One evident danger of Facebook or MySpace activity is the increased risk from stalkers and predators. Kids and teens, and even those beyond their teenage years may unintentionally place themselves at risk from stalkers and sexual predators. Your friends aren’t the only people who may be looking at your profile, and MySpace is a stalker’s haven where personal photos and information are a click away.

Most interesting are those who claim the variety of health problems that come about from social networking. Aric Sigman, a highly acclaimed British scientist has inflamed and enraged the population through his books like Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging Our Lives. Sigman is to be respected for taking the minority stand on unpopular issues. His talks on alcohol and technology are equally scintillating, but it’s his comments regarding social networking with which we are interested. In his influential paper, “The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking’” (Biologist, February 2009), Sigman attempts to prove his thesis that online social networking has biological effects that adversely alter our health. In other words: Facebook is bad for you. If you can navigate his medical verbiage, you will discover that online social networking subjects you to increased risk for cancer, genetic mutation, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, lupus, arthritis, strokes, and yes, even the common cold. His charts which trace the size of one’s social circle and its direct impact upon the diameter of one’s arteries are really quite insightful.

With a pointed application, Sigman closes his work with a haunting question: [Having considered th the enormous evidence of these calamitous effects] “we should now explain the true meaning of the term ‘social networking.’”

I will admit that I have a few Facebook friends, who don’t seem to sleep, judging by the constant regularity of their status updates, even in the odd hours of the morning, but I’m not sure it’s given them lupus…yet.

No doubt, it would do us all good to maintain an awareness of the way we spend our time. Few would argue that such an exercise could produce significant improvement, but you will have to judge personally whether or not you’re at an increased risk for dementia as a result of your Facebook activity.

APC has a great article up on the top 10 reasons to hate the new iPhone 3g.  As much as I kind of want to, I really don’t hate the new iPhone.  In fact, I’d love to have one.

My favorite reason cited: No Adobe Flash support. Ugh.

Undeniably, the iPhone has the best web browser of any phone on the market. But when you hit a web page with Adobe Flash in it, you’ll just get an empty space with a ‘missing plugin’ icon. Apple says Flash would run too slowly on the iPhone, but in reality, it’s probably more to do with Apple wanting to promote its competing web app development technology, Sproutcore.

Apple realises the ‘mobile web’ is at a tipping point… if it can get enough momentum behind developers coding sites specifically for the iPhone, it will help sales of the iPhone along in the long term. (That said, unlike Flash, Sproutcore is an open standard that theoretically works in any web browser that supports Javascript, so it could be widely supported by all handset makers if their phone web browsers got better.)

Who the hell uses Sproutcore?

Technorati Tags: iphone, hating, hate, 3g, apple, technology, gadgets

As you may have noticed there are going to be a number of new things going on with ArsGeek, starting off with a brand new look!  Expect to see lots of changes, some big and some small over the next few days.

That’s the premise behind Day by Day Armageddon by J. L. Bourne.  The book follows the first person narrative of our protagonist as he learns of a growing threat to humanity and keeps an almost daily journal of the rise of a huge zombie population and the fall of humanity.  This book has been out for a bit but I’ve just recently gotten my hands on a copy.

I should say before continuing on with this review that I’m a big fan of Zombies.  I love a good zombie movie but it’s rare that I find a decent book about the subject I can sit down and enjoy.  To be a decent book about zombies, it can’t just be a smattering of gore and horror – it’s got to be fun, interesting, though provoking and like the presence of the undead themselves, should hold a mirror up to our society.  A previous exception would be World War Z.

Day by Day Armageddon does a decent job of hitting my high points and it’s an enjoyable and fairly quick read.  Bourne’s protagonist is likable and I found him taking actions that I approved of, rather than the horror norm of hear-a-noise-in-dark-basement-go-investigate-in-swimsuit.  This guy’s a survivor, who makes smart choices when he can.  We meet a few other survivors as well, some we cheer for and some form antagonists to both the narrator and the undead.

The author draws from the ‘traditional’ modern zombie lore.  Slow moving undead with little intelligence bent only on finding and devouring living folk like you and me.  Bourne does throw in a few twists when it comes to the undead but you won’t find it a huge departure from the shambling horde.

There are a few sticking points – mainly the images included in the book and the large number of typos encountered by the reader.  The images are grainy at best and in my opinion serve to detract focus from the story.  I’d find myself constantly glancing at them when they appeared, to my annoyance.  They typos were another niggling annoyance.  There are quite a lot of them which would jump off the page just when things were heating up.  These are however just annoyances and really didn’t detract too much from my overall experience of the book.  The story is tight and fast paced.  I found myself staying up a bit later than I normally would to finish the book, which took me perhaps four hours to read.

The ending isn’t really an ending, as this is supposed to be the first of several books.  You are left hanging.  I do hope that another novel is forthcoming as I’d be glad to find out what happens to our Navy man and his small band of survivors though I understand that Bourne is currently on active duty in the real world military so we may have to wait a bit for this to happen.

If you’re a fan of horror fiction, particularly that features zombies, the folks who fight to keep their lives and a good bit of detail about how they do this, then you’ll enjoy Day by Day Armageddon.  At $15 I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for a good read.

Technorati Tags: zombies, armageddon, braaaaaains, books, self published, reviews