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POPSPirates Steal 33 Russian Battle Tanks It's on now -- pirates are back. Big time. Of course, pirate skeptics will ask 'Why do seagoing pirates need tanks?' Are these tanks airtight so these pirates can sneak up on ships from underneath? Will these guys become land pirates? Who knows, they're pirates!
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POPSBrave New World of Digital Intimacy 
It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.
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POPSOranges Some people take their oranges way too seriously
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POPSdangerous? I think this is way beyond any monster science fiction world possible to conceive. How did humanity get so far astray?
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POPSsimulation of ratbrain This computer doesn't simulate the brain, rather it translates the simulation into visual form. The vast data sets generated by the IBM supercomputer are rendered as short films, hallucinatory voyages into the deep spaces of the mind.
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POPSCreating Friendly AI Imagine, for a moment, that you walk up and punch an AI in the nose. Does the AI punch back? Perhaps and perhaps not, but punching back will not be instinctive. A sufficiently young AI might stand there and think: "Hm. Someone's fist just bumped into my nose." In a punched human, blood races, adrenaline pumps, the hands form fists, the stance changes, all without conscious attention. For a young AI, focus of attention shifts in response to an unexpected negative event - and that's all.
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