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Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

Location-aware homebrew for the Sony PSP. Built using a serial GPS device and a PSP “Go! cam”.

volume = pi * z * z * a

The comments abound with mathematical misunderstanding and nerd angst. :P

Darko - Missing You

via : via

Annabel Scheme, a crowd-funded novella about quantum computing and the digital occult. CC licensed. Funded by a 570-strong “posse of patrons” ($13,942). [via]

Go³, the exact metamorphosis of two-dimensional Go to three-dimensional Go. [via]

The space shuttle Discovery approaching the International Space Station for docking in July of 2006. (Be sure to click on the image to view the high-res version.)

I’m not sure if it’s all the BSG I’ve been watching, but I’ve been pining for Space flight.

Staring into the eye of mathematics. [via subblue’s flickr stream]

The Eyewriter allows paralyzed artists to draw using their eye movement. You can build the hardware yourself at a cost of fifty bones.

Ira Glass talks about working your way through the gap between what you know is good and what you create. via

A Catch

How’s life? I’m reading Catch-22. I laugh out loud on the bus. You know? Real life lols. It’s a little dated, but luckily I know who Henry Fonda is.

“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?”

The Canadian Copyright Consultation ended in September. The submission from the Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC) is quite enlightened, the submission from Don Hogarth of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) is not.

Meanwhile, Canadian officials are taking part in negotiations concerning a top-secret copyright treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that could see families barred from the Internet for a year if someone in the household is suspected of illegal downloads. [source]

Even though copyright was created to protect the commercial interests of content creators, the ACTA includes provisions for the criminal enforcement of “willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.” [source]

Might I one day be jailed for making mixtapes or posting my mixes to the net?

Listen, I’ve said it before, I’m not a pirate I just grog a lot.

Propositional logic with a new “alphabet” for the Boolean operators. [More: Explanation & Related Logical Tautologies]

Six or seven years ago I had the idea to “write” a book where every sentence was copied from another work of fiction. This video is the movie equivalent in the form of a music video.

Cosmic latte is the average colour of the universe.

#FFF8E7 or in HSV space (40°, 94%, 90%)

via

Jupiter Over the Mediterranean - apod

Kurt Vonnegut explains how fiction makes us crave drama. (That’s drama, as in real-life turmoil not as in theater.)

AI Helicopter Control Airshow

Teaching a computer to fly using reinforcement learning.

(Watch Larger HQ Version.)

“The Mud Tub is an experimental organic interface that allows people to control a computer while playing in the mud.”

e m a i l t o s i s t a

Infinite Mario AI

I’m guessing that the red lines and arcs you see are future moves the AI is choosing from. Moves could be selected by ranking their potential outcomes. A move’s score increases for positive outcomes like landing on solid ground, squashing an enemy, moving closer to the goal line, or headbutting a |?| box. The score decreases for negative outcomes like being killed by an enemy or falling in a pit.

The Loss of Parker Forest

Winnipeg city council has approved a city land-swap with developer Andrew Marquess of GEM equities. 59 acres of unserviced city land in the Parker neighbourhood will be traded for nine acres of serviced land in the Fort Rouge Yards. The city wants the Fort Rouge land for a future rapid transit corridor. Marquess wishes to build 3500 townhouses on the Parker land.

Nearly half of the Parker land being given to Marquess is forested. I spent a few afternoons in the summer of 2006 exploring the Parker Forest and I have returned to it often since. Here’s how I described it back then:

The forest is triangle shaped, with an estimated area of over 100,000 meters squared (or .1km2), and is composed of tall prairie grasses, dense forest (mainly Trembling Aspen with some Bur Oak), and (presently dry) wetland. It sits on what I believe to be CN land, south of Taylor Ave.

I discovered this forest during a Glutton University field trip in 2003. It remains my favourite secret forest in Winnipeg. It appears that I’m not alone; after following some human tracks we spied a campground, their tent fire red, camouflaged by the afternoon sunlight.

Hopefully this land is never sold for development.

The debate is complex. In-fill housing development is preferable over sprawl, especially if the housing is affordable. But the land they need to build this housing is of particular beauty and importance. Urban forests play a role in our communities as spaces of leisure, sport, relaxation and socialization. Most importantly they are home to numerous wild plants, insects, and animals. I’ve spied fire-files in the Parker grasses at night and local residents have spotted everything from deer to lynx.

