Not Chinas
Posted to Economist.com News Analysis.
Our Asia editor compares China's satellites
Read more at Economist.com News Analysis.
Dances with horses, or defending the indefensible
Posted to Salon.com.
One of the better introductions to “Zoo” that I have read, though the interview is pretty lame (not the writers fault, heh)
I can understand anybody’s reluctance to engage with the issues raised in “Zoo,” a lovely, subdued film, washed in midnight blue, that flirts with the outer edges of documentary reconstruction and poetic license – and is certain to make you uncomfortable. But much of the outraged response to “Zoo,” almost all of it from people who haven’t seen the film (I heard a lot of this myself, after covering it at Sundance), is based on willful ignorance and incomprehension.
Wendy Tremayne and Mikey Sklar: Green pioneers (video)
Posted to MAKE: Blog.
Jay writes -
Wendy Tremayne, best known for founding Swap-O-Rama-Rama, and Mikey Sklar, who is geek famous for self implanting an RFID chip into his hand, are also green pioneers. Leaving New York City to settle in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, these two decided to invest their retirement funds into creating Green Acre. Their goals for Green Acre span from being a green lodging spot for geeks to becoming a community center and arts venue for the increasing number of T-or-C locals.
72-Hour Party People
Posted by Warren Ellis to Warrenellis.com.
Denver - News - 72-Hour Party People
“I consider this shit an excellent use of my tax dollars,” Nick says, rattling a bottle of ProVigil. “It helps keep people from going werewolf around hour 50.”
Into the Shadowy World of Sex With Animals
Posted by MANOHLA DARGIS to NYT > Movie Reviews.
“Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died after having sex with a stallion.
Opening in NYC this week, also a review in the The Village Voice
I hear a rumor that it has been accepted into Cannes, not sure if that means in competition, or what, but pretty crazy anyway.
Architecture: Couples Who Build More Than Relationships
Posted by ROBIN POGREBIN to NYT > Arts.
Husband-and-wife collaborations are part of a broad trend that is changing the traditional definition of architecture partnerships.
Read more at NYT > Arts.
A Security Market for Lemons
Posted by schneier to Schneier on Security.
In 1970, American economist George Akerlof wrote a paper called "The Market for 'Lemons'", which established asymmetrical information theory. He eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work, which looks at markets where the seller knows a lot more about the product than the buyer.
Akerlof illustrated his ideas with a used car market. A used car market includes both good cars and lousy ones (lemons). The seller knows which is which, but the buyer can't tell the difference -- at least until he's made his purchase. I'll spare you the math, but what ends up happening is that the buyer bases his purchase price on the value of a used car of average quality.
This means that the best cars don't get sold; their prices are too high. Which means that the owners of these best cars don't put their cars on the market. And then this starts spiraling. The removal of the good cars from the market reduces the average price buyers are willing to pay, and then the very good cars no longer sell, and disappear from the market. And then the good cars, and so on until only the lemons are left.
In a market where the seller has more information about the product than the buyer, bad products can drive the good ones out of the market.
Read more at Schneier on Security.
Morpho Towers - Two Standing Spirals (Ferrofluid sculptures)
The body of the tower was made by a new technique called “ferrofluid sculpture” that enables artists to create dynamic sculptures with fluid materials. This technique uses one electromagnet, and its iron core is extended and sculpted. The ferrofluid covers the sculpted surface of a three-dimensional iron shape that was made on an electronic NC lathe. The movement of the spikes in the fluid is controlled dynamically on the surface by adjusting the power of the electromagnet. The shape of the iron body is designed as helical so that the fluid can move to the top of the helical tower when the magnetic field is strong enough.
Visit the page for the movie.
Via MAKE: Blog.
Wreck-diving London
Via cityofsound.
Wreck-diving London [BLDGBLOG]
"London will become a city of canals – before it is lost to the sea entirely. It is a new Atlantis, sinking deeper each day into the oceanic embrace of hydrology."
Busking, Distraction, and the Trouble with Value
Posted by pk to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.
Lovely Gene Weingarten piece in the weekend WashPost on whether one of the nation's great musicians -- violinist Joshua Bell -- can make any money busking incognito in a Washington subway at rush hour.
Too bad the article is so long, just skim it.
Chicks Don't Dig The Singularity
Found via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.
Why Chicks Don’t Dig The Singularity - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine).
