Things I am interested in…

No posts for the last few days as I am currently in sunny (but soulless) Surfer’s Paradise, Queensland, Australia.  I am attending the 2007 RANZCP Congress (From Cell to Soul).  I will post more about this after the conference, but there have been some very interesting presentations so far…

(or other uses for your iPod besides listening to that awful music)

What is a podcast you ask? The term is derived from iPOD broadCAST, and further defined here. As the iPod dominates the portable MP3 player market (~85% at the present time), the name has stuck, although it is generic, and most podcasts can be listened to on any player (they are just MP3s, or the equivalent, when you get right down to it).

Podcasts are great. I listen to podcasts a lot, on a variety of subjects.

In no particular order, here is a selection:

• This Week in Tech (TWiT) - fairly prototypical, and often very amusing. It is generally about tech news, though the panel has been known to digress from time to time (make that, invariably digresses!) Run by Leo Laporte, who is somewhat of a podcasting personality, and very active in the field. Here is his home page.
• Cory Doctorow’s podcasts - from craphound.com and BoingBoing.net. At the moment he is one of the people I find most interesting to listen to, about copyright, DRM, etc… He also writes some good sf.
• Science information - the best of these is the weekly Scientific American podcast. The host, Steve Mirsky, is from the Bronx, and is also often wryly amusing. I’ve learnt more about beavers and turkeys than I ever thought I’d need to know. Others on my playlist include Digital Planet (more IT technology) from the BBC World Service, and the New Scientist podcast, though the brash intro music is somewhat off-putting.
• Movie and entertainment news - until the end of last year I was a keen listener to Ebert & Roeper’s podcast, but this seems to have gone on hold (I guess while Roger Ebert continues to recover from his recent surgery). However, I have found a worthy alternative to take its place. Mark Kermode is witty, opinionated, and often quite scathing in his pithy reviews. Another excellent offering from the BBC.

There are a lot more, but this is something to be getting on with… Now I have to go to the gym.

Wow, there are a lot of groovy websites out there:

• a video on artificial muscle
• 10 emerging tecnologies in 2007
• Scientific American: Study shows why exercise boosts brainpower
• New Scientist: Small world networks key to memory

Wow… I never knew what an interesting fellow Thomas Kuhn was:

• Synopsis of his famous book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”
• Link to his entry in Wikipedia

My paradigms have just been shifted…

Link here for one of the best sites I have found on the net concerning the human brian…

Peter F. Hamilton’s homepage.

Where Lois McMaster Bujold fans hang out.

Cory Doctorow’s homepage. Most of his stuff can be downloaded in a variety of formats from here.

A perennial favourite - John Varley.

A webpage where Accelerando by Charles Stross is available for download.

Terry Pratchett’s home site (not strictly SF, but still very good).

Three Brits, two Yanks, and a Canadian. Guess who is who…

P.S. Favourite children’s fantasy author - Diana Wynne Jones.

What is the semantic web I hear you ask?

 Well here are two articles that can help you, from the creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee:

• Scientific American article
• a slightly more technical article regarding how it could acutally work

Here’s hoping that this all happens sooner rather than later…

Well it’s always good to have one’s horizons expanded…

Here are two sites I have come accross recently that connect quite well with my own personal set of interests.  To expand on this - I am a doctor, currently training in the speciality of psychiatry.  Both of these websites have a connection with psychiatry, though I have to say in my opinion most things do.

 So, without further ado:

• an anti-aging blog
• another blog, intriguingly titled “Neurophilosophy“