The density of the proposed housing is also very steep. If we alot 5% of the land for roads, infrastructure and public space that leaves us with 56 acres. To accommodate 3500 townhouses they would need to build 63 townhouses per acre. (One acre is a little smaller than an American football field.)

For a better idea of what 63 dwelling units per acre (or du/ac) looks like, take a peak at these 40-60 du/ac communities and 60-80 du/ac communities in California.

Here are some excerpts of recent Winnipeg Free Press Letters to the Editor on the subject:

A Lot to Lose

If you woke one morning to find bulldozers tearing down the park that your kids play in to build a fire hall and had to open the paper or be called by a neighbour to find out what’s happening, would you be upset?

[…]

I live on Parker Avenue. I have a lot to lose. Collectively, our neighbours have a lot more invested in our neighbourhood than any developer or any elected official. I believe we have a right and a duty to speak out.

-Robert Lewyc

In Fill Instead of Sprawl

[The proposed development is] “infill” instead of sprawl. It is dense housing, compared to single housing farther to the south. And if rumours are true, it is low income housing, something the city needs more of desperately.

[…]

I hope city council will consider things like a linear parkway, bike paths and green space paralleling the busway, and I look forward to more decisions that recognize the value of building on lands inside the existing city instead of the constant sprawling so-called developments that left such areas vacant for so many years.

-Shane Nestruck

No Consultation

[T]his protest, for me at least, has nothing to do with keeping out low rentals. What it has to do with is the fact that nobody at city hall bothered to ask any questions before agreeing to this land swap. Nobody asked: What kind of community are we infringing on; what is on the current site; how is the current site being used; what would be lost if it was bulldozed; what is it really worth on the open market; is it even developable?*

All of these questions must be asked as part of a due diligence process, but were never asked. The people of Winnipeg deserve better.

-Cal Dueck

The world is mapped using a grid of longitudes and latitudes. There is a degree confluence point where each line of longitude crosses each line of latitude.

On the weekend Jody, Mike and I hiked into the woods towards an unvisited degree confluence here in Manitoba’s interlake region (just north of Gypsumville).

We brought a GPS and some maps. We were given advice and direction by the local Conservation Officer. Our packs were lined with garbage bags.

One the first day we crossed a swamp by convincing ourselves to walk in deeper and deeper water. Eventually we swam, but only for a few doggy paddles.

On the second day we crossed swamps by sloshing atop floating mats of tangled reeds.

See: Our Confluence Scouting Photos or Slideshow

Another attempt will be required to reach the point.

“There is a confluence point within 49 miles (79 km) of you if you’re on the surface of Earth. The goal of this project is to visit each point and to take pictures at each location.”

Handedness and Handedness Revisted

Sketching with all four appendages. [via]

Buggin Out 09’ by Consequence featuring KiD CuDi [via]

Shan and I met this happy angler by the Assiniboine river on Friday night.

In 2006/2007 I emailed various levels of government to see if it was safe to eat fish caught in our Winnipeg river systems.

Also: Assiniboine River Water Quality Study 2001/2002 - Water Quality Mgmt Section, Manitoba Conservation [pdf]

Related: More Photos - Early Summer 2009 (Flickr Set)

StungEye Affiliate:

“Literary Cat Celebrates 10,000+ Unique Visitors to Meow Reader.

The Internet Eats Novelty. View our monthly stats graph.

(Note that Stumple Upon sent us nearly 7,500 uniques in the first month.)”

George Boole was the inventor of a logical calculus of truth values which provided a basis for modern computing. The binary digits ‘1’ and ‘0’ are often used to represent true and false in boolean algebra.”

I am working on a new Introduction to Programming Logic course for RRC, afloat in a sea of Boolean logic.

Floating Through Space and Don’t Forget it

via: laureolawillzone

Ted Baryluk’s Grocery - John Paskievich, Michael Mirus, 1982, 10min 19s

Ukrainian-Canadian Ted Baryluk’s grocery store was a fixture in Winnipeg’s North End (Point Douglas) for over 20 years.

Roomba Chaos - [via]
This video was filmed in one take, with audio being recorded simultaneously with the film. The video features Nyle and is produced by Last Pictures and 194 Recordings.

Procedural City

“The goal: Make a night-time cityscape using nothing but procedurally generated content.”

via: nevver

Sand dunes on Mars appear to flow and drip like a liquid.

