(…) story is for a human as water is for a fish—all-encompassing and not quite palpable. While your body is always fixed at a…

“(…) story is for a human as water is for a fish—all-encompassing and not quite palpable. While your body is always fixed at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe. And it does.”

– Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal, How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. (viacarvalhais)

Ghost ships

ghost ship, wikipedia

A ghost ship, also known as a phantom ship, is a ship with no living crew aboard; it may be a ghostly vessel in folklore or fiction, such as the Flying Dutchman, or a real derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, like the Mary Celeste. The term is sometimes used for ships that have been decommissioned but not yet scrapped, such as the Clemenceau (R 98).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_ships

The best documentary work is as complex as its subject matter, does not attempt to fully resolve itself, and forces the viewer…

“The best documentary work is as complex as its subject matter, does not attempt to fully resolve itself, and forces the viewer to interpret the work and engage with the subject matter independently. Filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Werner Herzog come to mind. Why no still photographers? Because the best still photographers have fled from any association with ‘documentary’ as the field has become increasingly parochial, stiff and old-fashioned. Still photographers are the most conservative and least ambitious of visual artists because they are tethered to the photojournalistic tradition and to the general public’s misunderstanding of the medium as a tool of faithful communication. For documentary to be born again, those practicing it and those looking at it must accept that truth cannot be found or created within its bounds, only art.”

–Gregory Halpern in what I consider a must-read piece onAmerican Suburb X  (viabryanschutmaat)

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery. On the one hand, we can’t make sense of…

“It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery. On the one hand, we can’t make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, wefeel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions. However, I think that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an illusion — our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality. Rather, we are mistaken about our experience. Not only as we not as free as we think we are — we do not feel as free as we think we do.”

–Harris, Sam.Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012. (viacarvalhais)

The Internet Didn’t Kill the Middle Class; Laxity and Apathy Did

collapsonomics, emptywheel, decay, manufacturing, employment, labour, capital

It wasn’t the rise of digitization that killed the middle class. It was the insufficiency of protests among U.S. brain power, including publicly-funded academics, failing to advocate for labor and home-grown innovation; their ignorance about the nature of blue collar jobs and the creative output they help realize compounded the problem. Manufacturing has increasingly reduced man hours in tandem with productivity-increasing technological improvements. It wasn’t the internet that killed these jobs, though technology reduced some of them. The inability to plan for the necessary shift of jobs to other fields revealed the lack of comprehensive, forward-thinking manufacturing and labor policies.

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/05/16/the-internet-didnt-kill-the-middle-class-laxity-and-apathy-did/

Antitrust: Commission confirms unannounced inspections in oil and biofuels sectors

EU, EC, antitrust, price fixing, collusion, derivatives

The European Commission can confirm that, on 14 May 2013, Commission officials carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of several companies active in and providing services to the crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels sectors. These inspections took place in two EU Member States. At the Commission’s request, inspections were also carried out on its behalf by the EFTA Surveillance Authority in one European Economic Area (EEA) Member State. The Commission has concerns that the companies may have colluded in reporting distorted prices to a Price Reporting Agency to manipulate the published prices for a number of oil and biofuel products. Furthermore, the Commission has concerns that the companies may have prevented others from participating in the price assessment process, with a view to distorting published prices.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO–13–435_en.htm

Multics Emacs History/Design/Implementation

emacs, multics, paleocomputing, history, computing, computers

Multics is no longer produced or offered for sale; Honeywell no longer even makes computers. People edit on computers on their desktop so cheap and fast that not only do redisplay algorithms no longer matter, but the whole idea of autonomous redisplay in a display editor is no longer a given (although autonomous redisplay’s illustrious child, WYSIWYG, is now the standard paradigm of the industry.). There is now no other kind of editor besides what we then called the “video editor”. Thus, all of the battles, acrimony, and invidious or arrogant comparisons in what follows are finished and done with, and to be viewed in the context of 1979 – this is a historical document about Multics and the evolution of an editor. It is part of the histories of Multics, of Emacs, and of Lisp.

http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html

ZENODO

OA, open access, research, science, CERN

All research outputs from all fields of science are welcome. In the upload form you can choose between types of files: publications (book, book section, conference paper, journal article, patent, preprint, report, thesis, technical note, working paper), posters, presentations, images (figures, plots, drawings, diagrams, photos) and videos/audio. We do check every piece of content being uploaded to ensure it is research related.

http://www.zenodo.org/faq

Click to zoom in on this gorgeous visualization of Kowloon’s Walled City, demolished twenty years ago this month. The…

studiox-nyc:

Click to zoom in on this gorgeous visualization of Kowloon’s Walled City, demolished twenty years ago this month. The illustration is from an article from the South China Morning Post, which includes a short history of the place and more stories from people who used to live there:

It was once thought to be the most densely populated place on earth, with 35,000 people crammed into a few tiny apartment blocks and more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.

