THEOREM II Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore,…

hierophage:

THEOREM II

Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and the Monad that all things commence to emerge in principle. That which is affected at the periphery, however large it may be, cannot in any way lack the support of the central point.

 - Dr. John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica (1564)

The Port of Hamburg - known as Germany’s “Gateway to the World” - is located on the Elbe River in Hamburg. On an average day,…

dailyoverview:

The Port of Hamburg - known as Germany’s “Gateway to the World” - is located on the Elbe River in Hamburg. On an average day, the facility is accessed by 28 ships, 200 freight trains, and 5,000 trucks. In total, the port moves 132.3 million tonnes of cargo each year - that’s roughly 1/3 of the mass of all living human beings.

Port of Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany
53.532581146°, 9.916544334°
Instagram: http://bit.ly/1C9YH82

MICHIEL HENDRYCKX [Robin Heifetz, 1960s] Composer Robin Heifetz on the piano at IPEM (Institute For Psychoacoustics And…

bal-semactiv:

MICHIEL HENDRYCKX [Robin Heifetz, 1960s]

Composer Robin Heifetz on the piano at IPEM (Institute For Psychoacoustics And Electronic Music)’s Muinkkaai studio. This photo was taken to illustrate Heifetz’s piano and tape composition  That Which Is The Beginning. The image is one of Ghent University’s selection taken from the IPEM’s archive, as featured in a recently published book on the studio.

In 1963, the BRT (Belgian Radio and Television) set up a studio for electronic music in cooperation with the State University of Ghent, with the intention of operating it as both a creative studio, and a research institution. One of the inventions is an instrument that used electronic tubes to generate eight octaves derived from a single base frequency. 470 compositions were realised at IPEM between 1963–1987. It is still operational, housed in the University building Technicum, in the same place it was founded.

[TW][IPEM][META]

There was no master architect for the nagri, and in fact the festival administration employed no architects at all, so each…

“There was no master architect for the nagri, and in fact the festival administration employed no architects at all, so each group was responsible for the construction of the section of the grid that it would inhabit and brought in its own contractors and construction teams. The festival site became a collage of cotton, bamboo, tin, plywood and plastic, materials typical of Indian slums, here converging in a constantly changing texture of materials and styles. By January, a fully functional city capable of supporting millions of residents stood where two months earlier there had been only a muddy plain, and throngs of holy men, teachers, students, tourists and service personnel brought the city to bustling life.”

– Rahul Mehrotra,‘Constructing the World’s Biggest (Disassemblable) City’ (2015)

Tailings - the waste and byproducts from mining operations - are pumped into the Gribbens Basin next to the Empire and Tilden…

dailyoverview:

Tailings - the waste and byproducts from mining operations - are pumped into the Gribbens Basin next to the Empire and Tilden iron ore mines in Negaunee, Michigan, USA. Here, the materials are mixed with water to create a sloppy form of mud known as “slurry” that is pumped through magnetic separation chambers to increase the mine’s total output. For a sense of scale, this Overview shows approximately one square mile of the basin.

Tailings
Negaunee, Michigan, United States
46.408652671°, -87.530031400°
www.dailyoverview.com

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth

Carcinisation, culture, children, internet, isolationism, adult culture, children's culture, explor

Children’s society exists on the internet if at all, with raids in video games and chat rooms replacing geographically colocated monster hunts. (This is increasingly the case with adult society as well, which also lacks architectural and geographic support.) It should be noted that the internet is not the cause of these problems. Rather, the internet is the precarious reservation onto which culture has been driven, bleak and uncanny, inhuman in scale. And even the internet is increasingly monitored and reshaped by the same malignant tiling system that drove culture here in the first place. What will happen to culture when even this frontier is closed?

http://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/

Page from an album of auroral photographs obtained during Carl Störmer’s first expedition to Bossekop in northern Norway. It…

punlovsin:

Page from an album of auroral photographs obtained during Carl Störmer’s first expedition to Bossekop in northern Norway. It shows a sequence of images of quiet and rayed auroral arcs, together with other less distinct forms, obtained on the night of 3-4 March 1910. The camera employed an objective lens by Ernemann of Dresden, adopted from a small children’s cine-camera, and sensitive ‘Lumière etiquette violette’ photographic plates. With such equipment, the exposure time for bright auroral forms could be reduced to half a second.

