Charles Stross' Diary (RSS Feed)
02-23-2008, 02:54 PM
Cows with blogs.
Yes, that was the subject of conversation in the pub last night. I can't provide any URLs, but I am assured that the dairy industry in Scotland is extremely interested in fitting their herd with telemetry to track everything from their location (via GPS) to their blood pressure, activity levels, and possibly even emotional state: an eventual goal is that the subjects of this exercise will effectively become spimes (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/26/bruce-sterlings-desi.html). As Bruce Sterling (who coined the term) explains it, "a Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities." Presumably the blogging bovines would emit an RSS feed that their owners could browse (or should that be "graze"?) in order to determine that Daisy has gotten into the bottom field again, or is overdoing the clover.
NB: I want the wikipedia admins to know that I am very annoyed that someone has deleted the wikipedia article on spimes. It's all very well to do the housekeeping, but it's gone too far when useful resources are being erased before I can link to them from my blog, dammit.
(I ascribe the subsequent conversation about GM cows with nitrated oligosaccharides in their milk, and the utility of explosive blogging bovines in any future Pakistan/India conflict, to a combination of beer and jet lag.)
Meanwhile, it has been reported that dwarfs represent a growing crime problem in Sweden (http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2696358.html?menu), with thieves robbing long distance coaches by sneaking miniature accomplices into the luggage compartments inside sports bags. Mind you, that's positively mundane compared to the nude wet meat soil bandit's antics (http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=20080&in_page_id=2) in Cool, California.
I was going to try and say something sensible about the Dyatlov Pass incident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident), but just the facts of the matter beggar the imagination. Sort of like a Russian Blair Witch Project, only it actually happened, kinda-sorta.
And I've been brain-wormed by a phrase from nowhere — "I'd sleep with the teddy tonight if it didn't smell so strange". I don't know what it means, don't really know where it came from, and I wish it would go away. (I think it wants to hatch into a story, but I'm not ready to write it yet because I think it also wants to be ... gruesome.)
If all this sounds a bit dazed and incoherent, it's because it's a grab bag of my current jet-lagged preoccupations (leaving aside the research into penile degloving injuries, the future of spam, and browsing wikileaks (http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks)). I'm still a bit disoriented, and I think I'm going to spend the next day putting my feet up with some easy reading. I've just received the galley proofs to SATURN'S CHILDREN (due out July 1st!) and I should really get to work checking them, then pick up tools and crack on with THE REVOLUTION BUSINESS, but all this intercontinental travel and sleep deprivation has left me feeling like a character out of one of William Gibson's more recent novels. And you know what? Living inside that man's head is No Fun At All.
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/02/news_of_the_weird.html)
Yes, that was the subject of conversation in the pub last night. I can't provide any URLs, but I am assured that the dairy industry in Scotland is extremely interested in fitting their herd with telemetry to track everything from their location (via GPS) to their blood pressure, activity levels, and possibly even emotional state: an eventual goal is that the subjects of this exercise will effectively become spimes (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/26/bruce-sterlings-desi.html). As Bruce Sterling (who coined the term) explains it, "a Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities." Presumably the blogging bovines would emit an RSS feed that their owners could browse (or should that be "graze"?) in order to determine that Daisy has gotten into the bottom field again, or is overdoing the clover.
NB: I want the wikipedia admins to know that I am very annoyed that someone has deleted the wikipedia article on spimes. It's all very well to do the housekeeping, but it's gone too far when useful resources are being erased before I can link to them from my blog, dammit.
(I ascribe the subsequent conversation about GM cows with nitrated oligosaccharides in their milk, and the utility of explosive blogging bovines in any future Pakistan/India conflict, to a combination of beer and jet lag.)
Meanwhile, it has been reported that dwarfs represent a growing crime problem in Sweden (http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2696358.html?menu), with thieves robbing long distance coaches by sneaking miniature accomplices into the luggage compartments inside sports bags. Mind you, that's positively mundane compared to the nude wet meat soil bandit's antics (http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=20080&in_page_id=2) in Cool, California.
I was going to try and say something sensible about the Dyatlov Pass incident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident), but just the facts of the matter beggar the imagination. Sort of like a Russian Blair Witch Project, only it actually happened, kinda-sorta.
And I've been brain-wormed by a phrase from nowhere — "I'd sleep with the teddy tonight if it didn't smell so strange". I don't know what it means, don't really know where it came from, and I wish it would go away. (I think it wants to hatch into a story, but I'm not ready to write it yet because I think it also wants to be ... gruesome.)
If all this sounds a bit dazed and incoherent, it's because it's a grab bag of my current jet-lagged preoccupations (leaving aside the research into penile degloving injuries, the future of spam, and browsing wikileaks (http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks)). I'm still a bit disoriented, and I think I'm going to spend the next day putting my feet up with some easy reading. I've just received the galley proofs to SATURN'S CHILDREN (due out July 1st!) and I should really get to work checking them, then pick up tools and crack on with THE REVOLUTION BUSINESS, but all this intercontinental travel and sleep deprivation has left me feeling like a character out of one of William Gibson's more recent novels. And you know what? Living inside that man's head is No Fun At All.
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/02/news_of_the_weird.html)