Maybe It’s Because I’m Not A Londoner
Day Back in London... A city I can appreciate on many levels, but can never quite warm to. My last visit had been in 1999 or 2000, probably for a Fortean Times UnConvention. My lightning-raid incursions tend to happen over weekends of busy intensity, so I'm perhaps unqualified to judge the place. Besides, the denizens seem to be managing quite well with out me. London provides a home to several of my friends. Mark Pilkington, of the Strange Attractor posse, was involved in putting on Megalithomania in conjunction with Third Stone magazine, in Holborn's Conway Hall. A delegations of the Blather Inner Circle decided to attend. So we did. Mr. Kavanagh - Blather.net's Man In London - was up and gone early on Saturday morning, in order to catch John Michell's talk and to help out. The lovely Ms. Maria Behan and myself, after coffees and cake, sailed into Conway...
How I Failed The Turing Test Without Even Being There
Blather guest writer, Robby Garner, winner of the Loebner prize for two years running, explains how he failed this year's Turing test. Very impressive, as he is a human being. Apparently. The Loebner Prize Contest, founded by a guy named Dr. Hugh Loebner, is an annual "Turing test" based on an idea for a "lying game" that was envisioned in 1950 by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing. In the lying game, a judge tries to guess whether he is communicating with a man or a woman. Dr. Loebner has created a contest where there can be no winner, only a consolation prize consisting of a bronze medal and USD$2,000. Hugh likes to tell the story of how he himself had tried to write an intelligent computer program in COBOL, or some other dead language, and saw that it couldn't be done. Instead, he put some money he had inherited into...
Roman Ireland: What did the Romans ever do for us?
Is Roman Ireland nothing more than wishful thinking? Exploring Ireland's forbidden archaeology is a tricky business... A Jaw-dropper On a pleasant Sunday morning early in 1996, I was traveling to work, when my jaw hit the rather grubby floor of the bus on which I was sitting. The reason for my cartoon like gob-flapping was the banner headline from The Sunday Times. I was, at the time, studying in what is now known as NUI Maynooth, (formerly known as just good old 'Maynooth') for a degree in Classics and English, so the newspaper headline was of some interest to me. It claimed that conclusive evidence had been discovered - or at least had been made public - that could lend proof to that most heretical of archaeological whisperings. I refer, of course, to the greatest of Irish historical conspiracies: the theory that at some long forgotten time in our past,...
Virus Hoaxing: Scrub Your Mind
This article by Blather's Dave Walsh first appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, October 29, 2001, as Don't mind the memes The fear of viruses is disproportionate to the potential of any actual virus, argues Dave Walsh. Any kind of virus, regardless of its capabilities for chaos and destruction, is a flagship for the purveyance of fear. Viruses seem to exude an evil sentience as they weasel their way around your body or your computer. How may of our doctor's visits have ended with an unsatisfying diagnosis of an unspecified "virus"? New biological viruses appear all the time . . . just like computer viruses. The scare-mongering of the last year or so would suggest that computer viruses have taken over the mantle worn by the Y2K bug until January 1st, 2000. True, viruses muck up computers and networks, and cost a fortune in downtime. Arguably, virus fear and...
The Irish Zorro
Blather on TV - the truth about Zorro (of course, he WAS an Irishman), and other mad stuff. "A certain Fabio Troncarelli, Professor of History at Italy's Viterbo University, apparently found "detailed proof" in the Vatican's Inquisition archives. He discovered that Zorro, the masked Robin Hood of Mexico was in fact a bloke from Wexford called William Lamport." Blather, on Irish TV. For a whole 30 seconds! (Ireland only) True Lives: Tell Me Captain Strange Tuesday 23 October 22:10 RTE 1 Blather's Dave Walsh appears (and speaks) briefly in this highly entertaining documentary about Irish UFO witnesses. So who will admit to knowing that that Co. Kerry was abuzz with UFO sightings just five days after the alleged 1947 Roswell happening? Also stars Eamon Ansbro, a UFO researcher referred quite a lot in the Blather archives. Directed by Colum Stapleton Tell Me Captain Strange discussion ZORRO FROM WEXFORD? About a...
