Is it just me, or does that Roomba ad on eth sidebar look like it’s advertising a robotic lawnmower instead of a vacuum?
for a second I got really excited.
Latest Updates: technology RSS
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aziz
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johnpi
Ipad ho-hum: What is it with Muslim bloggers and their early adopting fetishes? Some really good bloggers have reduced most of their contributions to the ‘Islamsphere’ to 140 character Twitter haikus. Now formerly high-functioning Muslims are carrying on about the Ipad.
Here’s a description of the Twitter phenomenon from a recent conference I attended:
Twitter has reduced many bloggers to micro-bloggers, resulting in an annoyed backlash by many netizens against daily blog or LJ posts that are merely collections of disjointed thoughts in 140 chracters or less. How has Twitter changed the blogosphere? Is it a good thing?
No. It’s not.
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arif
But what about emails, sms, texts containing scriptures and polemics people bombard each other with on daily basis? Egypt mufti wants to put prayer ringtone on silent.
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johnpi
Over 5,000 people convert to Islam through mobile hotline.
Any person can suggest names of non-Muslims he thinks might convert to Islam through text messages to the hotline, along with their phone numbers and the language they speak.
Later, preachers would call these non-Muslims and try to introduce them to Islam, without revealing the number of the person who suggested their names.
Preachers would call again if the person showed a desire to continue receiving these phone calls, Okaz said, adding that around 800,000 phone calls were made, costing 120,000 Saudi Riyals ($32,000).
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thabet
A quote by the Bradford Muslim blogger on a subject that has come up before amongst Muslim bloggers in the dim and distant past:
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buzz
This story does not have anything to do with Islam per se. But its intriquing to consider the religious possibilities. If you are orthodox Muslim, how about instantly downloading the Qur’an and Sunnah to have on instant recall when you go through your day. As a Sufi, all poems of Rumi and Hafez memorized. Maybe put a Zekr on loop as a mental background task while you work and sleep. Your digital personality can have a pervasive presence that can be downloaded and transferred via the internet with little concern for time & space. You could make the hajj once a day or more if you like.
Well, we aren’t there yet obviously. But if you look at tech trends, you can see that all the parts are beginning to assemble in that direction. Cheap and large scale micro memory. Intelligent search engines. fMRI scanning. Human-Computer Interface advancement and AI improvements which have been delivered by the gaming industry. I wonder if Wii has a Salat implementation yet.
Here is a little more.
![brain_scan[4]](http://talkislam.info/files/2009/09/brain_scan4-150x150.jpg)
(CNN) — For the past decade, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been moving the data from his brain onto computers — where he knows it will be safe.
Gordon Bell wearing a SenseCam, which automatically records photos throughout the day.
1 of 2 Sure, you could say all of us do this to some extent. We save digital pictures from family events and keep tons of e-mail.
But Bell, who is 75 years old, takes the idea of digital memory to a sci-fi-esque extreme. He carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to capture his conversations, commutes, trips and experiences. Microsoft is working on a SenseCam that would hang around a person’s neck and automatically capture every detail of life in photo form. Bell has given that a whirl. He also saves everything — from restaurant receipts (he take pictures of them) to correspondence, bills and medical records. He makes PDF files out of every Web page he views.
In sum, this mountain of data — more than 350 gigabytes worth, not including the streaming audio and video — is a replica of Bell’s biological memory. It’s actually better, he says, because, if you back up your data in enough places, this digitized “e-memory” never forgets. It’s like having a multimedia transcript of your life.
By about 2020, he says, our entire life histories will be online and searchable. Location-aware smartphones and inexpensive digital memory storage in the “cloud” of the Internet make the transition possible and inevitable. No one will have to fret about storing the details of their lives in their heads anymore. We’ll have computers for that. And this revolution will “change what it means to be human,” he writes.
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thabet
This is a good, and commendable, move from the Obama administration:
I found the above via @muslimvoices, who disagreed with Salman Hameed (author of Irtiqa, a blog about science and religion) on Hameed’s view that the state of ‘Islam and science’ was ‘dismal’ by pointing to Iran’s successes. However, Iran (and possibly Turkey) is something of an anomaly amongst Muslim-majority countries; most Muslim countries rank poorly when we consider science citation indices.
Hameed also raises a good point with respect to the science outreach programme: it should not confuse technological developments for science (as people often do).
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thabet
Oil is 150 years old, although it was known and exploited by the ancients of the far and near east, .
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shahed
An article I authored (“Technology and the Hajj”) appears in the latest issue of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, published by Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. (Unfortunately, it is not available online – you’ll have to buy a copy.)
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johnpi
Responses from the readership of the Jakarta Post to an Indonesian Ulema Council fatwa banning communication between the sexes on mobile phones and Facebook.
It is just too bad that a lot of people are taking this seriously.
It is a matter of content, not the platform: People on online networking sites are free to determine how to use them. Why not ban human interaction? That way no one will be tempted?
Halim
I believe Indonesian Muslims are individuals with common sense, who can think for themselves and choose if they want to avoid affairs or pornography, or whatever is not good for them.
If that is how much trust the NU has in Muslims, what does it say about them?
They need to catch up with technology before making any statements concerning these websites. This verges on “dictatorship”.
Reni P.
I wonder why my fellow Muslims in Indonesia keep quiet about these ulema trying to rule on every single aspect of our lives.
Come on, speak out, do something. This country is moving backward into the Dark Ages.
Diyan
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aziz
mark my words – the Roku digital video player will kill Blu-Ray in five years.
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shahed
How has technology affected the hajj, for better or worse? I’m working on a paper that explores the good and bad of the impact of technology – from mobile phones to buying cheap airfare online. Would love some of your thoughts on the matter.
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thabet
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thabet
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thabet
US boasts of laser weapon’s ‘plausible deniability’.
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thabet
First, we needed their oil.
Now, we need their sunshine.
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Fatemeh
Even though it’s not available in the Middle East yet, the iPhone is getting an “Islamic” makeover.
