echo get_class($my_class_instance) . ‘<br/>’;

foreach (get_class_methods($my_class_instance) as $method) {echo ‘———>’ . $method . ‘<br/>’;}

To stock ‘machine readable’ information about a table cell use the abbr tag:

<td abbr=”my_data”>

Might come in handy for example when you try to give jQuery a handle on specific table cells when id and class tags are already in use.

The ‘abbr’ attribute is an official attribute of the td tag in HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 DTD in compliance with S=Strict, T=Transitional, and F=Frameset.

Sometimes, stuff gets stuck in Windows trash. Mouse-click trash emptying doesn’t work any more.

If that happens, use the following command in the command line:

rd /s /q C:\RECYCLER

If something’s really stuck in the recyler, you will get the following error message (or equivalent in your operationg system installation language):

Problem - Le processus ne peut pas accéder au fichier car ce fichier est utilisé par un autre processus

Ignore that message. The trash on the desktop, too, will still have the “full” icon but this wull be gone once you right-point it and ask the trash to be emptied.

Trying to call R from, say Java?

C://Program Files/R/R.exe returns an error as the Windows command line has trouble interpreting spaces.

Use this call instead:

C://program~1/R/R.exe

The written language, made of letters, words and phrases, is how we mostly do internet search. It doesn’t have be that way though. It is very possible, for example, to search a photograph by drawing its approximation. This is shown by ‘retrievr’, the graphic search engine of System One Labs. In retrievr, you can do exactly this type of non-textual searches. You can also search by uploading an image. ‘Retrievr’ searches for results in the flicr database.

‘Retrievr’ is a python implementation of an image search algorithm originally developed by Chuck Jacobs, Adam Finkelstein and David Salesin at the University of Washington. This algorithm is also implemented in imgSeek is a standalone image management application for UNIX systems (such as Linux or Mac OS/X).

It is interesting to put search engines such as retrievr in context with other non-textual search applications : Shazam, for example, the song recognition service on iPhone and Android. For what we face today is only a biginning of the development of search engines of this type. Projects like these will most probably contribute to the ongloing decline of the importance of text in favour of images and sounds, which has been on its way ever since the advent of television.  Step by step, we are entering, perhaps, a post-textual era.

After a long choice process, my best picks go to the following podcasts:

1. The classic tales podcast:  Delivers professional performances of unabridged classics.  Enjoy classic short fiction from Poe, Dickens, Hardy, and others. Performed by character actor B.J. Harrison.
2. Das philosophische radio im WDR 5-Radio zum Mitnehmen: Um dem Bedürfnis nach Austausch mit anderen nachdenklichen Menschen zu entsprechen, hat WDR 5 mit der Sendung “Das philosophische Radio” ein einzigartiges, regelmäßiges Forum für die öffentliche philosophische Diskussion geschaffen: Immer am Freitagabend von 20.05 bis 21.00 Uhr werden ein Philosoph oder eine Philosophin über ein Thema, ein Buchautor oder eine Autorin über eine interessante und anregende These mit den Hörerinnen und Hörern von WDR 5 philosophieren. Moderator der Sendung ist Jürgen Wiebicke.
3. France Culture – Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance: L’un des rares podcast de philosophie centré davantage sur les thèmes philosophiques que sur les philosophes.
4. RSR – Histoire Vivante: Le meilleur podcast historique, tirant tout l’avantage des archives audio.
5. utopod: Podcast francophone des littératures de l’imaginaire
6. Hörspiel Pool – Bayern 2:  Das Beste aus der Deutschsprachigen Litteratur. Ein Download-Angebot des Bayerischen Rundfunks.

As my podcast aggreagator, I currently use Google listen on my Samsung Android device (Galaxy Spica). All above mentioned podcasts synchronize and render perfectly well with this software.

And what if consumption has superseded itself with the advent of Internet advertisement?

Since commercials are now possible on global scale, while being contextually aimed at specific audiences, it becomes less and less interesting to mass-produce for crowds subjugated by manufactured desire for standardized objects. Manufacturing myth, like cars, TV’s or CD players, is no more necessary to reach a sufficient audience for your business. For you are no more limited to sell your stuff to the guy next door and you don’t need to sell at million-scale either. With little investment, you can propose your Aberdeen-made blueberry and minth liqueur to a car mechanic in the suburbs of Beijing, who, just by chance, happens to like that sort of thing. If he’s in a hurry, you can even ship it with FedEx. All you have to do is to have your ad placed on spetialized sites (say “weirdliqueurs.com”): something youknowwho contextual ads and co. can take care of for you in no time.

