Four short links: 19 November 2018
Partial Time, Black Mirror, Implant Usability, and Open Source Game
- Time is Partial — Even though time naturally feels like a total order, studying distributed systems or weak memory exposes you, head on, to how it isn’t. And that’s precisely because these are both cases where our standard over-approximation of time being total limits performance—which we obviously can’t have.
- Black Mirror, Light Mirror: Teaching Technology Ethics Through Speculation (Casey Fiesler) — This is not a new idea, and I’m certainly not the only one to do a lot of thinking about it (e.g., see “How to Teach Computer Ethics Through Science Fiction”), but I wanted to share two specific exercises that I use and that I think are easily adaptable.
- How I Lost and Regained Control of My Microchip Implant (Vice) — After a year of living with a totally useless NFC implant, I kind of started to like it. That small, almost imperceptible little bump on my left hand was a constant reminder that even the most sophisticated and fool-proof technologies are no match for human incompetence. (via Slashdot)
- System Syzygy — open source puzzle game for Mac, Windows, and Linux. (via Andrew Plotkin)
