What we can learn from procrastination
Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something…
Europe simulates total cyber war
The first-ever cross-European simulation of an all out cyber attack was planned to test how well nations cope as the attacks slow connections.
The simulation steadily reduced access to critical…
Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
So when an eminent member of the House of Lords stands up six hours into a debate and blows the gaff on a shadowy foreign Foundation making a bid to buy the British state, and this is recorded in…
Is a federal Nordic state on the cards?
It can, however, be a stimulating academic exercise to speculate about what this Nordic federal state should look like. In that spirit I propose beautiful Stockholm for a capital (the only never…
Some Proposals to Answer Important Questions
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sıuuǝʇ uɐılɐɹʇsnɐ
Raising giant insects to unravel ancient oxygen
The giant dragonflies of ancient Earth with wingspans of up to 70 centimeters (28 inches) are generally attributed to higher oxygen atmospheric levels in the atmosphere in the past. New experiments…
Michael T. Rea
A Buzz between Rural Cooperation and the Online Swarm
This article introduces and explores connections between rural traditions and contemporary projects of voluntary cooperation within emergent online network practices. The key examples are mainly from…
Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’
FOR DECADES in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as…
Bell System Technical Journal
The scientific discoveries and technological innovations produced by Bell System research and engineering were critical not only to the evolution of global telecommunications but, more widely, they…
Ethiopian Caterpillar automaton by Maillardet
The Ethiopian Caterpillar is an exquisite automaton from 1820 going to auction at Sotheby’s November sale in Geneva. The automaton is attributed to Henri Maillardet – creator of the famous drawing…
The Productive Surface
From the legacy of high modernism, an emphasis on form, technique, function and technology has dominated the representation of surface in architecture and landscape architecture. This emphasis has…
"John is Dreaming"
"Matin is Dreaming"
"Freddie is Dreaming"
"Jacques is Dreaming"
Untitled / benacree
untitled
New visual programming language for information visualization
With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial…
New visual programming language for information visualization
Hiroshi Sugimoto
» Bootstrapping a Type System
News Flash: Economists Agree
I believe it is better to introduce students to economics with topics about which there is more of a professional consensus. In chapter two of the book, I include a table of propositions to which…
HTTP cookies, or how not to design protocols
For as long as I remember, HTTP cookies have been vilified as a grave threat to the privacy of online browsing; wrongly so. That said, the mechanism itself is a very interesting cautionary tale for…
Interview with Benoît Mandelbrot by Hans Ulrich Obrist
MANDELBROT: The use of images in mathematics certainly stands completely against the ideology of the 1960s and ‘70s, when the sciences were sharply classified according to whether images are or are…
China’s Growth in Clean Energy Matches Ambition
China is emerging from the global recession even more dominant in clean energy and with greater ambitions to be the world’s leader in this sector than previously thought, a new report from the…
The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability
The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability: The RCA’s Approach, by Clare Brass and Octavia Reeve
Wiki Home - Make Your Bot!
Make Your Bot is the home of the under $100 Mantis 3-axis CNC milling machine. The Mantis machines are part of the MIT Machines that Make project. This wiki provides all of the design files and…
Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish
I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.
Printable Robots
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large / Rétrofuturs (Hulk4598) / Stéphane Massa-Bidal
Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook | booktwo.org
Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook | booktwo.org
Real-time heatmap example with Javascript
The following demo generates a real-time heatmap with javascript and the HTMLCanvas element depending on the user s mouse movement. The heatmap is applied to the picture on the left.
‘Aliens have taken the place of angels’
Before the term “science fiction” appeared, in America in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such as HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds were…
Starship Stormtroopers
Starship Stormtroopers by Micheal Moorcock
Information Warfare - Part 1
Consider however the effects of connecting a Tazer into a wall socket LAN port, using a home built RJ-45 or BNC attachment. Fifty kiloVolts will punch through every isolation transformer on the…
Iceland - Michael Schlegel
ProjectCollage
Harold McGee’s ‘Keys To Good Cooking’ For Chefs
His latest book, the Keys to Good Cooking, is a how-to guide for home chefs in which McGee, a food science expert, explains techniques for kicking recipes up a few notches. McGee details why people…
Programming crowds
Both papers describe software that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to farm tasks out to human beings sitting at Internet-connected computers. The best-paper prize went to VizWiz, a cell-phone…
Robot Invasion Welcomed in Japan
TOKYO — Could it be that the Japanese view of robots as friendly helpers — and not as the rebellious, violent machines that populate much of Western science fiction — is rooted in the Shinto…
mattermedia
Research material and annotations: history and theory of art and media
Slavoj Žižek · Can you give my son a job?
What we have in China isn’t simply a combination of a private capitalist economy and Communist political power. In one way or another, state and Party own the majority of China’s companies,…
The Corporate Intelligence Community
The robot that reads your mind to train itself
Writing is not a series of strokes, but space, divided into…
Writing is not a series of strokes, but space, divided into…
Writing is not a series of strokes, but space, divided into…
Dale Frank
Chris Berens "Microcosmos"
EmmaDreaming.jpg (1400×700)
The Utopia Experiment
“We live in strange times, caught between two opposing views of the future. On the one hand, the believers in technology and progress promise a world of ever increasing prosperity, a science-fiction…
Making things hard to read ‘can boost learning’
Difficult-to-read fonts make for better learning, according to scientists. The finding is about to be published in the international journal Cognition.
