I just got a Gerber Dime from Amazon. I gotta say, for a $13 multitool, it’s pretty dang awesome. It’s replacing the Guppie as my everyday-carry multitool.

Surprisingly [given Gerber’s recent record of lousy multitools], the Dime is very good.  Not just very good, but probably the best keychain multitool on the market.  It’s design is nice, its fit and finish is quite good, and its tool selection is the best ever for a keychain multitool.  Not just the best Gerber ever (after all, one of the Hilton sisters has to be the smartest), but probably the best ever regardless of maker, including the vaunted and beloved Leatherman.  The Dime is a premier tool at a bargain basement price.

Excellent, thorough review: Everyday Commentary: Gerber Dime Review

Anyone who has watched a child have an animated conversation with a doll — or a stuffed animal, a toy car or a Lego brick for that matter — has probably wondered what that child is really thinking. As the pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget wrote in his book ‘‘The Child’s Conception of the World,’’ published in 1929, ‘‘Does the child attribute consciousness to the objects which surround him, and in what measure?’’

This question has only grown more intriguing with the advent of toys that, rather than waiting for a child’s imagination to animate them, use technology to seemingly attain consciousness all on their own. In the late 1990s, Noel Sharkey, a professor at the University of Sheffield in England who studies the ethics of robotics, saw how this could play out when one of his daughters, who was around 8 at the time, started interacting with one of the first-ever artificial-intelligence-powered toys — a virtual pet called Tamagotchi. An egg-shaped computer that fit in the palm of her hand, the Tamagotchi had a tiny screen to express what it needed and wanted. Sharkey’s daughter periodically pressed a button to give the Tamagotchi food; she played simple games to boost her pet’s happiness levels; she took the pet to the toilet when the screen indicated that it needed to relieve itself. Tamagotchi’s creators had programmed it to demand an ever-increasing amount of attention, and a failure to deliver this caused the pet to become sick. ‘‘We had to break it away from my daughter in the end, because she was obsessed with it,’’ Sharkey says. ‘‘It was like, ‘Oh, my God, my Tamagotchi is going to die.’ ’’

…

‘‘Hey, new question,’’ Barbie said. ‘‘Do you have any sisters?’’

‘‘Yeah,’’ Tiara said. ‘‘I only have one.’’

‘‘What’s something nice that your sister does for you?’’ Barbie asked.

‘She does nothing nice to me,’’ Tiara said tensely.

Barbie forged ahead. ‘‘Well, what is the last nice thing your sister did?’’

‘‘She helped me with my project — and then she destroyed it.’’

‘‘Oh, yeah, tell me more!’’ Barbie said, oblivious to Tiara’s unhappiness.

‘‘That’s it, Barbie,’’ Tiara said.

‘‘Have you told your sister lately how cool she is?’’

‘‘No. She is not cool,’’ Tiara said, gritting her teeth.

‘‘You never know, she might appreciate hearing it,’’ Barbie said.

Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child – The New York Times

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero’s decision invalidated the gag order in full, finding no “good reason” to prevent Merrill from speaking about any aspect of the NSL, particularly an attachment to the NSL that lists the specific types of “electronic communication transactional records” (“ECTR”) that the FBI believed it was authorized to demand. The FBI has long refused to clarify what kinds of information it sweeps up under the rubric of ECTR, a phrase that appears in the NSL statute but is not publicly de

Source: For the first time ever, a judge has invalidated a secret Patriot Act warrant / Boing Boing

WXshift (from the Climate Central folks) is taking a pretty serious stab at showing climate predictions on a local scale (or larger if you want), and integrating it with weather (at least a bit). Since I’m doing some related work, it’ll be really interesting to see where it goes, and how much interest they get. They could certainly be doing better on data visualization and user interface, but of course they’ll probably improve it as it matures…thanks, Mike!

Explore local climate change

[For anyone interested in science fiction, science, or, well, imagination, this is a pretty great site 🙂 -egg]

This is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. It’s 100% free, no registration required.

Hottest Questions This Month – Worldbuilding Stack Exchange

[Some very interesting answers to this question on Quora -e]

What happens to an ant that gets lost? If it loses a pheromone trail, will the ant keep trying to find it again till it dies? Is it hard coded for survival without the backing of its colonial cousins? If it finds a new colony, will the new colony accept it?

What happens to an ant that gets lost? – Quora

Excellent piece in the NYT, written in 2011:

The girls surely have a complicated conception of what they mean by “me.” If one girl sees an object with her eyes and the other sees it via that thalamic link, are they having a shared experience? If the two girls are unique individuals, then each girl’s experience of that stimulus would inevitably be different; they would be having a parallel experience, but not one they experienced in some kind of commingling of consciousness. But do they think of themselves as one when they speak in unison, as they often do, if only in short phrases? When their voices joined together, I sometimes felt a shift — to me, they became one complicated being who happened to have two sets of vocal cords, no less plausible a concept than each of us having two eyes. Then, just as quickly, the girls’ distinct minds would make their respective presences felt: Tatiana smiled at me while her sister fixated on the television, or Krista alone responded with a “Yeah?” to the call of her name.Although each girl often used “I” when she spoke, I never heard either say “we,” for all their collaboration. It was as if even they seemed confused by how to think of themselves, with the right language perhaps eluding them at this stage of development, under these unusual circumstances — or maybe not existing at all. “It’s like they are one and two people at the same time,” said Feinberg, the professor of psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. What pronoun captures that?

Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind? – The New York Times

Dohanos was a prolific American painter and illustrator with over 125 Saturday Evening Post covers to his credit.

Source: Mid-Century Misery: the discontented delights of Stevan Dohanos – Boing Boing

Lots more here.

Blum imagines the Internet as a series of rivers of data crisscrossing the globe. I find it a lovely visual image whose metaphor should be extended further. Like water, the Internet is vast, familiar and seemingly ubiquitous but with extremes of unequal access. Some people have clean, unfettered and flowing data from invisible but reliable sources. Many more experience polluted and flaky sources, and they have to combine patience and filters to get the right set of data they need. Others must hike dozens of miles of paved and dirt roads to access the Internet like water from a well, ferrying it back in fits and spurts when the opportunity arises. And yet more get trickles of data here and there from friends and family, in the form of printouts, a song played on a phone’s speaker, an interesting status update from Facebook relayed orally, a radio station that features stories from the Internet.

Source: Mapping the Sneakernet – The New Inquiry

Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined twins who have directly connected brains, born in 2006.

Here’s a pretty good documentary about them, made at the age of 7.

And here’s a paper (in an undergrad journal) that considers some of the implications.

Craniopagus twins, who are conjoined at the head, are uncommon and often misunderstood. While craniopagus is rare in itself, Krista and Tatiana Hogan are unique even among craniopagus twins: their brains are connected…Consequently, Krista and Tatiana are left with a connection that is both novel to documented research and exquisitely mysterious. They possess what their pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Doug Cochrane has called a “thalamic bridge” (Dominus, 2011a). Krista and Tatiana’s thalamic bridge will provide significant insight into the study of cognition and behaviour, and may even have significant implications to the philosophy of mind. Furthermore, their connection will be accompanied by major social change, as we must redefine our definition of what it means to be an individual. For us to understand how being part of a pair is more important than being an individual to one’s identity, we must shift our perspective and eliminate our preconceived notions of individuality.

Craniopagus: Overview and the implications of sharing a brain | Squair | University of British Columbia’s Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

[It won’t be so long before we can connect brains technologically, so it’s extremely interesting to see how that might turn out in practice. -egg]