Prof. Welton's Boxing Cats
Nothing really changes.Rogue Websites
Treasure Island, 1934If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time. ... more »
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now? ... more »
Richard O'Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces a potential 10-year term in a US jail despite never having been to America or using web servers based in the country. When still a teenager O'Dwyer set up a website, TVShack, which posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student's lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright. ... more »
But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington’s savviest players — not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America — signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism. ... more »
The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of section 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, or merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. ... more »
more at findings.comNo-one has ever lived in the past
Acme Physics
... in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the series when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent. "I noted that the reason for that was that his examination questions were mostly qualitative, requiring understanding of the concepts rather than just calculational, using formulas, which is what most of the instructors did," Hestenes says. Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. So he and a colleague developed a test to look at students' conceptual understanding of physics. ... more »
Road Runner cartoons can easily and meaningfully be worked into the physics and physical science curriculum. Many vignettes involve fairly direct misrepresentations of specific physical principles. I developed the table below for my own use in deciding which clips to show and when. The two compilation videos are still in print as far as I know. I hope you find the information useful. (An asterisk denotes a particularly useful cartoon or vignette.) ... more »
You left the bodies but you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!
via the always great @paleofuture
Interesting that, again, like lots of late 80s to late 90s concept pieces they were able to see the logical extension of several concepts but missed the big one: ever-present networks. Until recently there was this weird idea with news (particularly print based news people) that we'd need "kiosks" and removable media for this glorious future of reading.Public Service Announcement
Cave Of The Book
Guy LarameeCarved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee via @cmenscher, love these.Brutal Fornication And A Fascist Theocracy
Anything Machines
Just like you, growing up I watched the world of the future replete with tablets. TNG definitely. Everyone's pointed this out already. TNG used tablets the way we believed they'd be used: scattered on desks, casual, connected, always on. I want this, you want this, everybody wants this. They weren't missing from TOS either, or other sci-fi, but TNG stands out as being closest to what we got.
Mostly. If you want to spend a worthwhile 200 hundred dollars on a device, you could do a lot worse than the Kindle Fire or Nook. You could get another much much more expensive Android tablet which just about completely, universally suck. They suck in comparison to the iPad2, which is relatively brilliant. I'm not disappointed with my Kindle Fire because I knew what I was buying. I wasn't buying the future, and I wasn't buying an Anything Machine.
My desktop is an Anything Machine. Put X in, get Y out. Write instructions, write anything. A node upon a vast network. Complete maleability in purpose. Is it a magazine? Sure. A video? Sure. A jukebox, an evolving narrative, a library, a painter's easel, a math cruncher, a galactic telescope, a publisher, a generic mashup machine, sure, all of them. And the interface is the keyboard. And a mouse. For me, as a programmer, to a much lesser degree, the mouse. My desktop is too big to put in my pocket, or scatter in clumps on a work desk, which is why I'm eager for tablets. I want Anything Machines everywhere.
Now whenever I see a TNG rerun and I see them tap-a-tapping upon their PADD I can't help but think, is the soft keyboard better in the 24th century*? Goddamn, I hope so, because I absolutely cannot get anything done on any existing tablet. I want to like them. As I write this, I do so on a netbook, my portable Anything Machine. Why? because the relationship to any construction of language or other set of instructions from a real keyboard to a soft keyboard seems about 10 to 1 to me. That's 5 minutes of my time, or a really frustrating hour.
So here I'm getting cranky. We've been handed a future we weren't really even expecting to be realized and fundamentally my reaction is "fuck, where's my goddamn keyboard". Ungrateful wretch. However, my reaction has some validity (I'd argue) because I still think of computers as primarily Anything Machines and not primarily Consumption Machines. The tablet, the form factor, turns out, is amazingly, perfectly Consumption. I'm not knocking tablets for this, what I'm expressing is that my expectations of them have been wrong, I was caught up in futurism.
* I wonder, given that there are now more "apps" being made than any other recent human endeavor, over time won't this be completely unproductive? If you really want tools that do things, you create them at the lowest, most abstract level which does the greatest number of things. A hammer that only works on one nail and one kind of wood (for $3.99), or the idea of a hammer? Apps, it seems, generally lack the idea of actual applications.
