This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and…

“This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.”

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book Two.)

Cameron’s World

internet, design, retro, web, web1.0, personalisation

Cameron’s World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009). In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.

http://www.cameronsworld.net/

“Catfish” demonstrates that online intimacy is about quantity, not quality. Back in 2007, Leisa Reichelt, the head of user…

“Catfish” demonstrates that online intimacy is about quantity, not quality. Back in 2007, Leisa Reichelt, the head of user research at Government Digital Services in the U.K., defined ambient intimacy as “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.”

–Consider the “Catfish” - The New Yorker (viaiamdanw)

India’s Forgotten Stepwells

architecture, water, infrastructure, india, civilisation

Rudimentary stepwells first appeared in India between the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D., born of necessity in a capricious climate zone bone-dry for much of the year followed by torrential monsoon rains for many weeks. It was essential to guarantee a year-round water-supply for drinking, bathing, irrigation and washing, particularly in the arid states of Gujarat (where they’re called vavs) and Rajasthan (where they’re baoli, baori, or bawdi) where the water table could be inconveniently buried ten-stories or more underground. Over the centuries, stepwell construction evolved so that by the 11th century they were astoundingly complex feats of engineering, architecture, and art.

http://www.archdaily.com/395363/india-s-forgotten-stepwells

Poison-Injecting Robot Submarine

robots, automation, conservation, reef, QUT, starfish, crown of thorns

This one-shot poison (which is harmless to everything else on the reef) is what makes autonomous robotic sea star control possible, since it means that a robot can efficiently target individual sea stars without having to try and keep track of which ones it’s injected already so it can go back and repeat the process nine more times. At Queensland University of Technology in Australia, a group of researchers led by Matthew Dunbabin and Peter Corke spent the last decade working on COTSBot,* which has been specifically designed to seek out and murder crown-of-thorns sea stars as mercilessly and efficiently as possible.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/poison-robot-submarine

The cyborg sensorium is possible because, as it turns out, the human brain is quite happy to accept whole new forms of…

m1k3y:

new-aesthetic:

The cyborg sensorium is possible because, as it turns out, the human brain is quite happy to accept whole new forms of peripherals. Neuroplasticity, we now know, is the natural state of the brain; we’ve only just developed the technology to properly take advantage of it. It’s like we were always meant to merge completely with the machine world. To fuse into a new kind of organism.

via LOVECRAFTIAN CYBORGS AND THE ALIEN AESTHETIC: Part 1 – Cyborgs of the Abyss | Journal of a Cosmic Anthropologist

It Me

A Buddhist monk locks the door to a private area of the Chojin Lama Temple. The temple was spared destruction and converted to a…

A Buddhist monk locks the door to a private area of the Chojin Lama Temple. The temple was spared destruction and converted to a museum during the Stalinist era. Unfortunately, most other monasteries did not share the same fate and were destroyed. Tibetan Buddhism is the most common religion in Mongolia, although originally, Mongols practiced Shamanism in which they worshipped the blue sky. - Observations from 2009 along the Trans-Mongolian Railway by misterzvereff (via https://instagram.com/p/7ImHltIjbs/)

Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System

IEEE, robotics, social robotics, HRI, children, child psychology, learning, play, engineering, Lord

Next, they designed an abuse-evading algorithm to help the robot avoid situations where tiny humans might gang up on it. Literally tiny humans: the robot is programmed to run away from people who are below a certain height and escape in the direction of taller people. When it encounters a human, the system calculates the probability of abuse based on interaction time, pedestrian density, and the presence of people above or below 1.4 meters (4 feet 6 inches) in height. If the robot is statistically in danger, it changes its course towards a more crowded area or a taller person. This ensures that an adult is there to intervene when one of the little brats decides to pound the robot’s head with a bottle (which only happened a couple times).

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/children-beating-up-robot