Apr 12
Shit can only get stranger. The diet guarantees it. Lilac Chaser from xty on Vimeo. THE HASHEESH EATER (1857): I haven’t read this book since I was a teenager and I haven’t thought about it since the last time I was hiding under my blankets thinking through the various meanings of “I must”, “you must”, …
Apr 07
‘What Ali Wore’: A Fashion Blog Dedicated to the Most Dapper Old Man on the Planet: Just about every day, Zoe Spawton takes a picture of Ali, an 83 year old Turkish tailor, living in Germany, who has 18 kids and a sense of style. Word of Ali’s new-found fame has even reached his native …
Nov 09
Bioterrorism examined in lecture at Marshall: Using 3D printers, people should be able to hack DNA and create viruses, attacking life in much in the same way hackers and cybercriminals can attack computers. DARPA wants to equip soldiers with Android phones for ‘Predator vision’: Attach a camera to their head, let the watch the output …
Sep 16
This is the computer generated, Japanese popstar, Hatsune Miku. And these are kids reacting to the computer generated, Japanese popstar, Hatsune Miku.
Aug 12
Different cities look different. A new piece of software can tell you how. It isolates the visual elements that make a city distinct. Carnegie Melon says: For this study, the researchers started with 25,000 randomly selected visual elements from city images gathered from Google Street View. A machine learning program then analyzed these visual elements …
Jun 11
According to a recent study, more than half of the accounts who follow businesses on twitter are robots. The researcher used a random sample of 10,000 followers for each company then analysed their behaviour using software and algorithms to work out who was human. Proper punctuation, profiles with a name, image or physical address and …
May 26
IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects) is working with torture-tool manufacturer Raytheon to develop a metaphorical language analysis system: The system will automatically find, identify and categorize large numbers of linguistic metaphors in foreign language texts. Under the contract, Raytheon BBN will: Develop tools and techniques to identify, qualify and categorize metaphors; Build a metaphor repository that identifies and links …
Apr 09
Popular stand-up philosopher, Slavoj Žižek has an interesting little essay on Corporate Rule of Cyberspace. My favourite part: There are two tell-tale words here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus …
Apr 02
Epson glasses that project images on their lenses are here. We all know Google (GOOG) is secretly building a super-advanced version of real-life Google Goggles at Google X Labs, but it looks as though Epson — the company behind printers and projectors — may have beaten Google to the punch. The Epson Moverio promises to bring …
Mar 24
Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today has built an argus of flying, file-sharing drones. Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, but it became much more than that. “Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own …
"This ultra-sharp, darkly satiric, hyper-speed novel is set in a world where multi-level mega malls serves as city states and everything on the outside lies in ruin. On the lower red levels, gang violence and media saturation and bio-tech designer drugs rule. During the weekend, slummers from the green levels leave their safe lives of jobs and families to partake in risky, sometimes deadly, fun on the red levels. And on every level, TV and advertisements literally penetrate the mind. Death is easy and life cheap, until that life is your own or your beloveds. Extreme stylization, great characters, and a high-level of intensity is maintained throughout. This is a whip-smart, truly violent novel that has at its core a still very human pulsing heart."
May 20, 1990: Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson’s remarkable Kenyon College commencement address on creative integrity.
川流不息 Endless stream by Singer 晴哥 on Flickr.
