A life more aggregated

Weightless Cats - I Can Has Gravity? (by AIRBOYD)

Sat, 18 May 2013 23:43:34 +0100

Weightless Cats - I Can Has Gravity? (by AIRBOYD)

"The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:47:02 +0100

“

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

”

- The three types of specialist

(via Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera: “2001: A Space...

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:46:26 +0100

(via Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera: “2001: A Space Odyssey” Howard Johnsons Children’s Menu (1968))

"I love all this new technology, it’s great. It’s smaller, lighter, faster. You can make a really..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:05:31 +0100

“I love all this new technology, it’s great. It’s smaller, lighter, faster. You can make a really good-looking movie for not a lot of money, and when people start to get weepy about celluloid, I think of this quote by Orson Welles when somebody was talking to him about new technology, which he tended to embrace, and he said, “I don’t want to wait on the tool, I want the tool to wait for me”, which I thought was a good way to put it.”

- Deadline.com » Blog ArchiveSteven Soderbergh’s State Of Cinema Talk - Deadline.com

(via E-Stonia: where the free internet now flows like water -...

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:53:48 +0100

(via E-Stonia: where the free internet now flows like water - Boing Boing)

"The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you’re joining a massive..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 04:29:20 +0100

“The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you’re joining a massive e-mail list. Every day, one person from the list is randomly selected to write one e-mail to everyone else. That’s it. As of this writing, the Listserve has 21,399 subscribers. There has been one email per day since April 16th, 2012. Run by a group of Masters Candidates in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the Listserve emerged from a class exploring new ways of creating conversational spaces online. There were other ideas: chain letters, or a message board for only 100 people at a time. But eventually email’s directness and ease-of-use won out. An email flies straight, circumventing the myriad distractions of other online gatherings, where some voices pack disproportionate clout (or, er, Klout).”

- The Luck of the Listserve – The New Inquiry

‘Crossing Remix [Andrew Weatherall]’ by Wooden ShjipsNot new but...

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:23:12 +0100

‘Crossing Remix [Andrew Weatherall]’ by Wooden Shjips
Not new but finally clicked. Scuzzy Weatherall action - the last two minutes in particular are classic.

(via Gritty crayon colors - Boing Boing)

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:23:04 +0100

(via Gritty crayon colors - Boing Boing)

"Yet so many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 09:11:17 +0100

“

Yet so many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly obvious message of condemnation. Gatsby parties can be found all over town. They are staples of spring on many Ivy League campuses and a frequent theme of galas in Manhattan. Just the other day, vacation rental startup Airbnb sent out invitations to a “Gatsby-inspired soiree” at a multi-million-dollar home on Long Island, seemingly oblivious to the novel’s undertones.

It’s like throwing a Lolita-themed children’s birthday party.

”

- The Sublime Cluelessness of Throwing Lavish Great Gatsby Parties - Zachary M. Seward - The Atlantic

(via The Eyes Have It: Google Goggles Spun Into New Aesthetic...

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:36:15 +0100

(via The Eyes Have It: Google Goggles Spun Into New Aesthetic Gold | COUNSEL)

"Besides the comments on proms and crushes and parents and school and #yolo, the most common theme on..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:47:43 +0100

“Besides the comments on proms and crushes and parents and school and #yolo, the most common theme on #followateen is people pointing out that #followateen is creepy. It’s a good point. Of course it’s creepy. It’s really creepy. If you haven’t yet noticed, Twitter is, itself, creepy. The language is creepy and the concept is creepy. The form is creepy and the content is creepy and the fact of all our relative habituation to it is very, very creepy. The word follow is creepy, evoking heavy-breathing stalkers. Cult leaders have followers, and hapless victims get followed down dark alleyways. Follow implies obsession, lack of autonomy, predators, and silent threats.”

- All Our Little Lives – The New Inquiry

"…here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:56:58 +0100

“…here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!”

- How to Spot a Weak Argument — Editor’s Picks — Medium

‘À tout à l’heure’ by BibioFeel good early summer sound of...

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:10:04 +0100

‘À tout à l’heure’ by Bibio
Feel good early summer sound of the long Bank Holiday just passed…

(via Futurology: shining a bright, broad beam of light into the...

Sat, 04 May 2013 16:29:39 +0100

(via Futurology: shining a bright, broad beam of light into the darkness | Lydia Nicholas | Science | guardian.co.uk)

"I thought about titling this post, “Google Glass: The Beginning of White Flight from Smartphones,”..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 16:22:47 +0100

“I thought about titling this post, “Google Glass: The Beginning of White Flight from Smartphones,” but instead I’m going to propose a new term, status flight, to describe what happens when elites abandon a status symbol that’s lost its signifying power after becoming too quotidian and ubiquitous. This isn’t to say there aren’t some real “white flight”-type elements here; accessing the Internet via mobile phone is more common for Black and Latina/o users than for white users, for instance, and it’s no coincidence that the first Glass-related Tumblr I saw was White Men Wearing Google Glass. (There’s now a Black Men Wearing Google Glass Tumblr too, though as I write this, it features only one picture of one man; White Men Wearing Google Glass presently has 27 pictures, though Sergey Brin appears more than once.) At the same time, I worry about extending boyd’s “white flight” metaphor too far; I also want to capture the simultaneous race, gender, and class dynamics that feed into this phenomenon. While class dynamics are a part of what boyd describes in her paper, this seemed to be lost on some readers of my App.net piece—so though I’m ambivalent about using a new term, I thought I’d test this one out. Status flight therefore describes when people of higher status (in this case, privileged white technophile men) dissociate themselves from something that has become too closely associated with people of lower status (in this case, pretty much everyone else).”

- Status Flight and the Gendering of Google Glass » Cyborgology

(via Sushi Cats, A Cute Collection of Magical Felines Resting on...

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:57:23 +0100

(via Sushi Cats, A Cute Collection of Magical Felines Resting on Sushi Rice)

"Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:30:33 +0100

“

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

”

- Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction | DVICE

(via It’s Nice That : Ryo Takemasa injects some...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:33:18 +0100

(via It’s Nice That : Ryo Takemasa injects some cheerfulness into London with his illustrations)

"America’s 78 million aging baby boomers are heading into retirement with more than their..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:32:40 +0100

“

America’s 78 million aging baby boomers are heading into retirement with more than their considerable wealth, health and education. They are also bringing into their golden years an epidemic of drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness that has yet to be recognized, according to a recent Institute of Medicine report.

The notion that the elderly might be abusing or addicted to alcohol, illicit drugs or prescription medications may strike some as improbable. After all, the common notion is that alcohol and substance abuse are for young people.

Dead wrong. Baby boomers, who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s when experimenting with drugs was pervasive, are far more likely to use illicit drugs than previous generations.

”

- A Rising Tide of Substance Abuse - NYTimes.com

‘Konono Ripoff No. 1’ by Dan DeaconUsual hyperactive fare from...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:04:03 +0100

‘Konono Ripoff No. 1’ by Dan Deacon
Usual hyperactive fare from Mr Deacon.