Edible Insects: future prospects for feed and food security

food, food security, UN, FAO, insects, diet

The book “Edible Insects: future prospects for feed and food security” was launched at the conference, after years of compiling a database of the insects people eat around the world. The protein in many insects can be about the same as lean red meat or fish, but the insects require far less feed to produce the same quantity of meat as a cow, for example.

http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/05/13/UN-To-fight-hunger-eat-more-insects/2431368445017/

Engineering the $325,000 In-Vitro Burger

meat, tissue culture, food, biotech, biology

The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world — including potential sources of research funds — that so-called in-Vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/engineering-the–325000-in-vitro-burger.html?_r=2&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1368418364–9BbUl9iWpNavnGGiS9Hqxg&

http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/about/who-works-here

brucesterling:

http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/about/who-works-here

*Just stumbled over this snapshot of Honor Harger, dressed for her usual day-job as the radiotelescopic thought-leader of the New Aesthetic.  

http://honorharger.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/unmanned-aerial-ecologies-proto-drones-airspace-and-canaries-in-the-mine/

*Somewhere in the futurist quadrant of the 2020s there’s an awesome scenario where grimy hordes of sci-fi fans suddenly take all their fashion cues from globe-trotting tech-art curators like Dr. Harger here. Then the planetary mundane regime just falls without a shot.  There’s nothing left of the War on Terror and the Austerity, the whole dark wicked interregnum just blows away like cigarette ash.

A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image

book review, surrealism, design, typography, 1920s, 1930s, Rick Poynor

Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design uncovers the presence of an alternative tradition in graphic design. The Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s focused on literature, painting, photography and the object, and the Surrealists’ publishing activities provided only hints of what a fully conceived Surrealist graphic design or typography might look like. Many of the most suggestive early examples came from Czechoslovakia, where Surrealism would become a lasting influence. Subsequently, Surrealist ideas and images had a profound impact on image-makers in every sphere of art and design, and by the 1960s the effects of Surrealism were widely felt in international graphic communication.

http://observatory.designobserver.com/rickpoynor/feature/a-dictionary-of-surrealism-and-the-graphic-image/37685/

Text of SXSW2013 closing remarks by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling, SXSW, 2013, gothic hi-tech, progress, electronic frontier, world changing, nai

It’s always the electronic frontier. Nobody ever goes back to look at the electronic forests that were cut down with chainsaws and tossed into the rivers. And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world “better.” This is a dangerous word. Like: “If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?” Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical. Because when you say a thing like that at South By: “Oh, we’re here to make the world better” — you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivete. The world has a tragic dimension. This world does not always get better. The world has deserts. Deserts aren’t better. People don’t always get better.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/

Ferran Adrià and experiments in design

food, design, Ferran Adrià, dialogue

Then you can see how old we are, we still have this discourse of separate disciplines of art, design and cinema. I want a dialogue between these disciplines. With regards to innovation, cooking has a very important character, which is its immediateness. If you go to a café and order a coffee, you want it now. When you apply that to innovation, cooking can be brutal. All the designers with whom we have worked at elBulli are very surprised, because we work 10 times faster than they do. In cooking you can’t do things later, you need to do them now. Designers pick up this characteristic from us and that’s achieved through dialogue.

http://disegnodaily.com/interview/ferran-adria-and-experiments-in-design

A Cavalier History of Situationism

SI, rhizome, McKenzie Wark, interview, work, marx, creativity, production, culture, critical theory

Well, there is no longer any difference between work and play. There’s no such thing as leisure and non-leisure. We’re all working all the friggin’ time. But when we’re working, we’re goofing off half that time anyway. Does anyone even know when they’re working anymore? I’m talking about in what the Situationists called the ‘overdeveloped’ world. I do all my work in coffee shops, and I see people constantly juggling stuff that’s either work or not work, god only knows what it is. As the grid tightens, it in certain senses becomes more diffuse.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/7/cavalier-history-situationism-interview-mckenzie-w/

Let’s Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype

bitcoin, security, dan kaminsky

Bitcoin’s resilience comes from a property I refer to as Too Big To Regulate. Put simply, it’s easier to tell ten people to behave, than ten thousand. So if we want a system that’s impossible to regulate, get the power in the hands of ten thousand rather than ten. But there are some factors in Bitcoin that are not Too Big To Regulate. There’s only a few parties that turn bitcoin (which teleports) into dollars (which buy stuff). There can, and will be more, but the quantity of these critical nodes is not set by Bitcoin itself.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/lets-cut-through-the-bitcoin-hype/