The net-to-brain interface...

The net-to-brain interface is one step closer to fruition with the advent of Google Reader, from google labs.  At first  on hearing the description, I thought, oh, another run of the mill rss reader.  At the time I'd been using Thunderbird to read news feeds I foolishly downloaded onto my hard drive, as if all the spam email wasn't enough.  I've since chucked the bird and gone back to web-based email and rss reading.  The great thing about reader is the interface.  Unlike most readers, where you sift through folder after folder of feeds from different sources, Google Reader allows you to save all your subscriptions, and you can click on all links, and a steady stream of articles is displayed in a viewer.  You can 'star' or tag interesting articles for later use, and to advance through the stream you just hit the space bar and it pages-down.  The great thing is, the paging stops as soon you let off the space bar, so when you get fifty articles about something you don't care about, just hold the bar down and fast forward through the boring feeds until something catches your eye.  As Jean Shepherd once said, it's not the big headlines that tell us about life, it's the small bits of trivia and curiousities that tell us about what's realing going on. 

Here's some interesting links I've found recently:

• This google video contains a nature documentary on the 'Pika', the animal from which 'Pikachu' is derived.  I had no idea it was based on a real animal.  It's disgustingly adorable
• Website stencil revolution offers stencil templates designed by artists
• Boing Boing linked to a giant insect that appears to be eating Germany in Google Maps
• Boing Boing also linked to a matchstick model of Hogwarts academy, from Harry Potter