“THE VULTURES OF Britain’s International Centre for Birds of Prey don’t know it, but they’re dupes. Every day, the giant birds carefully tend to their eggs, rotating them periodically so they incubate just right. But…take a closer look at that nest. Not every egg in there is made of calcium carbonate, and they don’t always contain baby birds.No, at this conservation center, some of those eggs are actually 3-D printed. And they’re packed with a bounty that may be more precious to the vultures than an actual embryo: sensors.”
I asked around the social media, “What are the good open access journals in digital arts, computer music etc?” Motivated by deciding that once I get some commitments out of the way, I’m not going to write for closed access publication any more, especially not with public funds. The results so far, in no particular order
i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it. it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle. people tend to express their vision of the mass as a kind of imaginary parade of blue-collar workers, their muscle-bound arms raised in defiant salute. sometimes in this vision they are holding wrenches in their hands. anyway, this image has its origins in Marx and it is as Romantic as a dozen long-stemmed red roses. the mass is more like one of those faceless dolls you find in nostalgia-craft shops: limp, cute, and silent. when i say “cute” i am including its macabre and sinister aspects within my definition.
“I took a photograph of the view out of the window and had a very large negative made from it, which I fastened to the lens hood attacement in front of the camera. I tried to bring the negative into alignment with the real landscape which I could see through the camera. Then I filmed for months, changing the focus from near to far and then back again.”- Kurt Kren
The annual Boring Conference which is held in the UK as a celebration of “the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked”; subjects which, according to the Boring Conference website, are “often considered trivial and pointless, but when examined more closely reveal themselves to be deeply fascinating”. Previous topics discussed at the conference, which has been running for four years now, include sneezing, toast, IBM tills, the sounds made by vending machines, the Shipping Forecast, barcodes, yellow lines, and the features of the Yamaha PSR-175 Portatune keyboard.
“The point is… to live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.”
The recent decades have seen a dramatic reversal in the conceptualisation of inattention. Unlike in the 18th century when it was perceived as abnormal, today inattention is often presented as the normal state. The current era is frequently characterised as the Age of Distraction, and inattention is no longer depicted as a condition that afflicts a few. Nowadays, the erosion of humanity’s capacity for attention is portrayed as an existential problem, linked with the allegedly corrosive effects of digitally driven streams of information relentlessly flowing our way.
“(…) there are many ways in which a person’s reality model can malfunction and differ from the true external reality, giving rise to illusions (incorrect perceptions of things that do exist in the external reality), omissions (nonperception of things that do exist in the external reality) and hallucinations (perceptions of things that don’t exist in the external reality).”
–Tegmark, Max.Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. London: Penguin Books, 2014. (viacarvalhais)
“In an unusual attempt to prevent more [labour] protests, some of China’s biggest coal mining companies are now focusing on other businesses entirely, Chinese media reports. Coal mining companies in Jincheng, a city in north China’s Shanxi province have embraced pharmacies, solar power stations, restaurants, supermarkets, and vegetable and fruit planting, National Business Daily (link in Chinese) reported on Mar. 28.”
“From the ideal cities of the Renaissance, to Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement, to Le Corbusier’s modernist City of Tomorrow, with its “single society, united in belief and action”, design was seen as a critical tool with which it was possible to transform both political reality and the quality of life. Architecture, the most utopian of the arts, was interpreted as a harmonising force, able to shape not only space, but to use technology to mould attitudes and beliefs for the better.”
“As modernist architects and designers pursued social perfection with uncritical zeal, utopian ideals often degenerated into dystopian realities. Writers such as Orwell, HG Wells and Aldous Huxley illustrated the dangers inherent in utopian thinking, and questioned the utopian faith in science and technology as an industrial lifeboat that promised to banish scarcity and waste.”
“TraPac ran into labor-related setbacks in 2014 when ILWU members walked off the job for more than a month after several machinery collisions occurred in the automated area of the terminal.”
I don’t think I’ve posted this yet! An old piece from grad school.
Pistol shrimp, or snapping shrimp, have a disproportionately large claw from where it derives its name. As a defense mechanism and for hunting, when the claw closes with a quick snap, it emits a bubble. This bubble, upon bursting, causes an extremely powerful sound wave (sonic boom!) which can kill small fish and stun larger ones.
River morphology. Peru. Via. (You can make images like this too, read on).
Rivers through time, as seen in Landsat images
Thanks to the Landsat program and Google Earth Engine, it is possible now to explore how the surface of the Earth has been changing through the last thirty years or so. Besides the obvious issues of interest, like changes in vegetation, the spread of cities, and the melting of glaciers, it is also possible to look at how rivers change their courses through time. You have probably already seen the images of the migrating Ucayali River in Peru, for example here. This river is changing its course with an impressive speed; many – probably most – other rivers don’t show much obvious change during the same 30-year period. What determines the meander migration rate of rivers is an interesting question in fluvial geomorphology.
The data that underlies Google Earth Engine is not accessible to everybody, but the Landsat data is available to anyone who creates a free account with Earth Explorer. It is not that difficult (but fairly time consuming) to download a set of images and create animations like this one.
“My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.”
― William Gibson
Many on the listserv are framing Angola’s Wikipedia pirates as bad actors who need to be dealt with in some way so that more responsible editors aren’t punished for their actions. This line of thinking inherently assumes that what Angola’s pirates are doing is bad for Wikipedia and that they must be assimilated to the already regulated norms of Wikipedia’s community. If the developing world wants to use our internet, they must play by our rules, the thinking goes. But people in developing countries have always had to be more creative than those for whom access to information has always been a given. A 20-year-old developer in Paraguay found a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger that allowed people to use Free Basics to tunnel through to the “real” internet. Legal questions aside (Angola has more lax copyright laws than much of the world), Angola’s pirates are furthering Wikipedia’s mission of spreading information in a real and substantial way.
