Web Monitor
16:00 UK time, Thursday, 17 December 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: a bleak verdict at the 20th anniversary of the Simpsons, rappers for economic theory and science fact behind science fiction.
• On the twentieth anniversary of first episode of the Simpsons, the show's unofficial biographer John Ortved. He explains why he thinks it has disappeared from the cultural radar:
"As the show sort of moved away from its roots, starting around the sixth season, and the show kind of got a little zanier, the show became sort of unmoored from those emotional character-driven plots that initiated the series. You really start to get 21 minutes of throwaway jokes and then one minute of emotional reconciliation thrown in at the end."
• Web Monitor has spoken before about the joys of geek rap, but this was still a surprise. A report about the comeback of Keynesian economics for the US broadcaster . He has set up a simulated rap battle between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, who opposed Keynes' preference for public spending. Here's an excerpt:
"We've been going back and forth for a century
Keynes: I want to steer markets,
Hayek: I want to set them free."
• The film Avatar is set in the year 2154 where humans are the aliens. Adam the film to see whether if any of the science fiction in it could come true. One element is the necessity for humans to live through another body. So Popular Mechanics asked Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University working on technology which helps people walk again, how near we are to out-of-body experiences:
"'We are training monkeys to control their own avatar using brainwave activity,' Nicolelis says.Other work has allowed primates to remotely move robotic arms, and, in humans, electrode implants have helped generate synthetic vocalizations and mentally move computer cursors. Yet other efforts seek to reroute neural signals via wearable machine interfaces around the severed spinal cord to reconnect functional bodily muscles back to the brain.
The seamless and complete transfer of consciousness into another biological body envisioned in Avatar is bounds beyond what is presently realizable, however. 'It's pretty far-fetched,' Nicolelis says."
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