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
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 Physics of Space Battles
An aerospace engineer muses on the future of war in space.
The Superorganism
The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (Non-programming books for Programmers.)
Computing Without Computers
Paul Curzon’s Gentle Introduction to Computer Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms.
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]
Streetz 104.7fm
Hip-hop now has a home on the dial in Winnipeg. And check it, the DJs are all local Ojibway/Cree/Métis men and women ranging in age from 18 to 28.
“Aboriginal youth are the fastest growing demographic in Winnipeg. Winnipeg’s Aboriginal population is estimated to be near 90,000 and growing quickly. Streetz 104-7 will feature a vibrant mix of sizzling Aboriginal and mainstream Hip Hop.”
The Eyewriter allows paralyzed artists to draw using their eye movement. You can build the hardware yourself at a cost of fifty bones.
Wu wei
Natural action. Creative quietude. The art of letting-be.
Wu wei involves knowing when to act and when not to act.
The Sage is occupied with the unspoken and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity, producing without possessing, creating without regard to result, claiming nothing, the Sage has nothing to lose. -Tao Te Ching
Dutchie
From Jan Willemsen’s Nederland photochromes. Also: Oude fotos van Nederland. [via]
The General Pirate License | Diovo
When you wish to share without attribution. I don’t think we need a license for this. Just share. Heart’s in the right place though.
“I have come across many situations where I wanted to share an idea but never wanted the idea to be attributed to me, mainly because the original idea never came from me and also because I did not know who the original idea came from.”
Zork: The Cavern of Doom
Choose your own adventure tale with path/choice visualization.
The Beatles Never Broke Up...
A mashup from another dimension. Download the entire album. [via]
Don’t tell me wonderful appropriation art like this should be illegal. Strong copyright laws already exist in Canada. Yes, the Internet changes the game. Play ball fools. Down with the suppression of innovation.
Speaking of the ACTA, The University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic filed an access to information request on the Canadian involvement in this agreement but received only a document stating the title of the agreement, with everything else blacked out. source
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.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you
Mark Pilgrim explains his use of the GNU Free Documentation License for his books. The FDL explicitly gives anyone the right to publish the material themselves, which is exactly what one woman recently did much to the horror of the publisher Apress.
Kashiwa Mystery Cafe
A cafe in Kashiwa Japan were you order for the next person in line, and receive what was ordered by the person in front of you.
The rules:
- Let’s treat the next person. What to treat them with? It’s your choice.
- Even if it’s a group of friends or a family, please form a single-file line. Also, you can’t buy twice in a row.
- Please enjoy what you get, even if you hate it. (If you really, really hate it, let’s quietly give it to another while saying, “It’s my treat…”)
- Let’s say “Thank You! (Gochihosama)” if you find the person with your Ogori cafe card.
Daily Drop Cap
An illustrative initial every day.
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.)
Information Visualization Manifesto
“The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.”
The on-going conversation in the comments is also worth a read.
Wanda Koop Untitled (Red) 2009 [via]
Teaching a computer to fly using reinforcement learning.
(Watch Larger HQ Version.)
RedLibrarian: The Ned Ludd Memorial Library
“The library will contain only books and paper journals. It will not have public access computer terminals. It will have a silent reading room, as well as a collaborative study room, in which laptops are allowed. There is no wired or wireless internet connectivity.
In return for all these restrictions, we will offer serene, quiet study/reading/research space, the best print collections money can buy, comfortable chairs and tables, and a return to the lovely, dusty book culture that some of us (and I think we’re still in the majority) remember, love, and think important.”
“The Mud Tub is an experimental organic interface that allows people to control a computer while playing in the mud.”
send + receive: a festival of sound v11
October 13-17, 2009 - Winnipeg, Canada
The annual week-long event focuses on sound: its production, its applications, its meanings, and its theories of production and reception.
Fundamental Principles of Cognition
“If anyone makes a claim of having constructed (programmed) a cognitive agent, that agent should show evidence of adhering to [these 6½ Fundamental Principles]. I submit that the fewer of these principles an agent employs, the less cognitively interesting the agent is.”
