Giant Freakin Robot

We all know what Christmas, and the holiday season in general, bring to the table. It’s a tradition that goes back a ways, and is tied to the two things that drive people the most: religion and money. But Jesus and credit card bills aside, the holiday needs some originality, perhaps ideas even a computer could think of all on its own. We need to go back to its roots and embrace that which got us into it in the first place. An 8-bit revolution! Oh yeah, I replaced “Christmas” with “video games” in the middle of that. Sorry. I’m not a holidays kind of guy.

But even I can get into the spirit behind A Puzzling Present, a Santa Claus-hopping computer game created almost entirely by an artificial intelligence program named ANGELINA, a doctoral project that may usher in a generation of artificial game design. London’s Michael Cook, a PhD student with the Computational Creativity Group at Imperial College, has in just two years taken ANGELINA from Atari-era graphics and gameplay to levels of, and I say this with all due respect, shitty NES and Flash games. Regardless of the output, which I’ll get to in a mini-review below, the input behind the game is where gamers and non-gamers can be amazed.

If you thought your cell phone’s capability to replace the pre-packaged ringtones with real songs was amazing, wait till you hear this! (This is the year 2003, isn’t it?) Though it probably won’t immediately be available for smartphones owned by the public, the technology may soon exist for handheld electronic devices to see through solid objects. But don’t you call them X-rays, cause that shit’s played.

Tiny and affordable microchips radiating terahertz waves (T-rays) are the next evolutionary step in the human race becoming an army of Supermen. The next step is obviously fashionable exo-underwear. Bringing the terahertz frequency’s potential into practical use was the project of Ali Hajimiri, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, along with postdoctoral scholar Kaushik Sengupta, as reported in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. They used the complimentary metal oxide semiconductor technology used to make the microchips in many common electronics, designing silicon chips that fit on the tip of a pinky finger, but are fully-functional at operating within the terahertz frequencies. Hajimiri says it’s “the same low-cost, integrated-circuit technology that’s used to make the microchips found in our cell phones and notepads today,” and that the chip “operates at nearly 300 times their speed.” He says it so simplistically that it makes me wonder why monkeys with typewriters haven’t written a teleplay in which the technology is invented.

Disinformation is a New York company which tells you in all kinds of ways that “Everything You Know Is Wrong,” while pulling the wool of global bureaucracy from over your blind eyes. I say that mockingly, but I’ve followed them on and off for well over a decade. It’s only gotten more interesting as time has gone by, and the world’s corruption has finally caught up with how corrupted we’ve been told it was all along. Though the Internet is filled with things like this now, they were one of the more prominent outfits to embrace all forms of media to get their point across.

Here comes the non-prodigious Dangerous Information, which asks the dangerously informative questions: “Is information dangerous?” The simple answer is, “No shit it’s dangerous.” UFC fight stats? Not dangerous information. Detailed information on how to cripple the world’s economy with an iPad? Dangerous. Danger Info recently dropped an info bomb warning the world just how potentially apocalyptic DIY drones can, and will, be, if put into the wrong hands. Or the right hands. Due to the switch from British female voiceover to digitally manipulated male voice — belonging to a handkerchief-masked bandit performing the experiment — I can’t tell what the cheekiness factor of this video is. Watch for yourself and judge.

My views on anti-consumerism have thrown in the flag when it comes to TV commercials and ad campaigns in general, which have not only taken over all forms of media, but are fully integrated into our everyday lives at nearly every waking moment. As Internet bloggers, we at GFR are walking ads, forcing people to frequent the site by poking them with live and rubber chickens in alternating patterns, at least until Josh or David gets that mind-manipulation grandfather clock project completed. If that sounds like a strange tactic, consider the patent Verizon filed that was recently, and thankfully, rejected by the U.S. Patent Office.

The patent’s “non-final” rejection actually means the company can tinker with the product and try again, but we’ll collectively hope that never happens. If you think I’ve been vague about what the patent is, consider Verizon’s bullshit patent application title: “Methods and Systems for Presenting an Advertisement Associated with an Ambient Action of a Use.” And if you mix around some of the letters in there and add a “k,” you’ll get SKYNET!

Verizon’s controversial invention would be a TV set-top box that has the camera and microphone technology to turn basically anything that it electronically sees and hears into tag words for a ridiculously specific type of ad targeting. If you are alone, with a partner, a group of people, or even if it’s just you and your dog, you are all data. If you are singing, dancing, eating, drinking, fighting, fish-slapping, backpacking, or box-stacking, your actions are data. If you are a man, woman, white, black, Chinese, blonde, tall, handicapped, cyborg, or bald, your features are data. Everything is data. Everything is Verizon.