Street

Vote for BabyLolly @ The Next Web

Hi pals. We need your votes for BabyLolly in the Rising Sun Startup Rally for this year’s The Next Web conference. Please lend us your support by clicking the “Vote Now” button.

With enough votes for our video we’ll be able to present at the conference later this month in Amsterdam.

Art and Code - Overview Part III

My Art and Code overview continues… (See: Part I & Part II)

Sunday Continued

The toolkit presentations continued after lunch.

Processing - Presented by co-creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas

I’ve written about Processing here before. It is still my goto tool for visual coding.

Jotted Down:

Fry, Reas, Shiffman, and Greenberg all in one room.

Should the concept of literacy be expanded to include programming fluency.

Max / MSP / Jitter - Presented by Luke Dubois

Max / MSP / Jitter is a graphical programming environment for music, audio and media. A patcher based languages that shares roots with Pd which was demoed in the morning.

Jotted Down:

I guess I’m a FLOSS snob; although this environment looks much more polished than Pd, I gave it less attention because it’s a commercial product. (There’s a 30-day trail version, but the full bundle costs $699 USD.)

Reminder to check out the work of Michael Joaquin Grey, especially Recapitulate: Retrace, Erase, Repeat which uses Goya’s The Disasters of War etchings as source fodder.

Also, check out Hello World, The Song (in Max/MSP)

VVVV - Presented by Sebastian Oschatz

Vvvv is a video-synthesis toolkit. The programming interface is similar to the patch-base language we’ve already seen (Pd and Max/MSP), graphical function-blocks connected with wires. For a more detailed look read Ctrl+B For Concurrency.

Of the visual languages presented at the conference, vvvv is the only one I downloaded and experimented with. Oh I do wish for infinite time to play with all these wonderful tools.

Jotted Down

Read the vvvv licensing page, commercial vs. non-commercial uses.

This language doesn’t contain any explicit looping structures.

Nerdy VJs would go wild for this.

And then we had a cookie break.

AIR & Extendscript - Present by Dr. WooHoo

A number of Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects) contain an implementation of Javascript (called Extendscript) which can be used to programmatically control (and potentially abuse) these products.

Jotted Down

Reminder to check out In the Mod.

openFrameworks - Presented by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson, Arturo Castro

openFrameworks is a C++ library for creative coding. It was described as a glue languages wrapping together several commonly-used open-source multimedia libraries. Minimal Design: There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions.

Jotted Down

Looks fast! Might lend itself nicely to augmented reality projects.

Evening - Dorkbot @ Brillobox

The Dorkbot Pecha Kucha at the Brillobox was fun. I presented early having greatly under-estimated the length of my presentation. The 10 minutes were over quickly, and I fear my last few minutes were a muddle.

Delicious beers were consumed. I chatted with some wonderful people.

Floating-Lightbulb of the night, bringing Jonathan Brodsky idea of coding competitions to RRC.

Monday - The Warp Up

Panel discussions, CODE and FORM at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, pizza and beers with some interesting folks, and then a cab ride to the airport and home again home.

Art and Code - Overview Part II

My Art and Code overview continues… (See: Part I)

Sunday - Toolkit Overviews and Dorkbot @ Brillobox

Sunday was a day of presentations. From 8:45 to 17:45 we were treated to 45 minute demos of various arty programming toolkits. In the evening there was a Dorkbot Pecha Kucha-ish gathering at a pub called the Brillobox.

Some notes I jotted down during the presentations:

Alice - Presented by CMU’s Don Slater.

Alice is a 3D programming environment for creating animations, games and videos. 3d models of objects and characters are programmed visually by dragging/dropping/connecting various Instruction-Tiles together.

Jotted Down:

Five Fundamentals of Programming

  • Sequence
  • Decision
  • Repetition
  • Data Persistence (Variables)
  • Methods (Modular Abstractions)

Pd - Presented by Hans-Christoph Steiner

Pd or Pure Data is a graphical programming language for audio and video programming. Data (most often audio signals) flows through various specialized transformation or generation nodes/objects which are visually connected together by the programmer using “wires”.

1000 words == Picture

Jotted Down:

Closed tools split creators from consumers.

We need to think about programming as something every does / will do.

Scratch - Presented by John Maloney and Evelyn Eastmond

Scratch is a graphical programming environment for children ages 8 and up. Like Alice, the programs are created by snapping graphical blocks together.

Jotted Down:

Remixing of Scratch programs is encourage via their website.