- Principle 1: Object Identification (Categorization)
- Principle 2: Minimal Parsing (“Occam’s Razor”)
- Principle 3: Object Prediction (Pattern Completion)
- Principle 4: Essence Distillation (Analogy Making)
- Principle 5: Quantity Estimation and Comparison (Numerosity Perception)
- Principle 6: Association-Building by Co-occurrence (Hebbian Learning)
- Principle 6½: Temporal Fading of Rarity (Learning by Forgetting)
Sounds better than a Turing Test. ;)
Baskerville Open Source Font
An open source project to create a digital revival of the famous ‘Baskerville’ typefaces. [via sam]
e m a i l t o s i s t a
Mario AI Competition 2009
Build the best Mario playing AI. The organizers are “hoping to get submissions based on evolutionary neural networks, genetic programming, fuzzy logic, temporal difference learning, human ingenuity, and hybrids of the above.”
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.
Lease
Hey, this is how I feel when I’m putting in an offer to buy a house. :)
AskMefi: What is Charisma?
Also:
- AskMefi: The Elements of Charm
- AskMefi: Boost My Charisma Score
- Charisma @ Wikipedia
Interesting to note that thesaurus.com lists witchcraft & witchery as synonyms of charisma.
Greek “kharisma,” meaning “gift,” “favored by the divine.”
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
Canada, Speak Out On Copyright
The Canadian government has just launched the first public consultation on copyright since 2001.
It’s time to speak up unless we want to see a repeat of the copyright amendment bill C-61 tabled last year. (C-61 “died on the table” when Parliament was dissolved last fall for an election.)
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]
How to Hollow a Book in 80 Easy Steps
Lessons borne of trial and error and error.
How To Believe @ guardian.co.uk
Blogging the Philosophers.
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.)”
MoreCowbell.dj
Add cowbell and Christopher Walken to any song you upload.
Powered by the Echo Nest Remix API. Algorithmic remixing.
“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.
beecause
Celebrate creativity, assist the arts and help honeybees.
Teach a Kid to Argue
“An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side.”
Argument by logos, ethos, and pathos for children.
The Dice-O-Matic mark II
A 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million dice rolls a day.
Let’s Hear It for the Bees
Honey Bees keep time using molecular clocks, “a series of feedback loops in which the proteins produced by several genes feedback to repress their own production. […] The end result is a near-24-hour cycling in the levels of various proteins that in turn result in the cycling of the secretion of hormones and other substances.”
See: The Setup or The New Best Friends
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.
Danger Mouse to release blank CD
The music cannot be released (legal dispute with EMI) so fans can download the music P2P and burn it to the CD-R.
The album can also be streamed in full from NPR.
LampHead - experiments in surrealistic shading
AskMefi: "You must ____ in ____!"
Quintessential Cliché Experiences Around the World
Ned Raggett Reads the Almanac
Download the entire album
Manitoba Bans the Bottle - March 13, 1916
Prohibition in Manitoba. (Via: The Winnipeg Time Machine)
Roomba Chaos - [via]
Upcreation
“The peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe.”
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.
“The goal: Make a night-time cityscape using nothing but procedurally generated content.”
Heavy Boots
If you are standing on the Moon, and holding a rock, and you let it go, it will:
- (a) float away
- (b) float where it is
- (c) move sideways
- (d) fall to the ground
- (e) none of the above
Sand dunes on Mars appear to flow and drip like a liquid.
The Philosophy of Computer Science
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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.
The Free Will Theorem
John Conway (of Game of Life fame) is currently presenting a series of public lectures at Princeton to explain his work with Simon Kochen on the free will of elementary particles.
They assert, roughly, “that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. [… A] particle’s response [to human intervention] (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.”
For the Mathematicians and Physicists: The Free Will Theorem
Designing Processes Rather Than Art
Bruce Sterling on Generative Art
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.
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:
- An Important Visualization
- It’s easy to lie with statistics and maps [pdf].
- Using Cartoon Faces to Represent Multi-dimensional Datasets (More: Chernoff Faces and Face Saver)
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.
