Pants-a-Pundit

Two pundit pantsings for you today.

• Ray Kurzweil Response to "Ray Kurzweil's Failed 2009 Predictions"

  First, an amusing stoush between Ray Kurzweil and one Michael Anissimov. Quibbling with Kurzweil might be dangerous - after all, one wouldn't want to be left behind when the nerd rapture arrives - but by my reading he had the easy predictions right, and the difficult predictions wrong enough to have to rationalise and re-interpret his way around things. My advice to tech pundits is to avoid prose at all costs - stick to heavily allegorical verse, preferably in 16th century French. It makes these things so much easier.

• Participatory media and why I love it (and must defend it)

  Caterina Fake's response to the ridiculous piece Jaron Lanier somehow managed to get into the Wall Street Journal recently. I guess it's not terribly surprising that the mainstream media finds it difficult to figure out who's worth listening to in the technical community, but I'm still occasionally surprised just how far chutzpah and self-promotion can get you.

Tech talks

• 2009 Reflections | Projections

  A set of interesting video talks by people like Alex Martelli, Bram Moolenaar, Don Stewart, Douglas Crockford.

Visualisation

• The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbulb

  Some really spectacular ray-traced renderings of a 3D analogue to the Mandelbrot Set.

• A visualisation of W3schools.com's historical browser statistics

  An innovative circular layout. More cool than useful, though - it's too hard to compare browser share between years.

• allrgb.com - images containing all of the RGB colour space

  "The objective of allRGB is simple: To create images with one pixel for every rgb-color (16777216 to be exact); not one color missing, and not one color twice." Pointless, playful and perfect. I've contributed my Hilbert Curve portrait - when I get around to it, I'll add some more space-filling curve visualisations.

• Visualising Prime Numbers

  An interesting way to visualise a prime number sieve. And, begorra, all done in Autocad.

Security

• How unique is your browser fingerprint?

  A nice way to drive home the point.

• Google et al's proposal to extend the DNS protocol.

  Why is this under security, you ask? Well, I quote from the blog post: "Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy." Dear Google - one or more of those words do not mean what you think they mean. Lets have fun speculating which ones.

• Selected Papers in Anonymity

  A nice collection of papers on privacy and anonymity.