I’ve been working with my new Macbook Pro for a few weeks now and the surprises keep coming. All over the system I’ve found neat little trinkets and touches—no surprise, really, considering the developer. One of the more interesting features that I’ve discovered is a new voice in the speech section of the System Preference. If you’re on a Mac using Leopard, the new default voice for all things Speech related, “Alex,” is impressively natural sounding (see instructions above to try it out).

I encountered this new voice when I checked out something called Textcast, an impressive little piece of software from Bitmaki that allows you to automate podcasting with the new synthetic voice, Alex. I can’t yet think of any particular use for Textcast, but it’s one of those applications that just strikes me for its potential. I, for one, have a lot of fiction online and I’ve always wanted to make it easy for people to listen to it as well as read it, but the sheer amount of it has generally kept me away from such a project. But this could be a nice alternative for folks who’d like to listen to my fiction instead.

[source: Daring Fireball]

At this point in the 21st century it is completely fair to say that if “it” is not thinking then we are talking about fancy remote controlled cars.  And no one ever said that a remote controlled car was much more than a toy. Toys don’t react, they have no awareness, and they have no choice. But then the classic 21st century question is how are we NOT remote controlled cars. I know where your brain is; so do you. I know the answer but you would rather have freedom than chaos—up to you.

A few nice things do stand out about Powerset. The ajaxy integration of content into the search results page is definitely a step up from Google’s fairly wimpy page snippets. This feature alone would make it much easier to peruse results for accuracy and usefulness.³ I’m also impressed with the fact that Powerset appears to be gathering data from Freebase—an important open source database of information that’s a fundamental step towards creating a semantic web.

But if you ask Google and Powerset the question, “What is math?” you get pretty different answers. Google says:

a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement

Powerset says:

MATH is an American Improv/experimental band formed in Woodstock, New York in the mid 90s.

While this may be true, I don’t think it wins the semantic claims any points. True enough, if you ask “What is mathematics?” you get a better answer. But shouldn’t a search engine claiming semantic abilities understand synonyms? Apparently, not yet. But I’ll definitely keep using Powerset and report back as I understand more.

From what I can gather, all these old text adventure games are mostly written in something called Z-code and generally speaking, the only way to access most of them is through a Java applet on the web or one of several free downloadable interpreters; unfortunately, all of which choose to exactly emulate the old terminal style screens.  On large screens, it’s terribly unpleasant to read.  So, my first thought was, why hasn’t the interface been updated to take advantage of the slick typography of modern computers?  I think people would take more interest in some of the newer, award-winning fiction created, if this were the case.

And the other thing that I found frustrating is that the commands and command structure hasn’t changed the least in 20 years.  My Master Shake bot on AIM can do more with regular English than any of these games.¹ Every time I said “look calendar” and the program responded “I don’t know what you mean,” I found myself wondering, why not?   In fact, my bot knows a few things about people and places from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force world.  I don’t think it’s hard at all to see that interactive fiction could be greatly improved with some simple AI.  I’m going to take a shot at an interactive short story using just ALICE.  I think with the right variables (and Jquery interface), it will be possible to build a much smarter interactive fiction.

By introducing world governments into the global free market, their abilities to counteract social problems become limited by the threat of the flight of capital in markets which can only worsen their situations as they try to counteract the effects of capitalism on the social body. Their Keynesian ability to spend on public works projects and high deficit spending is now overthrown by the market.

Another of his major points is that, as Gresham’s Law states, bad money drives out good money. Now Gresham’s Law is a little out-of-date considering that all money is now fiat money.¹ Nonetheless, he draws a parallel and writes, “Bad capitalism drives out good capitalism.” Social market economies (socialist regimes) are driven “out of business” by world markets that allow for corporations to seek and find cheap labor, areas where regulations are lax. Here again, the problem of these social market economies is now exacerbated by the fact that have fewer Keynesian remedies with which to protect their laboring populations. Impose too much protection and the capital just goes somewhere else.

Technology in Gray’s book seems to play a large but mostly invisible role. He mentions at one point that only Japan can perhaps deal with the concepts presented in “the end of work” by Jeremy Rifkin.

All in all this is a very good book to read, totally accessible to those without a background in economics and well reasoned through and through.