Record of the Week Club
A 16-week musical experiment of good olde Manitoba collaboration.
The (204) is featuring an entire episode about the ROTWC Saturday, March 14.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- #10 - Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- #12 - If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Info Vis with Ben Fry
I’m currently trying to figure out what kind of data I wish to play-with / visualize.
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.
5000 Fans
An artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year (for their music, art, etc) stands to make $100K per year.
or: 100,000 fans @ $1 (digital download) or 1,000,000 fans @ 10 cents (micropayment)!
Sure, there might be overhead costs in the production of said music/art, but even if this overhead was an outrageous %50 of the profit, you’d still be making $50K per year.
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. :)
New Theories of Mimesis
“I am looking for writings on Mimesis in regards new, digital, hypertext and hypermedial technologies and cultures.
I am following the redefinition of mimesis. From Plato’s disregard of oral culture, through his mimesis of Socrates’ dialogues in writing. Following Plato, Aristotle’s theory was always a written mimesis, thus the order and processes of representation and mimicry were fundamentally written.
In essence, I am interested in how the artifacts of oral culture differed in their mimesis to written culture, and thus, how our modern move from a written to a digital/hypertextual culture will similarly impact on mimetic embodiment.”
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.
Glasnost: Test if Your ISP is Manipulating BitTorrent Traffic
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is required by mandate to make its programming “available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means.” Using BitTorrent allows the CBC to meet this target. However, when they experimented with this technology last year, many users were blocked by their ISP due to BitTorrent’s association with piracy.
The Glosnost Results show that at least 10 Canadian ISPs block BitTorrent outright. Canadian ISPs are also starting use traffic-shaping techniques to throttle-down the speed of all BitTorrent traffic.
Discrimination ain’t nice in meat-space, and it ain’t nice on the net. If you love the internet, read up on Network Neutrality. Non-discriminatory treatment of network-traffic is essential for an open and participatory internet.
Amish Hackers
Technology and the Amish.
“Over And Out” by Jen Stark [hand-cut stack of coloured paper, 2008]
NFB - Film Archive
The Canadian National Film Board has released 700+ films, clips and trailers from their archive for free download. Ya for Canadian culture!
Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
A systematic approach to improving the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being through hci.
TrackMeNot
“A background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.”
Julia Nunes - All My Loving, The Beatles
“yeah i know, no one can cover the beatles”
Velato
An esoteric programming language that uses MIDI files as source code.
“There is a tendency for Velato programs to have jazz-like harmonies.”
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.
Culture Machine - Pirate Philosophy (Vol. 10)
Culture Machine explores the culture and philosophy of piracy (as in P2P, remixing, culture-jamming, etc, not peg-legs and parrots).
My Thoughts:
Digital piracy is mainstream. Nearly all of popular culture (music, tv, movies, books, etc) can be acquired and consumed for free. Kevin Kelly tells us that ownership is no longer important.
Prediction:
The next step will be the wide-scale piracy of physical objects. More on this at another time…
Basement Reading
A Winnipeg-based zine maker.
Download: Hello, Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye / Whata Nice Place [zip]
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”
oldhat »
Hats sewn in Winnipeg by Nathan Dueck.
Meow Reader
Photos of cats reading and photos of cats learning how to read.
FluxBlog
The analysis of pop music easily devolves into righteousness and pretense, but Matthew Perpetua has been doing a great job since 2002. Fluxblog was my first (the first?) exposure to mp3 blogs, and it continues to deliver. Take the recent analysis of Lily Allen’s Fear, the inspiration for this post:
“Vapid, cynical, hyper-consumerist neo-celebs of the Paris Hilton/Heidi Montag variety are utterly loathsome, but when we tear into them in comedy and art, it can often seem too easy and overly mean-spirited in way that eclipses any righteousness we could hope to claim in calling out their grotesque antics. Yes, they are clearly villains in the context of our culture, but on scale, they’re more like the Goombas in the Super Marios Bros. games — cannon fodder along the path to the Big Bosses.”
Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? (2003) by Robert Cauble
Me thinks Debord would have enjoyed this work of détournement.
via: sine-qua-non - via: icanread