Apr 10
lindsayrgwattTechnology google voice, microsoft tag, mobile
I love learning about new technologies, even when I don’t really know what they’ll be useful for. Here’s a great example: if you know what the image below is, then you can call me.
Huh? The image above is a Microsoft Tag – a four colour bar code. It’s similar to the QR codes you may occasionally see around (most notably on mandarin orange boxes). However, it’s got two advantages:
1) It works in both low light and if you’ve got a poor camera on your phone (those QR codes can be really tough to read with the crappy camera on your iPhone)
2) They can be set to trigger actions: go to a url, download contact info, send a text or place a call
I’ve set the one above to call me. But, you won’t actually get ‘my’ phone number. Instead, it’s going to place a call to Google Voice. It’ll call my Voice number, which will then ring both my work phone and my cell phone. However, it will only call my work number during business hours and it won’t call my cell phone late at night when I should be sleeping. And, if you start spam calling me, I’ll add you to my list of blocked callers, so you’ll just get voicemail instead.
Kind of cool, eh? Add the tag reader app to your phone and give me a call if you want to talk about it more.
Apr 04
lindsayrgwattRandom stupidity
These two photos are just so ridiculous that they had to get re-posted here. God bless the power of the Internet for letting me:
a) Discover things like this
b) Share them with you
Apr 04
lindsayrgwattUncategorized
This weekend my bro put me onto a new site – Arts & Letters Daily. It’s basically intellectual brain candy: every day they cull what they perceive as ‘the best’ from a variety of newspapers and serve it up to you.
I was struck today by an article about which words have been around since the Ice Age. Researchers in the U.K. have been working on determining which words were likely used by our ancient predecessors. Their conclusion: “I”, “who”, “thou”, “two”, “three” and “five”.
What struck me about the article, though, was that the author’s tried to use their model to predict which words are most likely to disappear from English in the future. Top of the list: “throw”, “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze”. They do so by calculating the linguisitic history of words and essentially determining how rapidly the words have changed from common ancestors.
However, I couldn’t help but wonder how their model would account for the pace of change of technology. Think about it: until the 1500s, few people could read. In the mid-1800s, newspapers became mass media and now everyone is literate and surrounded by the written word: the web, newspapers, books, magazines, ads, etc. Does this proliferation of media actually make it less likely that words will change? Will it freeze our language as is and make it more likely that humans 10,000 years in the future will be able to converse with us?
Or will something else keep our language dynamic? Maybe globalization will lead to us all speaking a balkanized English where each country’s native tongue
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