Changing your Facebook status to "[Your name here] is dead" would be just one small step in simplifying the post-mortem wrangling and puzzlement over how to update, monitor or remove a person's online identify after death, at least until it's standard practice to include all key passwords in one's will.
Also in today's links: making sense of the sentiments we spew, snails evolve in a strange direction, and what would Jesus nanoengineer?
- New programs are designed to gather -- and understand -- all the vitriolic rants by or about Rush, twee sentimental cooing over pictures of baby animals and breathless or depressed responses to new technology that make up the Web at large. These agents are meant to be used to analyze emotional responses expressed in the reams of text drifting through cyberspace.
- Isn't this how it always is? The fast get faster, and snails get slower. Evolution is selecting for snails with slower metabolic rates, the first time a directional selection on metabolism has been demonstrated. Is this happening in humans, too?
- What would Jesus engineer if he worked in nanotechnology? Surely He -- like Israeli President Shimon Peres -- would create a bible inscribed on a particle the size of a grain of sand.
