Someone noticed a few months ago that Blizzard had registered the domain name Cataclysm.com. Since then, there has been a whole lot of speculation about what exactly they were going to do with the name. These were some of the more popular options (in no particular order):
A new game built from the ground up called Cataclysm.
A WoW expansion called Cataclysm.
A simple mind-fuck designed to watch the fan base squirm as they try and figure out what the hell is going on.
Well, at BlizzCon, they made it official. And the winner is…
I really need to get my Rogue up to level 80 to be ready for the new expansion. In case you’re wondering what it’ll look like, here’s the official trailer (well…kind of…)
Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009
I remember when I was a kid in middle school there was a school wide poster contest on Countries of the World. I spent an entire week on mine, did a whole lot of research and spent a lot of time organizing the information on my poster. All the data was easy to read and flowed fairly well (at least I thought so at the time…one wonders how much of that memory is just wishful thinking). Meanwhile my brother, on the day of the contest made a quick cutout of his country and its name in bright colors, slapped it onto his poster and said “Done.” There was no content whatsoever, but it was bright and colorful. Big surprise that day, he won top prize and my display was simply ignored.
One result of this experience for me was an awareness of the difference between a pretty presentation and it’s underlying data, especially in popular media. In this case, from what I can see these videos do appear to have some real content, in addition to the bright colors. There might be others out there with more real and useful data, or more beautiful presentation (kind of hard to believe that, though), but it’s the combination here that really set these apart I think.
I’ve recently been interested in the idea that the internet is (not has) a mind of it’s own, and we are its neurons and axons. If thought is a pattern of activations in the neural network in your brain via both internal and external stimuli, then might that not be in some way mimicked by the mass “activation” of specific web sites and computers on the internet via internet traffic and real-world news (i.e. internal and external stimuli)?
I wonder what the internet thinks? I doubt that we could ever know, because the things we think about and act on, big and small, important and trivial all become single activations in its neural net. The things that we do affect the things that it thinks.
And if we were to determine that it thinks, could we communicate with it? Unfortunately I don’t think so. Again, the things that we do affect the things that it thinks. If we were to try and organize our actions so as to make ourselves known, the best we could hope for is to change it’s thoughts in some specific way. The problem is that it’s very likely to simply assume that whatever thought we end up creating occurred purely on it’s own. Think about it, have you ever had a thought that wasn’t your own? (What implications would the answer to the question of internet thought have on our understanding of some types of insanity?)