The Free Universal Construction Kit
EnemyGraph Facebook Application
For the past six months my research group has been looking into an app that explores social dissonance on Facebook. Today we are announcing the public release of EnemyGraph. The project was developed principally by graduate student Bradley Griffith with invaluable help from undergraduate Harrison Massey.
EnemyGraph is an application that allows you to list your “enemies”. Any Facebook friend or user of the app can be an enemy. More importantly, you can also make any page or group on Facebook an “enemy”. This covers almost everything including people, places and things. During our testing testing triangles and q-tips were trending, along with politicians, music groups, and math.
zero+1 aut0mat
(re.automated with help from http://ifttt.com/ } )
The Milkman’s Robot Helper
In 2007, I moved into an apartment building in St. Paul that was built during the early 1920s. I remember asking the building manager what the small, two-foot tall doors attached to the outside of each apartment were for. The doors had long been painted shut and no longer opened to the inside of the apartments, as it looked like they should. The manager explained that the doors were used decades ago by milkmen who would make deliveries during the day while people were at work.
In the 1920s virtually all milk consumed in the United States was delivered directly to the home. By the early 1970s, it was only about 15%. By the 1990s, it was less than 1%. Whither the man of milk?
Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world’s smallest nation
HavenCo’s failure—and make no mistake about it, HavenCo did fail—shows how hard it is to get out from under government’s thumb. HavenCo built it, but no one came. For a host of reasons, ranging from its physical vulnerability to the fact that The Man doesn’t care where you store your data if he can get his hands on you, Sealand was never able to offer the kind of immunity from law that digital rebels sought. And, paradoxically, by seeking to avoid government, HavenCo made itself exquisitely vulnerable to one government in particular: Sealand’s. It found that out the hard way in 2003 when Sealand “nationalized” the company.
For the last two years, I’ve researched the history of Sealand and HavenCo. I used the Wayback Machine to reconstruct long-since-vanished webpages. I dug through microfilm of newspapers back to the 1960s. I pored over thousands of pages of documents, only recently unsealed, from the United Kingdom’s National Archives.
The Ultimate Migration
Reader Fred Becker has asked about a ‘paper’ written by rocket pioneer Robert H Goddard on 14 January 1918, sealed in an envelope on the outside of which he wrote: The Last Migration. The notes should be read thoroughly only by an optimist! Goddard was 35 years old and the notes were written more than six years before he would conduct the world’s first rocket flight using liquid propellants. It is a prescient reminder of just how far and grand were the visions of this quiet, elusive man who laid the foundation for so much that would follow. Later that day same day he wrote a condensed version and titled it The Ultimate Migration, which we are delighted to reproduce here in full and in the form in which it was written, uncorrected for grammar:
Mathematics, movement, music and Leonardo
I’ve always been intrigued by the sensation of movement in music. And it is fair to say that it was my first calculus class that led me to graduate study in mathematics because, for the first time, I saw movement in mathematics. My fascination with each of these was nudged again by an interview with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer that I heard on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Big Brothers / Michæl Paukner

Big Brothers / Michæl Paukner
zero aut0mat
(currently de.automated from 201112)
errorbox 00
Google has said that they plan to “address” the issue ofâ€Ĺš
“Facebook’s Real Name policy is sexist, discriminatory, and stupid. Google’s policy is worse, because Google had the advantage of having seen how bad Facebook’s policy was, but they went ahead and…
Google has said that they plan to “address” the issue ofâ€Ĺš
10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)
Inspired by a fabulous post by Michael Feathers along a similar vein, Iě°˝€™ve composed this post as a sequel to the original. That is, while I agree almost wholly with Mr. Featherě°˝€™s1 choices, I…
10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)
Audiovisual Crop Circles
Graphic designer Alexander Peterhaensel gets a little fancy on all yer collective faces with a project which mathematically graphictastically translates some recordings of some music by JSBach. Note…
Audiovisual Crop Circles

Fluid Democracy – Story of The Italian Water Revolution
guaranteeing access to certain vital natural commons (such as water) everyone’s right to enjoy basic intangible common goods (such as education) has required society to create public services. And so…
almost a metaphor of how mathematical patterns emerge from confusion… like sharply defined figures looming from the mist

Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi
Melanin pigments are ubiquitous in nature. Melanized microorganisms are often the dominating species in certain extreme environments, such as soils contaminated with radionuclides, suggesting that…
Researchers Release Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes - Technology Review
The first open field tests of genetically engineered mosquitoes, carried out in the Cayman Islands, show that the insects can successfully compete with their wild counterparts for mates. The…
Researchers Release Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes - Technology Review
ephermera #2519

