Listen up.

Here’s a look at some of the interesting things happening online. Because the Internet is for more than buying clever t-shirts and looking at pictures of cats.

All the news that’s fit to refute

Emergent is a new project out of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the brainchild of journalist Craig Silverman (who also writes the amusing blog, Regret the Error where he tracks factual errors being made in the media and the attempts by the same media to correct them).

The constant news cycle, social media, and the Internet itself have led to an online culture where rumours emerge and spread with remarkable speed. “Rumours, once sparked, don’t just spread extremely quickly; they are also extremely difficult to contain,” wrote Megan Garber in an Atlantic article about Emergent.

Silverman says the project is “about trying to answer a simple question: Is it true?”

Emergent works by identifying rumours that are circulating, and then tracking how the rumour changes over time. At some point, the rumour is declared confirmed true or false. Among the recent rumours confirmed to be false are the stories that a Florida woman got a third breast and that Durex is launching a pumpkin spice condom.

It says something about the Internet that so much effort is being expended to separate fact from fiction.

A better way to waste time at work: 900+ classic arcade games

In case you want a better way to waste away the day at work, the Internet Arcade has coded a bunch of old, coin-op arcade video games to work in your browser. Included are games from the 1970s through to the 1990s, classics including Berkzerk, Defender, Galaga, Qix, and Track & Field (don’t forget your pencil).

No quarters required.

Dress like you work at Aperture Science Laboratories

The cleverest puzzle game ever created is Valve Software’s Portal. It’s sequel, Portal 2, was also entertaining, but lacked the brilliance of the first game.

Fans buy things like plush turrets and desktop companion cubes, but now, thanks to Musterbrand, they can dress like they are employed at the fictional Aperture Science Laboratories with three jackets inspired by the games.

Musterbrand has clothes inspired by other video games, too, including the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Unity, Metal Gear Solid, Uncharted, and Starcraft

What does your android look like?

Google has announced the latest version of its Android operating system. Release 5.0 is dubbed Lollipop, and to celebrate, the company has created an app that you can use to create your very own android character. The animated gif you create can be shared to all of your fave social networks, and could even be selected to be displayed in Times Square in Manhattan.

What do you look like when you’re old?

The FutureSelf interactive project creates a version of you that is 20 years older than you are now. And then starts a conversation.

The pre-scripted responses are a bit precious, playing off current pop-culture targets like Justin Bieber (who in 2034 is a hairdresser, it seems). And somehow, between now and 2034 you’ll have picked up an English accent (the campaign is for British mobile company, Orange).

Overall, it can be a bit creepy, actually, depending on what source photo you provide to be aged.

FutureSelf was built by Toronto’s Jam3. (Wanna see how they did it?)

On Wednesday, Oct. 22, Drex and I spent most of our tech-talk-time meandering on about streaming video.

A new player enters the Canadian market in a few days with the launch of Shomi, a joint project of Rogers and Shaw. The service is taking on Netflix.

For his part, Drex is looking forward to any opportunity to laze around binge-watching old episodes of ’80s-era sitcoms.

We also talked about the optimistic outlooks both Richard Florida and Ray Kurzweil have about the future of humanity. Drex may be worried about Skynet, but Kurzweil isn’t.

Here’s a look at what’s been going on in the tech world recently.

Shomi is trying to be Canada’s answer to Netflix

Launching in a couple of weeks, Shomi, a joint project of Rogers and Shaw, is a streaming video service that hopes to supplant Netflix north of the 49th.

The name is a bit precious, but it works well on a website. “Shomi my favourites,” for example. Or “Shomi what’s new”.

For $8.99, the service will be available on computers, set-top boxes from Rogers and Shaw, Android and iOS tablets and smartphones, and soon to Xbox 360 and Chromecast.

The collection is archival, not new, so Shomi can’t really challenge Netflix on that front. But the interface and usability of Shomi is far superior to what Netflix offers. And while Netflix makes suggestions based on computer algorithms alone, Shomi is also using humans to curate the viewing experience.

But I suspect that within a couple of years, it won’t really matter.

HBO has confirmed it is launching it’s own streaming service in the U.S. next year. CBS announced it would be doing something similar, and other cable networks and specialty channels (ESPN included) are expected to follow suit.

Content creators are going direct to consumer, which is why Netflix is leveraging its popularity right now to become a content creator with series such as House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and the upcoming seasons of Trailer Park Boys.

Unless Shomi is already planning for that future, their days are already numbered.

The future according to Florida and Kurzweil

At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver last week, urbanist Richard Florida and technologist and inventor Ray Kurzweil talked about the future.

Florida came up with the concept of the creative class, a term he used to describe how the modern workforce is more creative and knowledge-based than in past generations.

Kurzweil, meanwhile, has used mathematical modeling to predict such things as the notion that fossil fuels will be replaced within 20 years and that we can engineer human health to extend life spans dramatically.

In conversation with CBC correspondent Amanda Lang, and appearing as part of SFU’s Public Square series, the two men were asked whether innovation will save us. Kurzweil and Florida are both unabashed optimists about our future, so their answers weren’t really in question.

Before they could answer, Andrew Petter, SFU president, gave an introduction in which he took great care to detail what he perceived to be the drawbacks to innovation: the increasing gap between rich and poor, destruction of industries and jobs being automated away, the dangers of climate change.

Florida spoke first, and said that innovations create a tremendous opportunity that can save us if we “build social and economic mechanisms” so that innovations benefit all of us. He believes that in the same way that factories were the place where knowledge was collected and organized in the past century, that cities will play that role in our future.

Cities, said Florida, need to be dense and diverse, they need to be places where the creative class, which accounts for more of us all the time, can combine and recombine and fail and fail and try again. He recounted how, when Seattle was in the doldrums he was asked to visit and consult, and on a tour of the deserted downtown core, he saw a new building being constructed. Florida was told that it was a project being funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and he wasn’t surprised to learn that the massive construction was an homage to Jimi Hendrix. The Experience Music Project is, said Florida, the perfect example of what influences and motivates the creative class.

Now working for Google, Kurzweil gave much the same presentation that he delivered when I first heard him speak in San Francisco back in 2009. The difference is that he’s got a few more data points to add to his graphs of exponential growth of information technologies. So when he says we’re only 6 doublings away from solar energy technologies being able to provide enough power to meet our needs, that’s significant. It may not seem like it now, but such is the misleading nature of exponential growth: things may start slow, but once they reach a critical mass, they get big in a hurry.

The best example is the work done on the human genome. It took some 7 years to sequence 1% of the human genome, and only 7 more years to complete it. Now that human health is, effectively, an information technology, Kurzweil predicts that we are just a few years away from being able to radically increase life spans: stem cells are rejuvenating heart muscle in heart attack survivors, Parkinsons patients are benefiting from a pea-sized implants in their brains that can be updated with wireless transmissions in the same way you get a text message on your smartphone.

Florida and Kurzweil both acknowledged that innovation and technological progress aren’t without risk, but that we gain far more from them than we lose.

The future is now

While Kurzweil believes that technology will one day help humans live healthier, longer lives, surgeons and scientists in Europe have helped a paralyzed man to walk again.

Darek Fidyka, a Bulgarian man paralyzed from the chest down after injuries sustained in a 2010 knife fight, is now walking with assistance after surgery to transplant cells from his olfactory bulbs in his brain, to his spinal cord.

It’s a great time to be a kid who likes to play video games, because two of the best releases this fall were designed just for you. We’ll take a look at these, as well as some recently released games for older kids.

Read more at the Georgia Straight