The Goat Rodeo Complex/Difficult situation scale
Please feel free to use the Goat Rodeo scale (“This is a 4th Degree Goat Rodeo problem”) when thinking about the scope and difficulty of problem areas. Note how many of the things we are struggling…
Chris Berens “Leeuwenhart”
The other side of Dan Reisinger
Brothers Quay Shoot a Film at the Mütter Museum
THROUGH eyes as blank as a tilapia’s Stephen and Timothy Quay contemplate a world that is curious, doubtful, beastly and deranged. These identical twins, 63, have chronicled their world in more than…
The Zero G Coffee Cup
Astronaut Don Pettit invents a zero gravity cup to drink coffee, and anything else, in weightlessness.
Credit: NASA
»Mass Black Implosion (Iannis Xenakis ST/48 – 1, 240162 )«, 2007 by Marco Fusinato.
»Mass Black Implosion (Iannis Xenakis ST/48 – 1, 240162 )«, 2007 by Marco Fusinato.
»Untitled«, 2010 by Jorinde Voigt.
»Diatope Sketch«, 1978/1979 by Iannis Xenakis.
Methods - Usability Body of Knowledge
Practitioners in usability and user-centered design (UCD) employ a wide range of methods for gathering information about users and their tasks, analyzing needs, creating design solutions, iterating…
The 64-degree poached eggs
Eggs cooked with an immersion circulator are not, strictly speaking, cooked sous vide, since they aren’t vacuum sealed. But they are an excellent candidate for the long-time/low-temperature approach…
1975: And the Changes To Come
1975: And the Changes To Come
Affinity Diagramming
Affinity diagramming is a participatory method where concepts written on cards are sorted into related groups and sub-groups. The original intent of affinity diagramming was to help diagnose…
Benoit Mandelbrot the Maverick, 1924–2010
The world is mourning the loss of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who may have established a record by earning tenure at Yale in 1999, 75 years after his birth. (There’s an excellent older…
All About Polymorphics
Simon Ramo’s concept of “polymorphic” computing is laid out in stop-motion animation, accompanied by acoustic guitar. The film anticipates parallel, distributed processing and the architecture of…
Eggs Benedict Project - Kayahara
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
MUCH OF WHAT MEDICAL RESEARCHERS CONCLUDE IN THEIR STUDIES IS MISLEADING, EXAGGERATED, OR FLAT-OUT WRONG. SO WHY ARE DOCTORS—TO A STRIKING EXTENT—STILL DRAWING UPON MISINFORMATION IN THEIR EVERYDAY…
ANACHRONORM アナクロノーム: ANB–219
Website Aims to Keep Track of Politicians’ Promises
A new online tool aims to make it more difficult for politicians to renege on election promises. The Perpetually Public Data Project is an online archive of the websites of Senate and House hopefuls….
Why Rebel Groups Love the Toyota Hilux
Why rebels and insurgent groups the world over love the Toyota Hilux pickup as much as their AK-47s.
soviet moonlander
Alexandre-Farto-Scratched-Murals–2.jpg (670×500)
russell davies: something something something
It’s hard to miss the missing future in science fiction. Zero History feels like it’s set in the past, actually last year, when we were all obsessed with tactical pants and I was still updating EBCB….
Edo-period medical illustration
Anatomical illustrations from Edo-period Japan
Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of Alienation
GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE: BORROWING ARCHITECTURE FROM THE ZONE OF ALIENATION
Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of Alienation
EU Oil dependence and Energy Mix
Without having hard numbers, this reliance on Oil is mainly due to the Transport sector, given that all the PIIGS have been modernizing their Electricity infrastructure and consolidating balanced…
An observation on Drew Barrymore — rabbit hole ahead!
algorithmically-designed “DARPA Hoodie”
Several years ago, Otherlab’s Jonathan Bachrach and Saul Griffith, former BB guestblogger and MacArthur “Genius” received a DARPA grant to develop algorithms that convert 3D objects into 2D pattern…
Design Patterns between Free Software and Permaculture | fscons.org
Following an interdisciplinary approach to pattern languages, we’ll adventure in the discovery of Permaculture Principles in relationship to Free and Open Source Software development.
Design Patterns between Free Software and Permaculture | fscons.org
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Entangled_back
Global Survey of Early Warning Systems
Global Survey of Early Warning Systems - An assessment of capacities, gaps and opportunities towards building a comprehensive global early warning system for all natural hazards
Delusions – Museum of Schizophrenia
Delusions is a museum of schizophrenia that offers guest a first hand experience into the life of someone who suffers from the disease. The experience is presented in an exaggerated yet entertaining,…
The Milosevics
The text for “The Milosevics” is an exact transcript of telephone conversations among members of the Milosevic family that were recorded in 1997 by Croatian intelligence agents and released in…
Stefano Mancuso | Profile on TED.com
Stefano Mancuso is a founder of the study of plant neurobiology, which explores signaling and communication at all levels of biological organization, from genetics to molecules, cells and ecological…
Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?
If you have this book in your hands, you’re most likely a creator or culture worker who, on any number of occasions, has been seized by the desire to wrestle the terms “aesthetic” and “aesthetics” to…
Russia inflates its military with blow-up weapons
The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons.
but does it float
but does it float
Blue Harvest
nickcave_6
8Texts Book
HERO in CHiQ
In search of Belgrade’s sonic underbelly
Belgrade is not a polished, shiny city like Prague, it still retains its rawness and Balkanic chaos. Theoretically, cities like these - as is/was the case with all your Berlins - are usually bustling…
NE-TON
Ne-ton | That’s not the way to do business: Ne-ton (Non-tone) is an independent music label that focuses on free music in the broadest sense of the term. It encompasses various music genres such as:…
Svetlana Industries
Animation « XVIVO
One of the best parts of XVIVO’s creation of MOAs is the front row seat we have, interviewing the scientists who invent today’s medical marvels. They, in turn, appreciate our ability to understand…
£850bn: official cost of the bank bailout
K.O.F.Y sur MySpace Music
Sentient City Survival Kit
artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city