Wow, sometimes I am totally stoked to be living in the 21st century:

Google Earth to allow Exploration of Oceans, Mars

YES! How exciting.

But sometimes, I am both stoked and totally frightened:

'Fantastic Voyage' Revisited: The Pill That Navigates

Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has developed a prototype for a pill that can be programmed to navigate toward a specific trouble spot in the body and deposit its medicine there, radioing dispatches to the doctor as it travels.

This is HUGE. But eek, scary implications for things like biological weapons, suicide bombers, privacy, and personal freedom.

On a side note about personal freedom, oy vey, guess which catalog arrived for me at my generally gun-shy workplace?

Trevor and I also got one at home a few days ago, and I was wracking my brain thinking about how we could have gotten on their list, until I got the one at work today. We had bought each other these sweet tactical flashlights last year (I shipped his to my work), so it's obvious Surefire thinks we are militia members and our names got sold to into proper channels!

But truth be told, as someone who loves authentic (and vintage) military equipment, cheap ammo, and shooting mad guns, the catalog is RAD. But there are some creepy things in there. Like the Kuwait Liberation Medal, "awarded to members of the U. S. Armed Forces who participated in the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi forces between 1990 and 1993."

I suppose there are collectors of that kind of stuff, but c'mon, you just know who else, among others, is buying this stuff and why. Thinking about it makes me do the wince and squirm that I do when other people are embarrassing themselves!

Mail Goggles Might Prevent Email Regrets

If you're the kind of person who types tipsy and regrets it in the morning, Google's "Mail Goggles," a new test-phase feature in the free Gmail service, might save you some angst.

The Goggles can kick in late at night on weekends. The feature requires you to solve a few easy math problems in short order before hitting "send." If your logical thinking skills are intact, Google is betting you're sober enough to work out the repercussions of sending that screed you just drafted.

And if you can't multiply two times five, you'll probably thank Google in the morning.











[Y]ou can set up Mail Goggles to protect you from yourself at other emotionally vulnerable times — before your morning coffee, for example, or right after "Grey's Anatomy."

Once enabled, you can adjust when Mail Goggles is active in Settings.





I understand why relying on a computer program to pinch hit for someone's lack of common sense, foresight, and discretion is attractive in this, our godforsaken 21st century, but I also think of it as another notch in the belt of the infantilization of our culture.

Have a program take care of your drunken, slobbery lack of self control, and pretty soon you won't be able to control yourself when you're just in need of coffee or the traffic was bad on the way to work. And if you're so damaged you write shitty emails while at the same time forgetting simple math, you need consequences just so you can learn from them, and maybe gain some self-respect, you big baby!

Hey, I'm not all fascist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps bitch about this. I recognize that people are human, not machines. Part of being human is about making mistakes and forgiveness. So what if you send the occasional less than wonderful email when you're vulnerable? But, on the same token, being human is also about weeding out folks in your life who are perpetually less than wonderful. I need the rash and unfiltered populace as my yardstick!

Anyway, please, people, take some responsibility for yourselves. Man up!

Saturday was the day that happens every couple of months or so when I take a mammoth thrifting trip to San Francisco and hit the flagship Goodwill in SoMa and then coast along through the Mission, stopping in at Thrift Town, on my way to the Ocean and Mission Goodwill in the Excelsior District.

Sorry about the non-scenic view of the last link -- it seems StreetView isn't quite down yet with the Excelsior District. Pity, because besides being a home for tons of ethnic restaurants and shops, there are always some cool things to see there.

Like today, for instance:






































BTW, have I told y'all lately that I am loving my iPhone? I love having internet, email, texting, mobile, and a frikken camera yo!

I know, I know --I quote Mr. Lynch: "It's such a sadness, that you think you've [taken a photograph] with your fucking telephone!"

I am so riding the train to douchedom.

You have to check out this interactive subway map -- based on Tokyo's excellent subway map and system -- that details the world's top 200 Web sites, color-coded by genre. It is fitting that the Googleverse gets the all-night hot spots of Shinjuku and Shibuya. Too cool.

I love the trains in Japan. And while I hate noise pollution, a big part of my love for Nihon no densha (aside from the fact that they are almost never late) are the musical codes for when the train is arriving, departing, etc. A friend of mine once made a video of his travels in Japan and he ended it with the song for an incoming train. It actually brought a tear to my eye. Sounds strange, I know, but hearing it always makes me want to be there at this very moment.

So ingrained is the Japanese railway system in my mind with good times that I am very very tempted to purchase this crazy Yamanote Line clock. Green like the Yamonote line traincars and map route, it features the stations around the face and wakes you with the song for a departing train. Brilliant.

Christmas is only 4 months away. Just sayin'.

Contrary to a previous post about fears that Google will soon be so pinpointy in the all-seeing arena that they will be able to report to local authorities whether or not your pores are dirty -- I see that they are instead putting their Eye of Sauron to good use.

Bravo, Goog! Humanitarian work is A-OK. But, like countless others...













...ironically, yes, and *ahem* with you as my current primary search engine, email client, and blog platform. But nonetheless!

Whoa, been over to Google Maps lately and checked out the new "Street View?" Holy smokes, I don't know whether to cry with joy or laugh in terror.

Street View allows you to navigate video stills of streets as if you were walking them (only major streets in cities in the SF Bay Area, and other major streets in a handful of American and Canadian cities, have been thus mapped as of this writing). You can also pan 360 degrees and zoom to the level that you can see the face of a person walking on the sidewalk.












The joy: so frikken cool, and I've already had a ball looking at my friends' neighborhoods and homes. I look forward to navigating cities I've never visited and might not ever, like Sao Paulo in Brazil or any number of places in Australia, and of course finally seeing what it looks like around where some of my online friends live.

But the joy is also the terror. People are already squawking about privacy issues and the ever-growing possibility of Google becoming the all-seeing big bad, in cahoots with evil corporations, evil governments, NAMBLA, all of the former, or [insert not-as-all-seeing, but with a compliant Goog, as-equally-big-bad average citizen nemesis here] to divide us from our hard-earned cash, put us in jail, take away our [speech, guns, porno, etc.], indoctrinate our children, or other equally wicked wickedness.

I know we've all watched and read enough sci-fi to be concerned about the implications of anything that may sow the seeds of dystopia, but is it really that much of a problem? In this increasingly web-based world, is Mr. Murdoch tracking your every word on MySpace and selling it to The Gap more or less sinister than your husband possibly seeing you kiss your lover goodbye in your driveway on Street View?

I guess the question is less that than this: in this increasingly web-based world, are we becoming too comfortable, and it is time to start reining in our personal presence on the web? Or should we just trust and realize that to live in a reasonable manner you'll never be off the grid entirely, so just roll with (or without) caution?