5cience.net

A Perfect Brick A Perfect Day

weston — Fri, 18 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Your Totalitarian Regime Is Adorable

weston — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:55:00 +0000

Cameras are everywhere. There's probably, if not one in your hand right now, one in your pocket. There's likely one above you now, if you're anywhere public. We've become used to this. Even if you aren't posing for a photo, you may be aware that you'll be posing for one soon. People maintain a camera face. The look forward, prepared, maybe with a gesture or expression they've practiced, even if they don't acknowledge it as practiced. You can see this look, the camera glare, in avatars, in Facebook photos. Even if you don't think someone is taking your photo, I believe subconsciously we now believe someone may be. This is not seen as surveillance, it's seen as desire, social. We live in a constant state of "SAY CHEESE!", the moment someone used to command you to freeze yourself into a state ready for posterity.

This is, arguably, no longer totalitarian, no longer surveillance. We are aware of most of the recording, if at times only dully when we're taking money from the ATM. There is very little special or uncommon intention attached to picture taking.

What I find remarkable about the photos taken in Prague during surveillance in the 70s is that they were taken at a time when doing so is an obvious attempt at social control by an obviously totalitarian regime. The question back then "perhaps someone is watching me" was enough to curtail cultural freedoms, empower the political engine, disparage contrary behavior and criticism. It was a tool of fear.

The opposite may be true now, the greatest tool of social control might be the modern terror "perhaps NOBODY is watching me".

These images are beautiful and mundane. They reveal a layer of daily activity that wasn't naturally captured. In that sense the monitoring by a police state become weird antique objects, so genuine they seem like they must be staged.

Three Point Landing In Meme Country

weston — Sun, 6 May 2012 16:30:00 +0000

(Editing by Duncan Robson. Music by Joel Robson. http://joelrobson.bandcamp.com/track/three-point-landing http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThreePointLanding)

Some look at memes, remixes and the constant stream of web culture and dismiss it. Just a cat that wants a cheezburger. Just Scumbag Steve or Tron Guy or Me Gusta. But there's more under the surface. ROFLCon peeled this back and showed the common behind meme-making, the habitual remixer, the socially awkward penguin. The background is the same expressive subversive impulses we've always seen in human culture, naturally taking shape in the latest technology, mutating quickly. It's an informational ouroboros, a radically consuming impermanent whirlwind, and those dismissing it are missing out on the distilled state of our times: fame, criticism, obsessiveness, struggling for individuality.

Also, this Three Point Landing mix from the supercuts panel is goddamn fantastic.

Goodbye Frontier Towns

weston — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Database normalization ties relationships together across tables so that there's no redundancy, allows those relationships to be updated consistently in the fewest places. Your identity online is becoming normalized through tech and convention.

At one time (long ago) it was peculiar, perhaps anathema, to use your "real name" online. You used a handle. The idea there would exist a normalized relationship between that handle and other records, and that these relationships had any reflection of the real world (discarded term: meat space) was thought of as dystopian, creepy. This is no longer the case.

Handles in a sense still exist, but as projects and brands, rarely as primary personal identities. The expectation, accepted behavior now is that your real name, and everything that goes with it is also your online identity. You promote your name as a commodity, you treat your identity like a start up.

Denormalization, on the other hand, is duplication of information across tables, so while there's excellent performance, the data can easily become disparate, can drift. One record may, but doesn’t necessarily, contain something from another record.

I'd argue that the normalization of identity, and the obvious fact that for a lot of people -- young people, tech people -- there is little or no separation between online-offline, means that we get operationally a kind of Victorian society. There may be a lot of identities, but the space is small, so the social pressures to behave "properly" is enormous. Through normalization the ability to maneuver is limited. It’s unforgiving.

The web used to be, not very long ago, a hodge podge of frontier towns. Some rougher than others. Most interesting. "Online", when it was a frontier, was wild. Imagine, a hundred years ago, you pick up your stuff and move across the country looking for work. You don’t know anyone where you’re going, they don’t know you. It’s a reinvention, you have the ability to live as essentially a new personality. Before the great normalization no one could look at your Facebook page, or blog, or tweets, or a thousand other artifacts that you’ve built up about yourself. Migrating physically now means little since centrally, in the information space, you’re pinpointed.

I’ve accepted that I will never entirely feel comfortable with this change. I come from online frontier towns. I don’t necessarily make very good online company. I have unrealistic affection for the uncouth, chaotic and perhaps embarrassingly named handles of the early days. I understand there are pros and cons, that having an online identity tied to your offline self that you use wisely can connect you with people that share your interests, and there are great rewards to that.

But God help you if you fuck up. You won’t be hanged, you’ll be shunned from polite society and you can't change your handle.