There appears to be a nice learning path from Scratch through Processing to Java. Perhaps we could use Scratch as an introductory programming language at the college. David Malan has been using it for a intro comp sci course at Harvard.

Scratch is implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.

May 16th is Scratch Day.

Scratch anime!

Hackety Hack - Presented by _why

Hackety Hack is a Ruby-based environment designed to make programming accessible for kids, (especially teenagers). Its motivation: The Little Coder’s Predicament

Jotted Down:

Why claims to be a freelance professor, in other words, half-way between a scarecrow and a seeing eye dog.

A logic/programming card game called kaxXxt is also in the works.

The ASCII sword-fighting program stirs-up long dormant memories of Monkey Island.

And then we ate lunch. To be continued…

Art and Code - Overview Part I

It’s about time I wrote an overview of my Art and Code experience.

Saturday - Workshops and Church Brews

The day began with a walk by the Cloud Factory followed by two programming workshops with lunch between them. There were 9 simultaneous morning and afternoon workshops. Choosing just two was frustrating. Another day of workshops would have been delightful.

I attended Information Visualization and Play Games with Hackety Hack.

Information Visualization - Ben Fry

Ben Fry along with Casey Reas created the Processing language “for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.” I first discovered Processing (aka p5) in January of 2004. One of my first sketches stitched together MRI brain-scan images into an interactive animation. (See: my early p5 sketches and a more recent sketch.)

Ben’s lecture focused on using visuals to effectively communicate complex information. Shout outs to Edward Tufte and Mark Lombardi (See: Lombardi 1 & Lombardi 2)

Info Viz Workflow:

  • Acquire
  • Parse
  • Filter
  • Mine
  • Represent
  • Refine
  • Interact

Also:

During the experimentation part of this workshop I began working on the Marvel “Social Network” visualization.

Lunch was tabbouleh salad, hummus, pitas and an apple.

Hackety Hack - _why

Why began the afternoon workshop with a song accompanied by autoharp. Then we played with a pre-release of Hackety Hack, a Ruby-based toolkit for learning to code.

Some Notable Features:

  • Bloopsaphone songs and sounds:

    b = Bloops.new
    b.tempo = 320
    # Where s1 is a bloopsaphone sound that can be 
    # generated for you or created by you.
    b.tune s1, "f#5 c6 e4 b6 g5 d6 4  f#5 e5 c5 b6 c6 d6 4 "
    b.play
    sleep 1 while !b.stopped?
    
  • A vim-style (aka modal) drawing tool.
  • Integrated mail client for sharing code.
  • A Dingbat sprite library for game creation.
  • IRC-like chat channels for human or programmatic communication. (For example, we wrote “chat” apps that allowed us to communicate by colour. Each rectangle in this image represents someone in the room.).
  • Embedded Try Ruby

Upcoming Features:

  • Built in Tutorials / Lessons (Similar to the original Hackety Hack)
  • Database (sqlite?) tables for data persistency.

The kid sitting to my left (maybe 12 or 13 years old) was new to programming. He was enthralled by the Hackety experience. I could almost hear his brain rewiring as he started to grok Ruby. Okay, I could literally hear it too, as he asked me a number of great programming questions.

After the workshop I spent some time chatting with Why and a group of fun and friendly Ottawarians. (Is that the right term for someone from Ottawa?) We eventually found our way to Church Brew Works (a restaurant and micro-brewery inside an old church) for a lovely dinner with some lovely beers. It took a while to obtain a table for 13, but good times were had by all.

Inca Yupana (“counting tool”) based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Output from a Processing sketch I’ve been playing with. This is a visualization of hero collaborations in the Marvel Comics universe. Each circle represents a super-hero. The larger the circle, the more heroes they have worked with. (Captain America, Spiderman, and Ironman are the large circles in the top right corner.) The lines represent collaborations between heroes. This sketch was produced using a subset of the Social characteristics of the Marvel Universe data, along with Ben Fry’s Node/Edge classes.

This form (seen in the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts) was constructed using a 3d printer. The piracy of physical objects is around the bend.

The rest of my Pittsburgh pix.

Art and Code - Day 1 - Morning

I arrived in Pittsburgh last night. The Cathedral of Learning is just outside my hotel. (Check out the commons room.)

Last week I read Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (thanks Jeff!). I walked by the Cloud Factory on the way to registration this morning.

Next up is Information Visualization with Processing presented with Ben Fry.

