My daughter is now 13. You can tell this by the way she presents herself for dinner at a restaurant wearing red and black striped fingerless gloves, a black puffball skirt and tights, a t-shirt that’s the dilute 2008 iteration of an idea Vivienne Westwood scrawled on the back of a fag packet in 1976, and a pair of boots that appear to have been fashioned from the hollowed-out legs of a particularly unfortunate black bear. Also, by the way I’ve gone from being called “daddy” to being called “shut up, Ellis.” She bitches that she can only hold something like 500 texts (three days’ worth of use, it would seem) on her hideous KRZR phone, and bitches that it’s “not fair” that my Nokia has eight gigs onboard. I’m faring better than her mother, who is incapable of even comprehending the previous sentence (her phone is so old that it’s essentially a Morse tapper). When she actually places a phone call, she goes out into the garden, so we can’t hear her Secret And Important Conversations. Which mostly sound like “yeah… cool… yeah… creepy… yeah.” She wears her mp3 player in the car so she doesn’t have to listen to “old, creepy” bands on the CD player. And then berates me for not listening to “dad music” in the office. Which is also often termed “creepy.” Most things are either “cool” or “creepy.” Having accounts on social network services is evidently “sad.” She’s forgotten her email password and messages her friends through game and fashion sites. She uses YouTube to listen to music. Nouns have seemingly become optional: “I need to thing about thing with thing and thing.” Her mother understands every word. I do not. This may be why her mother is “cool” and I am “creepy.”

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Rudy’s in Amsterdam, Regine is in Seoul, Xeni’s in Ghana, and Japan is apparently brimming with interesting junk. And I didn’t have to make any special effort to find that out. It just sorta popped up in the course of operation as soon as I put my pencil down and fired up this machine. This next decade coming up – the teens – man, it is going to be really alien.

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With the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco is now well positioned to start pushing XMPP into firmware, not just for dedicated messaging routers but also for more generalized routers and systems … including mobile chipsets and network adapters. Firmware routing of XMPP in turn could proved a radical boost to the idea of using XMPP as a key protocol for just-in-time communication systems, such as emergency first-responder networks (police, EMTs and rescue services). Moreover, since XMPP can gateway into most existing IM networks, such a system provides an interesting bridge between IM, SMS and similar messaging services (such as twitters).

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Here’s hoping that somehow, thanks to the increasing accessibility of equipment and relative price decrease in digital film and editing software, more and more storytellers standing beyond the gates of the sausage factory will be goaded, either by hunger or the pure urgency of inspiration, into making their own moving pictures.

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We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech. Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth.

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IMAGINE a world where every sound jars like a jackhammer, every light is a blinding strobe, clothes feel like sandpaper and even your own mother’s face appears as a jumble of frightening and disconnected pieces. This, say neuroscientists Kamila and Henry Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is how it feels to be autistic.

According to their “intense world” hypothesis, all of autism’s baffling and sometimes incongruous features – social problems, language impairment and obsessive behaviour, sometimes allied to dazzling savant abilities – can be explained by a single neurological defect: a hyperactive brain that makes ordinary, everyday sensory experiences utterly overwhelming.

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Gospelr is quick to point out that it’s not “just another Twitter.” Instead, the site prides itself on being the world’s first “Ministry Microblogging” tool for those that want to share thoughts, ideas, words of encouragement, prayer requests, daily scripture readings, and oh so much more.

The company’s founder wants it to be more than a Christian Twitter, though. Beyond being a place where people can chat it up about ol’ JC, the company wants to be the place to “share the Gospel with those that have already heard the Good News (because we all could use a good reminder… daily!) and those that have not.”

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An object that brightened intensely and then faded back into obscurity over a period of about seven months is unlike anything astronomers have seen before, a new study reports.

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Nothing had been seen at its location before it started to brighten, and nothing was spotted after it dimmed. That suggests it is normally too faint to observe and that it brightened by at least 120 times during its firefly-like episode.

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The object’s spectrum is also bizarre. It does not match that of anything seen in the mammoth Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has mapped more than a quarter of the sky.

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Madonna and Michael Jackson both celebrated their 50th birthdays this month, challenging conventional notions of appropriate lifestyles at this age. Now banks are waking up to the fact that baby boomers are demanding customers and big business – for example, Abbey reckons this age group owns more than 90pc of all cash deposits in Britain.

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What you get when you swallow too much change too quickly isn’t a mass outbreak of twitching, hebephrenic breakdown, nor some neo-Amish wave of technological renunciation. You wanna know what it looks like? A hockey mom and former beauty queen with an upswept ‘do and a pregnant daughter in high school. Sarah Palin is future shock personified

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