I’m at Burning Man, and I’m riding my bike around. [… O]ver my left shoulder I hear the word “gene;” I hear the word “memes,” and I stop. And there’s this very unassuming white tent with a bunch of people sitting around on chairs as if they were at a lecture hall. And there’s this good-looking guy in a woman’s nightie. […] I listened to the lecture and thought, “That’s a fascinating guy!” It turned out he was doing a lecture every day, so I kept coming back. The third time I came back, I was on a hallucinogen.
So Ray Kurzweil got up there and Moira Gunn was interviewing him, and everybody got to submit a question. And Moira would pick her three favorite questions. So there were all these technical questions about how will the singularity do this, how will the singularity do that. And my question was, “How will the Singularity get laid… err help me get laid?” So she picked my question as an extra one as a way of dismissing it. She said, “Somebody put a joke question in here, and can you believe that there are people here who would write something like this? It’s ‘how will the Singularity help me get laid?’” And then she throws it aside and tries to move on to another question. But Kurzweil says, “Hang on. Hang on. I want to answer that.” And then he goes into this long technical description…
Spirograph
Posted by topmen to Wohba!.
Top Men spent many childhood hours mesmerized by the patterns and frustrated by the limitations of the good old Spirograph.
The Jagged Edge of the World
If you can see this in person probably wait until then, it’s much more powerful as an experience.
Posted by Tim Bray to ongoing.
Caught in pixels for your, well, not pleasure exactly. I’m talking about the World
Press Photo Contest Winners’ Gallery. If you have any kind of a heart, there are pictures here that will tear holes in it. And some that are just insanely pretty.
pdf-mags
This is mostly just a test to see if I got my publishing toolchain back up and running.
Posted by Warren Ellis to Warrenellis.com.
Jean Snow just sent me this. The few moments in the week that I call my spare time have just been obliterated. pdf-mags.com - an aggregator for PDF magazines.
I am utterly screwed. But isn’t it wonderful? I love that I can now pull down a free magazine stuffed with 56 pages of stencil art from Kiev.
(There’s also a smaller scrnmgs for Flash-driven online magazines.)
MacSwear
The game itself is the classic worm game, played in non-euclidean space - that is to say, it is played on the surface of various three-dimensional shapes.
I highly recommend the blind version of the game. Kinda gives you a headache after a while though.
Link.
Idea2006
Update: Links to all the media available here. Read on for the ones I think are best.
Some interesting talks from Idea2006, ranked in order that I imagine my audience will appreciate them. All the media is here.
Dan Hill: The New Media
Drawing from work in both strategic and operational areas at the BBC in London, I’ll explore some of the ways big media companies are approaching the new media landscape. Far from being marginalised by Web 2.0-style operations, I’ll argue that broadcast media can be reinvented to take advantage of both its traditional strengths and the new environment it finds itself in. I’ll highlight the course we’re plotting between between the top-down, fully-articulated, designed, broadcast models and the fully-participative, emergent, vernacular, open-ended, networked models. Essentially believing there is some value in both, and lots in their potential fusion. This will include examples of strategic work defining the design and navigation principles around the next generation BBC website as well as tactical steps towards this, drawn from interactive products and services made at BBC Radio & Music. This will include using hosting music festivals in Second Life, explorations of ‘Lost’ mapped onto graphical scores, spurious relationships between urban planning and designing media systems and tricks for getting design ‘into the boardroom’.
Mike Migurski and Eric Rodenbeck: Information Visualization, Why Now and Where It's Going
Good talk on Info Viz, audio here, ppt slides with inline movies here (165mb)
pngs of the slides here. Even if you can't play the ppt I recommend you download the zip with the movies, and extract them and figure out which is which as you flip through the pngs, there is some pretty cool stuff in there.
Fernanda Viegas: Information Visualization, Why Now and Where It's Going part 2
Audio, slides. At one point she flips to the live NameVoyager, go play, it's fun.
Paul Gould: Next Generation Libraries
God, what a stuck up prick, but he did have some interesting things to say. Audio, slides.
Linda Stone: Opening Keynote
Designers have a special sensitivity and resonance with mass consciousness. Linda Stone has studied how the way we use our attention impacts and is impacted by mass consciousness. From multi-tasking, to what Stone calls, “continuous partial attention,” to focus and uni-tasking, Stone tracks twenty year social cycles, bringing a sense of context to our current, always-on lifestyle.
And the closing keynote from Bruce Sterling, a little less than I have come to expect from his usually brilliant summations, but still fun: Audio.
I was fairly delirious through the first day due to being awake 48 hours at that point, so if you find anything else good let me know, and I will listen to it, heh.