“Glitch” by Kyle Thompson I wanted to emulate the look of a VHS or computer glitch. Combining the way the image disintegrates…

kylejthompson:

“Glitch” by Kyle Thompson
I wanted to emulate the look of a VHS or computer glitch. Combining the way the image disintegrates with an image of some one seemingly breaking apart themself.   To do this I actually removed and altered the data of the edited photo (meaning that most of this is was done in a HEX editor rather than an image editor).   

Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship

politics, democracy, oligarchy, status quo, instituions, re-election, charlie stross

Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimize the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election. And in so doing, they have broken the “peaceful succession when enough people get pissed off” mechanism that prevents revolutions.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html#more

Caffenol Recipes

Caffenol, film, developer, photography, DIY, coffee

Caffenol Recipes that are proven to work can be found here. If not stated differently, the temperature of the solution should be 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. For all other temperatures, please adjust the developing time accordingly. If you have never used caffenol before, I suggest that you start with films that are proven to deliver decent results, for example the 400 ISO films Ilford HP5 Plus, or Kodak TMAX 400. Slow films that work are Ilford FP4 (ISO 125) and Ilford PanF (ISO 50). Developing times and links to example pictures can be found in the Film Development Chart.

http://www.caffenol.org/recipes/

Restoration, thinking paths and obliquity

Restoration, thinking paths, obliquity, rest, prodcutivity, serendipity, research, renewal

the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

http://www.contemplativecomputing.org/2013/02/restoration-thinking-paths-and-obliquity.html

The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later

emacs, wiki, community, engineering, revision, culture

It really sucks that when Bozhidar Batsov put his big talk about how shitty EmacsWiki is into action, the only thing we got out of it was another shitty wiki. It bugs the everliving hell out of me that even though engineering is supposed to be a rigorous discipline, we throw all kinds of shit at the wall to see what sticks, without ever looking at the walls in the last four or five rooms to see what the hell worked the last time.

http://wrttn.in/3afc42

Convictions For File-Sharing Violate Human Rights

falkvinge, copyfight, free culture, culture, europe, ECHR, copyright

It is, in other words, no longer sufficient to justify a sanction or any other judicial order restricting one’s artistic or journalistic freedom of expression on the basis that a copyright law provision has been infringed. Neither is it sufficient to consider that the unauthorised use, reproduction or public communication of a work cannot rely on one of the narrowly interpreted exceptions in the copyright law itself, including the application of the so-called three-step test […]

http://falkvinge.net/2013/02/07/court-of-human-rights-convictions-for-file-sharing-violates-human-rights/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Falkvinge-on-Infopolicy+%28Falkvinge+on+Infopolicy%29

Present Shock: The End Of Time Is Not The End Of The World

Douglas Rushkoff, review, present shock, technology, society, narrative, stories, collapsonomics

To the problem of narrative collapse, Rushkoff suggests that young people have reacted to the loss of storytellers by realizing they have to become the storyteller. The gamer can write his own next level. We can be fragmented by allowing ourselves to operate on the (non-temporal) time scale of computers or we can program our computers to keep us in sync with our own goals and our own lives. Technology is, in fact, neutral. It doesn’t “want” things to be a certain way. But all technologies are ste up by people with certain biases, but those biases are often unclear until they play out in the real world. So civilians do have an opportunity to intervene in technologies that they dont’t fully understand because they do have the capacity to understand the impact of those technologies on their lives.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/12/22/douglas-rushkoffs-present-shock-the-end-of-time-is-not-the-end-of-the-world/

The Kraken Awakes: What Architeuthis is Trying to Tell Us

squid, sea, architeuthis, kraken, fishing, photography

Despite its status as the largest invertebrate on the planet, no one had ever seen, much less photographed, a live giant squid in its habitat until 2004. On September 30, at precisely 9:15 A.M., near Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, a 26-foot-long giant squid attacked a baitline that Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and his research team had rigged with a strobe and a digital camera, timed to snap an image every 30 seconds. Within days, cephalogeeks all over the Web were posting links to astonishing photographs of the animal vrooming up out of the deep and grabbing the bait “in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey within [their] coils…immediately after striking,” as the researchers put it.

http://boingboing.net/2013/01/28/the-kraken-awakes-what-ar.html

Four Futures

futurism, scenarios, capitalism, abundance, scarcity, egalitarianism, hierarchy

Taken to its logical extreme, this dynamic brings us to the point where the economy does not require human labor at all. This does not automatically bring about the end of work or of wage labor, as has been falsely predicted over and over in response to new technological developments. But it does mean that human societies will increasingly face the possibility of freeing people from involuntary labor. Whether we take that opportunity, and how we do so, will depend on two major factors, one material and one social. The first question is resource scarcity: the ability to find cheap sources of energy, to extract or recycle raw materials, and generally to depend on the Earth’s capacity to provide a high material standard of living to all. A society that has both labor-replacing technology and abundant resources can overcome scarcity in a thoroughgoing way that a society with only the first element cannot. The second question is political: what kind of society will we be? One in which all people are treated as free and equal beings, with an equal right to share in society’s wealth? Or a hierarchical order in which an elite dominates and controls the masses and their access to social resources?

http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

There are two schools of thought on emergence. In weak emergence, the new properties arise as a result of the interactions at an…

“There are two schools of thought on emergence. In weak emergence, the new properties arise as a result of the interactions at an elemental level and the emergent property is reducible to its individual components, that is, you can figure out the steps from one level to the next, which would be the deterministic view. Whereas, in strong emergence, the new property is irreducible, is more than the sum of its parts, and because of the amplification of random events, the laws cannot be predicted by an underlying fundamental theory or from an understanding of the laws of another level of organization.”

