Through the black, a flash of unexpected light. BART's Transbay Tube runs under the San Francisco Bay.

.

Connecting Oakland to The City by tunneling through dark, deep brine. Your next time through, peer into the dark. Even at 70 miles per hour you may glimpse the phantom station mid-way through the eight mile submergence. No one's talking about it. Is it an abandoned construction site, peopled by the homeless? A cold war bunker? A cancelled connection to the old Treasure Island Navy base? An exclusive night club with an unbeatable underwater view? A biowar research lab, isolated for the next Andromeda strain? A deep sea diving platform, the better to find jumpers who preferred the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate? An archaelogical site, continuing a 40 year investigation into an alien wreck uncovered by Bechtel during construction?

The next time a BART train blows through your station without picking up passengers, remember this. It could be on the way to the mystery stop.

Roland Tanglao cites John Udell on the increasing need for search when everyone is audioblogging.

There doesn't appear to be a high grade speech-to-text engine in the public domain. Also, we need about 5-6 more years of intense research to invent and commercialize a new generation of filters to handle real life noise, words as sung, words in tonal languages, 99.99% accuracy, etc. Perhaps the need to search and organize all this new content will fund the R&D, maybe even getting the tools into the commons.

Video and image search needs work too. I want a search engine to be able to understand that this picture has a yellow beach pail. Because of scale, we need this to be automated. Taken to video, we need a rolling annotation of the contents of each scene/frame. What is said, people and objects on the screen, what is going on (brown toyota camry driving left to right), geocoding (up 8th Avenue); nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Elint agencies, and the tech companies that serve them, have rudiments of these tools. Again, we need years of R&D and a movement of the technology to the commons.

Conference: Converging Technologies to Enhance Human Performance.
February 5-7, UCLA. This conference intends to explore what is currently being called Nano-bio-info-cogno convergence. This cross-disciplinary conference should prove to have some interesting discussions on how these different fields will play into the coming neurotechnology wave.

I hope someone blogs and streams it.

Zack keeps challenging my assumptions. The Emotional Revolution, where cognition can influence emotion. Medicalization of performance enhancement. Mental Health Expectancy. Neurotechology forecasting of sensoceuticals using the Pain Pleasure Principle. I can't wait for his book.

[aka technology]

Miriam Misrach's essay describing Peter Palmquist's life and work. A memorial. A Eureka Times-Standard obituary.

Scot Hacker:

Palmquist had created the world's largest collection of photographs of early California, and had catalogued and described them meticulously.

Palmquist is one of those people most will never hear of but who made their lives count, and who enriches the lives of generations to come by his contributions.

via jon lebkowsky.

[aka obituaries a la blog]