LSD neural net

Jonas Degrave, NN, convolution network, convnet, VGG, image recognition, classifiaction, programmin

We decided that we wanted to try and reproduce this, and make some convnet art ourselves. To save time, we downloaded the parameters for a trained VGG-16 network. This architecture with 16 trainable layers was proposed by Simonyan et al. and was used to reach the 2nd place in the 2014 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. A VGG-16 network primarily consists of convolutional layers with 3-by-3 filters, with the occasional 2-by-2 max-pooling layer in between.

http://317070.github.io/LSD/

The Village and The Village

Baarle-Nassau, Baarle-Hertog, Beglium, Netherlands, border, enclave, territory, iamdanw

The strange perimeter originates from 1198, the result of a series of diplomatic land swaps between the Lord of Breda and the Duke of Brabant. Quite a normal situation throughout Europe in feudal times. Elsewhere in Europe these parcels were consolidated over the years and borders rationalised, a process that Baarle somehow avoided. When the present border between the Netherlands and Belgium was drawn up in the Treaty of Maastricht (the 1843 one, not the 1992 remake) the issue of Baarle’s complex border was put aside. A few maps of the area were attached to the treaty for reference, but in the meantime “%E2%80%9CThe status quo shall be maintained both with regard to the villages of Baarle-Nassau (Netherlands) and Baerle-Duc (Belgium) and with regard to the ways crossing them%E2%80%9D.” Working out the details would be come later.

http://www.iamdanw.com/wrote/what-are-borders-anyway/

How to design a metaphor

Michael Erard, metaphor, design, metaphor design, language, linguistics, psycholinguistics

Pretty much every metaphor designer is inspired by Metaphors We Live By (1980), by the Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon. It’s the classic look at how metaphors structure the way we think and talk, and once you’ve read it, you can’t help but agree that, at a conceptual level, life is a journey, and arguments are wars (you take sides, there can be only one winner, evidence is a weapon). However, for the practical metaphor designer, psycholinguistic research turns out to be much more useful than philosophical commentary, because it studies how people actually encounter and process new metaphors.

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/how-to-design-a-metaphor/

For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose…

“For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.”

–How to design a metaphor – Michael Erard – Aeon (viaiamdanw)

"The point of the exercise wasn’t really to end up with a t-shirt, rather it was a race to see how quickly I could take…

machine dreaming, flip flop, digital, tumblr, t-shirt feedback loop

“The point of the exercise wasn’t really to end up with a t-shirt, rather it was a race to see how quickly I could take something off the internet, through the physical world and back onto the internet again, re-contextualised as a tumblr post.”

“If I’d been in London I probably could have popped in to pick it up Wednesday, a 3 day turn-around. If SubLab had Google’s Neural Network and a shop front you could probably walk in, say “bee hives” or “honeybadger” and walk out with a custom computer AI generated one-off t-shirt within a couple of hours. This probably already happens somewhere.”

–The Google AI Neural Network T-Shirt

“Synthetic biology has the potential to make organisms more resistant to radiation or temperature extremes,” she said. “You can…

“Synthetic biology has the potential to make organisms more resistant to radiation or temperature extremes,” she said. “You can mix and match genes and do all sorts of things that if you were breeding [organisms] would take forever.”
These modified extremophiles can shed light on a variety of astrobiological questions, including whether or not a planet is potentially habitable. “Say we find a planet, and it has a certain pH, temperature, and radiation regime,” Rothschild told me.
“That’s where we take up the challenge and go into the lab,” she continued. “We’ll say, ‘All right, let’s start with this one that can live at low pH and high temperature. Can we add the radiation resistance?’ Then, we can go back to the astronomers and say [habitability] is not impossible, because we just made something in the lab like that last week.”

–http://motherboard.vice.com/read/we-might-create-alien-life-in-a-lab-before-we-find-it-in-space
(viam1k3y)

Void pantograph

wikipedia, reproduction, void pantograph, copywrongs, security, copy, photocopy

Void pantographs work by exploiting the limitations and features of copying equipment. A scanner or photocopier will act as a low-pass filter on the original image, blurring edges slightly. It will also not be perfectly aligned with the directions of the document, causing aliasing. Features smaller than the resolution will also not be reproduced. In addition, human vision is sensitive to luminance contrast ratio. This means that if a grey region consists of a grid of very small dark dots the filtering will produce a lighter grey, while a region of larger dots will be affected differently (“big-dot-little-dot”). This makes it possible to see a pattern that previously was invisible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_pantograph

Utrecht start experiment met basisinkomen

UBI, basic income, Utrecht, Netherlands, experiment, basisinkomen

‘We hebben op ambtelijk niveau al gepolst of een experiment met een basisinkomen mogelijk is en hebben nog geen definitief 'njet’ gehoord. Bovendien heeft minister Plasterk van Binnenlandse Zaken, in het kader van de Agenda Stad (een stimulans voor de lokale democratie), aangekondigd dat gemeenten meer ruimte moeten krijgen om buiten de bestaande wet- en regelgeving te experimenteren. Wij vinden het basisinkomen hier heel geschikt voor.’

http://destadutrecht.nl/politiek/utrecht-start-experiment-met-basisinkomen/