–Gazzaniga, Michael S.Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: Ecco, 2011. (viacarvalhais)

Little Printer: A portrait in the nude

domus, BERG, little printer, object, mary poppins, magic, design, UI, UX

Little Printer is a product of now. It is a product, a tangible thing, but is also a product, in the sense of a consequence, of contemporary culture. It humbly and accessibly exemplifies how physical and digital have merged to become one, to become hybrid objects, to demonstrate how objects might become networked, and how domestic objects might behave.

http://www.domusweb.it/en/design/little-printer-a-portrait-in-the-nude-/

Paul Prudence interviews Mitchell Whitelaw

art, generative, futurism, utopianism, dystopianism, interview, paul prudence, mitchell whitelaw

It might be argued that some of the main themes infused in generative art are those to do with a kind of techno-utopianism and futurism. Have you come across any generative artworks that deal with dystopian themes or have a sense of anachronism about them? More importantly are the technologies and software used in creating these artworks inherently defining their aesthetics?

http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/interview-with-paul-prudence-for-neural.html

Four hours of concentration

work, concentration, practice, 4hr, 10000 hours, cognitive limits

Now we also know that if you study absolute world class, best virtuoso violin players, none of them put in more than about four or so hours of practice in a day, because that’s the cognitive limit. And this limit actually shows up in a lot of different fields where people do intense training, that you really can’t do about more than four or so hours of this type of really mental strain.

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/02/04/four-hours-of-concentration/

Power And The Internet

internt, security, society, power, politics, corporatism, government

All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that’s only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general.

https://www.schneier.com/essay–409.html

There is so much photography, especially of a ‘seriouss’ [sic!] nature, that ties you up in knots, that seeks to put you into a…

“There is so much photography, especially of a ‘seriouss’ [sic!] nature, that ties you up in knots, that seeks to put you into a particular place in the way that you see and understand it. It’s a kind of photographic correctness, where even though you may agree wholeheartedly with what is being said or shown, the resentment at being forced to agree with the sentiments of the work, the inability of the work to offer even a second dimension or alternative perspective makes one want to disagree with it just for the sake of it. It’s Stupid Photography that doesn’t enlighten or engage, but just shuts things up and makes one long for something that is open and free. Photography isn’t always open or free.”

–Colin Pantall

A Short Rant About Working Remotely

work, working remotely, telepresence, collaboration, research

Pretty much all the evidence (rather than anecdote) I can find shows that co-located teams in a single team room environment are the most productive - all other things being equal. (And I’m saying this as somebody who spends a lot of their time working from home, and talking to other folk over Skype, etc. There are reasons for telecommuting - personal preference, getting access to people who cannot co-locate, etc. But for business productivity I’m not seeing much, if any, evidence).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145097

Climate change signals the end of the social sciences

climate, climate change, anthropocence, nature, culture, modernism, Latour

This human-nature hybrid is true not just of the climate system, but of the planet as a whole, although it would be enough for it to be true of the climate system. We know from the new discipline of Earth system science that changes in the atmosphere affect not just the weather but the Earth’s hydrosphere (the watery parts), the biosphere (living creatures) and even the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust). They are all linked by the great natural cycles and processes that make the planet so dynamic. In short, everything is in play.

http://theconversation.edu.au/climate-change-signals-the-end-of-the-social-sciences–11722

English plainclothes police officer follows himself for 20 minutes

CCTV, panoptocon, panopticomic, surveilance, autocriminalsation, follow

An undercover police officer in Sussex, England, shadowed a suspicious character through the streets a small market town for 20 minutes, following directions passed to him by a CCTV operator who guided him towards the suspect. After 20 minutes, the CCTV operator realized that the “suspicious character” was the police officer himself.

http://boingboing.net/2012/02/08/english-plainclothes-police-of.html

With New Constitution, Post-Collapse Iceland Inches Toward Direct Democracy

iceland, collapsonomics, post-collapse, economics, politics, consitution, althingi

In late 2009, the Ministry organized a 1,000-member strong national gathering - a drill in collaborative “Where do we go from here?” brainstorming involving randomly selected citizens and a few handpicked prominent thinkers (Magnusson and Jónsdóttir were there). Groups of participants bounced ideas off each other, ultimately formulating a list of shared values. The summit organizers, through Magnusson and his tech-nerd compatriots, took those suggestions and came up with an aggregation of cherished mores in short order. Not long after the discussions finished - thanks to social media crowdsourcing - Iceland had a decent estimate of its moral compass.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14097-with-new-constitution-post-collapse-iceland-inches-toward-direct-democracy

UBS: Boom in unsubsidised solar PV flags energy revolution

solar, PV, UBS, power, electricity

“We are at the beginning of a new era in power markets,” the UBS analysts write. ”Purely based on economics, we believe almost every family home and every commercial rooftop in Germany, Italy and Spain should be equipped with a solar system by the end of this decade.” It says up to 18% of electricity demand could be replaced by self-produced solar power in these markets, at the expense of centralised generation. Even as soon as 2020, up to 43GW of unsubsidised solar could be installed in Germany, Italy and Spain, replacing up to 9 per cent of electricity demand. This is on top of reduction in demand caused by energy efficiency measures and weak GDP growth.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/ubs-boom-in-unsubsidised-solar-pv-flags-energy-revolution–60218

Ghost Army

theoddmentemporium:

Ghost Army

The Ghost Army was a United States Army tactical deception unit during World War II officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. The 1,100-man unit was given a unique mission within the Army to impersonate other U.S. Army units to deceive the enemy.

From a few weeks after D-Day, when they landed in France, until the end of the war, they put on a traveling road show, using inflatable tanks, sound trucks, phony radio transmissions and playacting. They staged more than 20 battlefield deceptions, often operating very close to the front lines. Their mission was kept secret until 1996, and elements of it remain classified.

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