Tarot Junkies – Dublin Tarot Readers
Life getting you down? Feeling a bit out of control? How do you cope with the curve balls life throws you? Annmarie O'Connor gets personal with a pack of tarot cards. I used to be an optimist. But that was bound to end. I was always the one who'd pipe up with "come on, what's the worst that can happen?", Armageddon and the Wrath of Babylon swiftly following in tow. I'm that poor sod who never saw it coming a mile away... I found a way to trick fate. I've considered my options when it comes to damage limitation. Now there's no real clause in the "Life Handbook" is there? Otherwise we would never: a) have our credit cards rejected in front of a shop full of amused onlookers; b) assume we could drink 2 jugs of Mai-TaI and a half a bottle of tequila without falling over; c) need...
Dublin Tarot Readers and Raelians in Ireland
A cornucopia - Rael on TV in Ireland, and and guest writer Annmarie O'Connor gets up close and personal with Dublin Tarot readers. Tarot Junkies Life getting you down? Feeling a bit out of control? How do you cope with the curve balls life throws you? More... SH*TE No, we're not censoring ourselves - not exactly. Last week's Blather uttered an evil, heinous word - sh*t, with the 'i' intact. It seems that some email servers didn't kindly to that kind of Blather, and sent the issue back. 'We have scanned your email and find that some of the content is inappropriate' we were told. Another message, from BT Cellnet found that the issue included 'inappropriate language (i.e. one or more obscene words'. How daft is that? EVEN BETTER THAN THE RAEL TING, LIKE Blather hasn't mentioned Rael since RTE's The Late Late Show interviewed him in February 1998. A...
Give Me Interactivity Or Give Me Death
This article by Blather's Dave Walsh first appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, September 17, 2001, as Click here to communicate Despite all the hype, online interactivity continues to leave us underwhelmed. Dave Walsh clicks into the world of multimedia to find out what 'interactive' means and why it fails to deliver on its promises while going too far to deliver the goods Nearly a decade has passed since we were first treated to "interactive multimedia", buzzwords which arrived with the CD-ROM revolution and rapidly suffered overuse. While "multimedia" is relatively easy to define (the combined use of several media) - "interactivity" remains vague. When they first appeared, interactive CD-ROMs were feted as more than just a receptacle. Apparently, some strange alchemical transformation had incurred during manufacture, imbuing the discs with occult qualities. Less facetiously, a CD could harbour a virtual world - from the practicality of a specialist...
Bruce Sterling: Sterling Work
This article by Blather's Dave Walsh first appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, August 27, 2001, as Doing Sterling Work Remember Morse Code and electric typewriters? Before that there were silent movies and wax cylinders. These are the things that fascinate author Bruce Sterling, whose 'Dead Media' movement believes we can learn from the past. He talks to Dave Walsh about 'martyred media' and environmentalism In the suburbs of Austin, Texas, there is an antique shop called Radio Ranch, piled high with unfathomable pale green and chrome kitchen appliances, mysterious Bakelite communication equipment, "old medical quackery devices" and strange quasi-industrial artworks. A few miles away, across the Austin sprawl, lives author Bruce Sterling. Sterling, along with Richard Kadrey, author of The Covert Culture Handbook, is one of the creators of the Dead Media Project, variously described as "a media book of the dead" or "a naturalist's field guide for...
Bruce Sterling: Furoshiki Revisited
This article by Blather's Dave Walsh first appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, July 23, 2001, as PCs are the fabric of life '"I've never seen on these furoshiki." Maya leaned over the table. "I've certainly heard of them..." The intelligent cloth was woven from a dense matrix of fibre-optic threads, organic circuitry and piezoelastic fibre.The hair-thin optical threads oozed miniscule screen-line pixels of coloured light. A woven display screen. A flexible all-fabric computer.' - Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire Just eight years ago, in 1993, the average Westerner had never heard of the Internet, much less shown a desire to own a home PC. Back then, the idea of widespread Internet use seemed as crazy as having human moon-dwellers by 1999. We're now half-way through 2001, millions of us are "jacked into the matrix" - to use the parlance of early 1990s cyberpunk literature - but Martin Landau and...