calls, waiting to answer emails, etc.

Pay with Your Face

And SciFi-ideas start to come true: This article ponders if the iPhone 5 will enable mobile payments for goods by "leveraging the user's face as a security token, unlike plastic cards which typically need receipt signatures." Fascinating, Captain.

What happens if you hurt your face? Cut yourself shaving?

We are Technology

Some typically fascinating thoughts from a William Gibson interview:

So if someone is born now into this global world, do you think they even have a native culture?
One of the things that’s unknowable is how humanity will use any new technology. ... Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were.
I’m sitting here at age 52 with almost all of my own teeth. That didn’t used to happen. I’m a cyborg. I’m immune to any number of lethal diseases by virtue of technology. I’m sitting on top of this enormous pyramid of technology that starts with flint hand-axes and finds me in a hotel in Austin, Texas, talking to someone thousands of miles away on a telephone and that’s just what we do. At this point, we don’t have the option of not being technological creatures.

Open Letter to the Makers of AllSportGPS

I bought your iPhone application about a year ago, and was very happy with it for three quarters of a year. Then something happened and the program stopped working correctly. It tells me that I was resting when I was running. It takes forever to lock onto the GPS. All in all, it no longer does anything that I want it to do, so i'm removing it from my phone in favor of a better exercise tracking application. Next time, try paying some attention to the performance of your application.

Facebooking one another for real in the fading summer light

Gary Shteyngart has an intelligent and fun - if somewhat overblown - essay about being over connected and what it does to your mindset. My favorite part:

With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another. With each passing year, scientists estimate that I lose between 6 and 8 percent of my humanity, so that by the close of this decade you will be able to quantify my personality. By the first quarter of 2020 you will be able to understand who I am through a set of metrics as simple as those used to measure the torque of the latest-model Audi or the spring of some brave new toaster.

I enjoyed his 2003 novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook, although it didn't blow me away, but haven't read anything else by him yet.