** I also wonder if tablets aren't properly the tools of bureaucracy and militaristic hierarchies. Sometimes when we think about the future and Trek particularly we forget that we're looking at a civilized space navy, and certainly no lack of bureaucracy. The gadget fever masks an ideal future world with a lot of annoying electronic paperwork. Screw that.PDP-11
So Thompson and Ritchie got creative. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC's newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote.
Management took the bait, and an order for a PDP-11 was placed in May 1970. The machine itself arrived soon after, although the disk drives for it took more than six months to appear. During the interim, Thompson, Ritchie, and others continued to develop Unix on the PDP-7. After the PDP-11's disks were installed, the researchers moved their increasingly complex operating system over to the new machine. Next they brought over the roff text formatter written by Ossanna and derived from the runoff program, which had been used in an earlier time-sharing system. ... more »gallery
∴ notes from ebyx
He took the clack-gun from his parent’s basement. It was on a shelf there wrapped up in an oily felt blanket. He wasn’t quite sure why he took it. Marcsson had been detained 3 days for questioning. But no one had been arrested. He thought he was being followed. Probably. But he honestly had no rational idea what he’d do with the gun or why he took it. This then, was an irrational thing.
Jan 24 4:47 a.m.
Personal ownership of robots was against the law. It was a well observed, well enforced law. All robots were collectively owned by the State. The State centralized their operation from a set of terminals in the basement of the Ministry Of Heavy Equipment. There, instructions could be sent to adjust or override their autonomic decision processes. Most activity, however, was monitoring. The operators actually did very little operating generally, and were trained in principles of non-interference. It had been noted by behavioral scientists, in the beginning, that operators specifically had a lot of difficulty simply observing. Given the chance to micro-manage, they would. So a system had to be set up to reward actual observation instead of direction.
Jan 16 3:21 p.m.
Practical Multiagent Cooperation
Jan 13 6:17 a.m.
- "Klout believes you are influential about Beer." okee doke. Thu 9:26 p.m.
- I like that reddit uses postgres and I like how they detail how they use it http://t.co/gJsGSNI1 Wed 11:48 p.m.
- @benwerd shame. Wed 11:01 p.m.
∴ findings
The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality
The effect of these technologies is to transform a hitherto linear experience — a lone reader facing a stable text provided by an author who dictates the shape of reading by doling out information in a sequence he controls — into a multi-directional experience in which voices (and images) enter, interact and proliferate in ways that decenter the authority of the author who becomes just another participant. Again Fitzpatrick: “we need to think less about completed products and more about text in process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix; less about ownership and more about sharing.”
Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation
This is where the computer comes to the rescue. Digitize the entire corpus and you can put questions to it and get answers in a matter of seconds. We can, says Wilkens, “look for potentially interesting features without committing months and years to extracting them via close reading.” The Stanford scholar Franco Moretti calls this method of analyzing huge bodies of data “distant reading” (“Graphs, Maps, Trees,” 2005). The Shakespearian scholar Martin Mueller briskly urges humanists to “stop reading” (“Digital Shakespeare or Toward a Literary Informatics”). So much for the old humanist program.
In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that "interactive" anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is "unfinished." Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a "nature," and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the "nature" of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more "primitive" than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It's not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic - it's saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from. Finishing implies interactive: your job is to complete something for that moment in time. A very clear example of this is hypertext. It's not pleasant to use - because it happens on computer screens - but it is a far-reaching revolution in thinking. The transition from the idea of text as a line to the idea of text as a web is just about as big a change of consciousness as we are capable of. I can imagine the hypertext consciousness spreading to things we take in, not only things we read. I am very keen on this unfinished idea because it co-opts things like screen savers and games and models and even archives, which are basically unfinished pieces of work.
∴ knotesy
We have now obtained the doubleeyed or twin pictures, or Stereograph, if we may coin a name. Jan 26 2:56 a.m.
A new index scores planetary bodies on their suitability for life Jan 23 3:13 p.m.
Thomas Edison's Boxing cats, circa 1894 Jan 23 5:46 a.m.
hand-written, hand-drawn D&D style ad for Mark of the Unicorn Co.'s "Amethyst" Word Processor Jan 21 4:09 p.m.