This afternoon I’ll attend Make Games with Hackety Hack on Your Laptop Right There on Your Lap with mr. why the lucky stiff.

Right now I’m enjoying a coffee inside Carnegie Mellon’s Baker Hall.

Tomorrow I fly to Pittsburgh to attend the fundamental little hackers’ summit, Art and Code.

BabyLolly Featured In Winnipeg Free Press

I’m very excited to announce the launch of our new website, BabyLolly.com. For the past year I’ve been working along with my friend Andrew Burton, my sister Colleen Geske, and her husband Moses Faleafaga, on this online babybook and social network for families.

Today we were featured in the business section Winnipeg Free Press.

BabyLolly.com is an online babybook for parents to capture & share their baby’s precious moments with family and friends.

  • Photo/Video Gallery: no more cumbersome emailing of baby photos. Store and organize all your photos and videos and share them with family and friends.
  • Baby Journal: keep an online journal of your baby’s experiences and developments.
  • Baby Milestones, Firsts & Favourites: never forget an important milestone again! Capture and share all your baby’s important firsts & favourites.
  • Connect & Collaborate: give family and friends the opportunity to fully contribute to the babybook by leaving notes, uploading photos & videos, and sharing in each and every precious moment.
  • It’s a private site (so only people you invite will see your babypage) and best of all: it’s 100% free!

We’d love for you to sign up if you have a young family. You can also view a demo account for a fictional family.

If you have friends with babies share the link with them and let them share the joy of their baby! We would really appreciate your support!

I look forward to hearing your feedback on BabyLolly.

You Are Beyond the Edge of Forever

  (sleeping) Enter command: inventory
        You are carrying: a theorem. an axiom. 
                          a postulate. a hypothesis. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine postulate.
        It's a basic fact. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: think
        You thought of an idea 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine idea
        The idea is very vague and not fully developed. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: develop idea
        The idea developed into a contradiction. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine contra
        It is true and false, but neither is correct, 
                   and both are right. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine supposition
        It's an almost proven fact. It is not proven. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: Prove supp
    With what? postulate
        Somehow a contradiction keeps coming into the proof. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: drop contra
        OK. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: prove supp
    With what? postulate
        The postulate is now a lemma. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine lemma
        It's a rather specialised fact. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine hypothesis
        It's a complicated statement. It is not proven. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: prove hypo
    With what? lemma
        The hypothesis is now a theorem.
        Suddenly, a hyper-spatial cliff passes by 
        and the lemma leaps to its demise. 
  (sleeping) Enter command: examine theorem
        It begins: 

The metaphysical existentialism of reality…”

via: trivium

Meggy Jr RGB - Open-source handheld game platform with 8x8 pixel screen.

Diagramming the Obama Sentence

Oh brother, a surveillance camera project for Winnipeg.

“The Winnipeg Police Association said earlier the $460,000 cost of a proposed year-long camera project might be better spent on improving police response times and increasing the number of officers downtown.” —source

Last week I saw two cops riding down Princess St. on horses. Let’s trade in the camera project for more horse-back popo. :)

Daceybassyrappyhappy - Glutton Mix

Daceybassyrappyhappy - Choons from 2007/2008 that made me smile and dance around.

Track List

  • Marlena Shaw - California Soul (Diplo / Mad Decent mix)
  • My Robot Friend - Robot High School
  • Mark Ronson feat. Lily Allen - Oh My God (Chris Lake mix)
  • The Ting Tings -That’s Not My Name (Tom Neville mix)
  • Calvin Harris - Merrymaking At My Place (Kissy Sell Out mix)
  • Hot Chip - Ready For The Floor
  • Z-Trip - Something Different feat. Charlie Tuna
  • GoldieLocks - Learning To Brap
  • Ricardo Villalobos - Enfants (Olin Fix)

I’m not a pirate, I just grog a lot.

“Over And Out” by Jen Stark [hand-cut stack of coloured paper, 2008]

Julia Nunes - All My Loving, The Beatles

“yeah i know, no one can cover the beatles”

Act Entr'act

For my stungeye.com readers I’ve enabled comments. The comment links are found on the left below the date markers. For the Tumblrs it’s business as usual.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”

Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? (2003) by Robert Cauble

Me thinks Debord would have enjoyed this work of détournement.

Dream A Little Dream

Danielle^ plays the ukulele.

Also nice: