Debt: The first five thousand years
Anthropologist David Graeber explores the 5000 year history of dept on the Long Now blog.
Hitler can’t get a Folk Fest campground pass.
Update: (2010-05-01) The above video was part of a video remixing meme based on the movie Der Untergang. Was it taken down by the film’s production company? Was it a fair use parody?
Defining Computationally Minimal Art
Old-school optimalism, which aims at pushing technological boundaries in order to fit in “as much beauty as possible”, versus new-school reductivism, which idealizes the low complexity itself as a source of beauty.
Twitter Annotations
Tweets may soon include optional payloads of structured data. The purpose and usage of these annotations?
“Annotations are a blank slate that lend themselves to myriad divergent use cases. We want to provide open-ended utility for all the developers to innovate on top of.”
— Marcel Molina - Early look at Annotations
Possible Useful Annotations:
- The full URL of all shortened URLs that appear within a tweet.
- Longitude/latitude geo-locations when tweeting from GPS-enabled devices.
- Re-tweet history and/or attribution information.
- Multimedia URLs. Link a tweet to images, videos, and sound files.
- Multimedia data. The system should eventually support 2K payloads containing small images, sound clips, MIDI, etc.
- Microformats
Algorithmically generated Russian Dolls. (Open with a browser that supports html5 canvas, in other words, not Internet Explorer.)
openparliament.ca - Keeping tabs on Canadian Parliament.
See what your representatives are saying, and what laws they’re proposing.
Also, they provide a Hansards of the House API while in turn they make use of the How’d They Vote Postal Code API.
This is a pole covered in bubble gum. We visited friends in San Diego over the weekend. This is one of many photos of our trip.
Nature by Numbers - A short movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature.
I recommend watching in high-def and full-screen via the above link.
See the theory page for more information on the math that inspired this video.