CymaScope :: Sound Made Visible
The CymaScope is a new type of scientific instrument that makes sound visible. Its development began in 2002, with a prototype that featured a thin, circular, P.V.C. membrane; later we used latex….
First Demonstration Of Opto-Electronic Reservoir Computing - Technology Review
Feedback loops are ubiquitous in nature. They generate rich and complex behaviours that dominate many natural processes. But while this superabundance has fascinated engineers and scientists, the…
First Demonstration Of Opto-Electronic Reservoir Computing - Technology Review
katsumi hayakawa: architectural paper sculptures

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always… - but does it float
zzkt posted a new favorite picture (via):
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always… - but does it float
katsumi hayakawa: architectural paper sculptures

"nothing is original…"
"nothing is original…"

We Are the 99.9% - NYTimes.com
“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common…
Lytro
Lytro lets you take pictures like never before. Unlike a conventional camera that captures a single plane of light, the Lytro camera captures the entire light field, which is all the light traveling…
Dymaxion: Venture Warlordism
Democracy is the gold standard for good governance in modernity. Modern democracy is also fantastically expensive. After all, you only have to write a constitution, establish legislative, judicial…
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

kill your television
zzkt posted a photo:
Cooking in zero gee - Charlie’s Diary
Over the past quarter-million years of human cultural evolution, we have developed quite an extensive repertoire of techniques for preparing and cooking food at the bottom of a gravity well. However,…
Much pruning had taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many… - but does it float

Much pruning had taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many… - but does it float
The Technium: Scenius, or Communal Genius
Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His…
kill your television
zzkt posted a photo:
On The Science Of Cooking
As soon as I started reading Modernist Cuisine, I realized that I was wrong. Nathan and his team have created a lasting contribution human culture. This is not just a cookbook; it is the culinary…
US court verdict ‘huge blow’ to privacy, says former WikiLeaks aide
celandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir has slammed the decision by US courts to open her Twitter account to the US authorities and is taking her case to the Council of Europe….
US court verdict ‘huge blow’ to privacy, says former WikiLeaks aide | World news | guardian.co.uk
“Here is something that, as a philosopher, I have always found both fascinating and deeply puzzling: A complete scientific…
“Here is something that, as a philosopher, I have always found both fascinating and deeply puzzling: A complete scientific description of the physical universe would not contain the information as to what time is “now.” Indeed, such a description would be free of what philosophers can “indexical terms.” There would be no pointers or little red arrows to tell you “You are here!” or “Right now!” In real life, this is the job of the conscious brain: It constantly tells the organism harboring it what place is here and what time is now. This experiential Now is the second big problem for a modern theory of consciousness.”— Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Substroke Design Dump
Substroke was a research language for drawing dynamic (data-dependent) pictures. The description given here was intended as a brain-dump of a work-in-progress. The work-in-progress is no longer in…
Layered Landscapes - Nobuhiro Nakanishi

Layered Landscapes - Nobuhiro Nakanishi
zzkt posted a new favorite picture (via):
Layered Landscapes - Nobuhiro Nakanishi
Layered Landscapes - Nobuhiro Nakanishi
Animism (Volume I)
The Shadow Superpower - By Robert Neuwirth | Foreign Policy
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them…
photo-celebre-lego
photo-celebre-lego

Polygon Double Deer 2 by Kohei Nawa

Polygon Double Deer 2 by Kohei Nawa
Polygon Double Deer 2 by Kohei Nawa

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson
Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speak—more what you would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the genre-vanquishing hero he has become…
Full open access to scholarly monographs - suggesting a local library consortial approach
Frances Pinter (Bloomsbury Press) released a provocative 8-minute video suggesting a full flip to open access complete with CC licensing for scholarly monographs, and initiating the discussion with…
Full open access to scholarly monographs - suggesting a local library consortial approach
Richard Nicholson Photography : Last One Out
Analog - Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light
A survey of London’s remaining professional darkrooms, 2006–2010
X6sh6C0oTkhie06fooO8KUkjo1_400.jpg (400×411)

