I’m not leaving Facebook, but the way I use Facebook is going to change

Currently, people don’t see much of what is posted on Facebook. If you like a page and the owner posts something to that page, roughly 10% of the people who liked the page will ever see it. Not, that is, unless the page owner pays to promote it. YouTube and Google (through AdSense) share revenue…

Why you should give the Disney-JJ Abrams Star Wars a fair chance

The trailer for the first of the new Star Wars films is here and I’m not sure how to feel. I’m still skeptical about Disney being able to do Star Wars and I’m still skeptical about the idea that JJ Abrams can do anything well at all but it occurs to me that I might…

What if all of the dystopian stories are wrong and things turn out really great?

Sometimes, when I’m discussing the potential of future science and technology, I find myself thinking that I sound like a Bond villain. More and more though I’m ok with that, because this isn’t a Bond story. We are conditioned by fiction to think that conspiracies abound and that science and technology are bound to destroy…

First original series to be released exclusively on BitTorrent in 2015

Old media continues to press ahead with old strategies. Governments are being lobbied to reduce privacy and increase penalties for piracy, Google is being lobbied to degrade the search rankings of “infringing” sites and people are being sued for illegal downloads. Meanwhile, new media continues to press ahead with new models and find new audiences.…

George Bush’s response to the Rodney King verdict was better than Obama’s response to Ferguson

Following the announcement that there would be no charges against officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown,  Barack Obama took to the microphones: The president delivered a speech that was, more or less, what you would expect. There were appeals for calm, appeals for communities and police to work together and a strange…

There should be institutional support for victims of sexual assault

Victims of sexual assault are unlikely to report the crimes. There are many reasons for this but one of the key reasons is that they do not trust the police or the justice system. All too often, that lack of faith is completely justified. According to the YWCA, in Canada only 3 out of every…

Who needs satellite radio when you have David Byrne radio?

David Byrne is one of my heroes. He is best known as the frontman for the Talking Heads, which in and of itself is amazing. The Talking Heads, in my opinion, never put out a bad album. He did the stage design and choreography for “Stop Making Sense”, one of the best concert films ever…

It’s looking less and less likely that there is, or ever was, life on Mars

The video below illustrates some of the many, many problems that must be overcome before humans can actually live on Mars. At the same time it illustrates some of the problems that indigenous life on Mars would have had to overcome. It’s become pretty clear that life, as we know it, does not exist on…

It’s time for men to stop thinking of sexual abuse as a ‘women’s issue’

People who know me know how I feel about these issues. I’ve written about most of them before in some forum. I’m not going to say anything particularly new, but it’s important to say it anyway and keep saying it until the landscape changes. For a few weeks now now Canada has been caught up…