What you can do, anyone can. Any product can be distrubuted and sold on global scale. You no more need to find yourself an optimal client nest beyond hills, seas and roadway crossings. You don’t need to spend thousands on commercials in general magazines that’ll only bring something if you sell millions of products. Small things can survive – many of them, in fact. And with the small things, the small desires for them. Many small desires that haven’t been manufactured for you by dinosaur brandmakers but that just happened to you, on last-year’s Seoul trip, say, where, looking at the Han river, you began to like that blueberry liqueur.

What this possibly means for our World is the end of mass production, mass labour, mass consumption, mass braindeath. Some time soon, you’ll make money by being creative again.  And at this very moment, we’ll enter into the new age of diversified consumption.

As for the new pathologies of the eight billions of singularities to come, that is another story to be told by science-fiction.

Allopatric speciation of fruit-flies seems to take but weeks, much less then squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods. How about us? How long will it take until we are no more alone… again ? since the fun times of Universe sharing with the Neanderthalians as the only other tool-making, walking and talking beings.

We might soon get a chance to figure it out, as some of us seem on their way to make it to Mars, after all. And chances are that if some eventually settle there, you’ll probably not get to see them every weekend. They will live their separate ways, their separate survival strategies, their separate sicknesses. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into… two separate species.

What will happen then? Will the martians communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding be so great that we’ll eventually loose all interest in each other?

In any case, this confrontation with such a similar otherness will lead us to re-evaluate all our values, and some of these to our greatest good. Rather than waiting for aliens to come, this is our chance to make some of our own.

3D with glasses? Definitely not the next step as we’ve seen it all: color filters (bu-ah!), polarising glasses (neat but don’t tilt your head), alternate hiding of right and left eye with liquid crystal glass (kind off heavy for the brain, not that much used for left and right hemisphere alterning in 48/sec tact).

No, definitely, the next step is 3D without glasses.  Or is it? Isn’t the eye&object complex rather as old as the principle behind the creation of Chauvet or Lascaux? Isn’t the next step rather 3D… without eyes.

Connecting screening devices by micro-electrodes directly to the optical nerve is the next step. Ongoing research is already done on this technology in the prospect of healing the blind.

And beyond that: wireless chips implanted directly inside the brain: this is the next big step of real multimedia experience.  Call your lover and chat from within your mind in the middle of a business meeting! Or spare at least on your next myopia operation: buy – with WiFi and HD receptors and switch between the reality in front of you and the other, the world of 3D image-flow in information space.

Really, who needs glasses?

Human powered electricity generation is not the newest of ideas. As relates Webber Energy Blog here, it has already been implemented in fitness centers in California and Hon Kong. A similar idea has been set up by  a British night club owner with a dancefloor producing electricity. But why not expand this idea to smaller and even more everyday actions and use it to power devices at the same scale. I’m thinking of these automatic watches, for instance, that mechanically store hand and wrist movement to run: they, too, already exist. Now what if, for example, you implemented this kind of pendulum energy collectors into trousers and jackets. The collected electric energy could be stored in sewn-in batteries and/or be directly used to recharge all those devices we also love to carry around: mobile phones, pods, CD-players, GPS, playstations etc. Considering all the energy wasted by traditional wall-plugged current converters, this could mean quite a step for planet care. A step, too, perhaps, for public health: If you have to move around a little more to get that pod running, you might have just the bit of necessary motivation to do so…

Now, one could consider another option: not an energy producing but an energy saving suit. Today’s technology allows for very optimal thermal isolation. Of course, hi-end material is highly expensive but imagine all the savings one could make if, instead of heating a house interior to 20°C, one would only keep it at 5°C and compensate by an skin-adhesive thermosuit, even at home and in the office. Imagine highway patrol wearing these suits instead of keeping the motor running to keep warm (yes they really do this in the US, I’ve seen on a motorway near Boston).

And now, think one step further and combine both ideas: a discrete skin-adhesive energy suit collecting thermoregulating the body while collecting heat and movement energy wherever possible. Take a walk and your laptop will keep running in the middle of nowhere.

Any implementation suggestions or profound reasons why all this is really just unreasonable gibberish and cheap science-fiction? Feel free to write so.