X6sh6C0oTkhie06fooO8KUkjo1_400.jpg (400×411)
OpenLab NETWORK » OpenLab
The OpenLab Network is a new research initiative which targets a complex education issue of national significance regarding the ability of art and science researchers to collaborate on research…
Who Rules America: An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%
I think it’s important to emphasize one of the dangers of wealth concentration: irresponsibility about the wider economic consequences of their actions by those at the top. Wall Street created the…
Who Rules America: An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%
NotreDAM - Open Source Digital Asset Management
Notre-DAM is a multi-user, web-based application accessible from the most popular browsers. An authentication procedure, based on username and password, is required in order to use Notre-DAM….
CHARTS: Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About…
CHARTS: Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About…
CHARTS: Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About…
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
How do we explore? If you move to a new city, you might learn the territory by walking around. Or you might peruse a map. But far more effective than either is both together — a street-level…
Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email
If you file your emails into folders in your email program you’re wasting your time, according to a study by IBM Research. The 345-user study found that people who used the search function in their…
The Problem With “Asian Steampunk”
It’s not that the phrase “Asian Steampunk” is intrinsically flawed. It’s just that the range of concepts displayed in “Asian Steampunk,” whether fiction, gaming, or costumes, are so so… limited….
Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011
The full legacy of Steve Jobs will not be sorted out for a very long time. When employees first talked about Jobs’ “reality distortion field,” it was a pejorative — they were referring to the way…
Dealing with Extreme Disruptions
We live in a world of increasingly common “black swans” – unforeseen high impact, low probability events that can claim lives, shape societies and reshape the global order. When a 9.0 magnitude…
Innovation Starvation - World Policy Institute
In his recent book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that…
Moods on Twitter Follow Biological Rhythms, Study Finds
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but…
Peers, review your actions
Twenty years ago, academic publishers provided a valuable service to researchers. By printing articles, binding them into issues and sending them out into the world, they provided the only means then…
20110926
zzkt posted a photo:
PAST PRESENT FUTURE: SPACE-TIME
A festival of new psychedelic music, art film & architecture
What am I missing?
A possible weird development: Machine Precognition, named in the tradition of machine vision, machine learning, etc. In the general case, predicting the future is absurdly difficult. Predicting the…
wytai
acronym [“when you think about it”] a feature of modern society that suddenly strikes you as absurd and grotesque—from zoos and milk-drinking to organ transplants, life insurance and fiction—part of the faint background noise of absurdity that reverberates from the moment our ancestors first crawled out of the slime but could not for the life of them remember what they got up to do.
ANDY DENZLER
Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education
The breadth of content and openness of the class is enough to make any online education junkie salivate. The class’s RSS feeds host audio-recorded lectures, class assignments and special discussions….
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Rewilding Etiquette
Imagine a future where the most revolutionary changes in our world have not come from nanotech, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence or even space development–but from cognitive science and…
03_analog_web_470xx

Open the Future: About Foresight (Part One)
It’s a reasonable question. Consistently accurate predictions about interconnected complex systems are functionally impossible, at least at any real level of specificity. It’s long been known that…
Jonathan Cecil’s Chicago Fly:
Jonathan Cecil’s Chicago Fly:
“Easy access to aerial imagery and geospatial information is changing how we view and interact with our urban environments. I use these resources to investigate geologic and urban structures, particularly in areas of political interest. This series of work uses satellite and aerial imaging data to explore and to critique the illusionary boundary of macro and micro scales through defamiliarization. Images of urban areas are the input for a computational process that produces a high resolution 3D mesh which is rendered with ray tracing software to produce a final animation.”
Algae picture: kids swimming in algae in China

vordermaier.absence.1

ScanOps
a fourth class exists at Google that involves strictly data-entry labor, or more appropriately, the labor of digitizing. These workers are identifiable by their yellow badges, and they go by the team…
Wicked (1)
Here’s my take on things: our biggest challenges are no longer technological. They are issues of communication, coordination, and cooperation. These are, for the most part, well-studied problems that…
Massimal Made from 20,000 Zip Ties
Massimal Made from 20,000 Zip Ties

We passed the ice of pain, and came to a dark ravine, and there we… - but does it float
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We passed the ice of pain, and came to a dark ravine, and there we… - but does it float
zzkt posted a new favorite picture (via):
We passed the ice of pain, and came to a dark ravine, and there we… - but does it float

We passed the ice of pain, and came to a dark ravine, and there we… - but does it float
20110728
zzkt posted a photo:
Openbook

TreeMaker
TreeMaker allows one to set up quite elaborate relationships between flaps, their lengths, and their angles: far more complex relationships than are possible using pencil-and-paper origami design….
How Finland became an education leader
How has one industrialized country created one of the world’s most successful education systems in a way that is completely hostile to testing? That’s the question asked – and answered – in a new…
Germany to fund new coal plants with climate change fund cash - The Local - m.thelocal.de
The German government wants to encourage the construction of new coal and gas power plants with millions of euros from a fund for promoting clean energy and combating climate change. The plan has…
Germany to fund new coal plants with climate change fund cash - The Local - m.thelocal.de
InfoGraphics
Annotator - Open Knowledge Foundation
Open-Source Annotation Toolkit for Inline, Online Web Annotation
Shaped Aperture Test

20110708
zzkt posted a photo:
Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible SI: Special
Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible SI: Special

Lab « NextNature.net
Besides observing Next Nature phenomena and writing about them, we also develop concrete design projects. Our goal is to grow a methodology on how to design, build and live in Next Nature. This page…
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words? - but does it float

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words? - but does it float
We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and… - but does it float

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and… - but does it float
Contemplative computing
One of the great unexpected twists in the process was that lots of presses passed on the grounds that there are already lots of books about technology and distraction, and they couldn’t see how the…
Roomba Light Trails - First Run / 3rdeyepro
ordo v2.0

Roomba Light Trails - First Run / 3rdeyepro