All money is a matter of belief

weston — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:15:00 +0000

When creating, or even looking at, a banknote design, one of the first things you realise is their inherent and very deliberate imperfections. There’ll be an apparent mis-registration of colour, a strangely ragged line, a discontinuity in a pattern or an odd serif or ligature on a piece of lettering, but it’s exactly how it was designed. Without it, it wouldn’t be right. The design of banknotes represent something I find gloriously poetic — imperfect perfection — if it was perfect by our usual standards, it would be imperfect. Wonderful. ... more »

Banknote patterns fascinate me. I can get lost for hours in all the details, seeing how the patterns fit together, how the lettering works, the tiny security ‘flaws’ - they’re amazing. Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. ... more »

Венера

weston — Mon, 9 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

As enthusiastic as the US hurls probes at Mars to crawl the deserts, scratching around for a hint of water and life, the Soviets propelled craft after craft at Venus, hoping for some demystification. They were tenacious.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union no one has attempted to put a lander on Venus. Why? Doesn't Venus deserve as much love as Mars? Perhaps. The goals were legendary, anthropomorphic. The Soviets very soon found a completely hostile place. Finding life on Venus, assuming this is always a thinly veiled goal of any interplanetary mission, is fantastically unlikely. But Venus has other mysteries, still has mysteries.

Now scientists have discovered that magnetic reconnection also happens on Venus, a planet with no intrinsic magnetic field. The finding, reported today in Science1, suggests that magnetic reconnection may generate auroras on Venus, and could have contributed to the loss of a thick, water-rich atmosphere that scientists believe surrounded the planet during its early history, some 4 billion years ago. ... more »

The landing of a craft on Venus at all is incredibly difficult.

Surface temps of 475C, an atmosphere so thick that probes get crushed. Think it's hard getting a submersible to the bottom of the marianas trench? Try sending it through space first. Also, once you're in the atmosphere, it's so dense that you're gonna have trouble getting your probe to the ground before your power runs out. Which is what happened to Venera-4. Venera-5 and 6 were crushed 18km above the surface. But the Soviets didn't stop.

That the Soviets were able to do it several times with the technology of the era is remarkable. That they didn't stop after failures was equally remarkable.

If People Never Did Silly Things Nothing Intelligent Would Ever Get Done

weston — Sat, 7 Apr 2012 17:14:00 +0000

I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.

weston — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:00:00 +0000

White Savior Self Destruct

weston — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Hulk Hogan collapses into a quantum singularity. Fabric of space is torn to reveal a portal to preindustrial earth. @benbenjidr

The exposed sinew of George Clooney, beneath skin held open by hooks of iron, milked for muscle-tears @dadflannels

GEORGE ORWELL REREADS "KILLING AN ELEPHANT," ASKS FORGIVENESS FROM BURMESE PEOPLE. THEY KILL HIM, WITH AN ELEPHANT. @DISTACTION

disguised as a clown, morrissey disembowels himself during a child's birthday party at mcdonald's @junkview

A naked and self-flagellated Bono tears out his own heart and offers it as tribute to the Sun God @mana_horse

Ira Glass spins lazily, ejecting sheets of plasma from his molten surface, whispering 'Final act.' @SquireMakeastir

Martin Sheen discards his earthly husk, escapes to home dimension through a tesseract @risingstorm1618

You know my methods, Watson

weston — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 12:34:00 +0000

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew

weston — Tue, 6 Mar 2012 08:31:00 +0000

The problem relates to the way that data are transmitted within the experiment. Neutrino speeds are estimated by dividing the baseline distance travelled (as calculated using GPS measurements) by the time-of-flight (as calculated using an atomic clock). The researchers have now realized that an optical fibre connecting the GPS signal to the atomic clock may not have been functioning correctly at the time when the measurements were made. This could have led to an underestimate of the time taken by neutrinos on their journey. ... more »

With each doubling of detector volume leading to a doubling in the neutrino detection rate, a contagious volume fever has spread among neutrino astronomers. In 25 years time the unit in which detector volumes are measured has evolved considerably. Gone are the days that these were measured in cubic meters. Following the delivery of the IceCube neutrino telescope, the cubic kilometer provides a more convenient unit. And plans for future neutrino telescopes promise to dwarf IceCube. The most ambitious are probably the plans for the Arianna neutrino observatory, that address the conversion of a hundred cubic kilometres of the Ross ice shelf into a colossal neutrino detector. ... more »

In 1967, one of the Vela satellites encountered a brilliant flash of gamma radiation. U.S. monitors went on the alert, keen to determine whether someone had broken the treaty. They discovered an eerie truth instead: Those high-energy flashes were happening on a regular basis, often once or twice a day. They were coming from all directions. And they were not coming from the Earth. ... more »

Grace Hopper

weston — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:13:00 +0000

Pursuing her belief that computer programs could be written in English, Admiral hopper moved forward with the development for Univac of the B-O compiler, later known as FLOW-MATIC. It was designed to translate a language that could be used for typical business tasks like automatic billing and payroll calculation. Using FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Hopper and her staff were able to make the UNIVAC I and II "understand" twenty statements in English. When she recommended that an entire programming language be developed using English words, however, she "was told very quickly that she couldn't do this because computers didn't understand English." It was three years before her idea was finally accepted; she published her first compiler paper in 1952. ... more »

The term "bug" was used in an account by computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is given by this quote: In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's in a program a bug. Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. The date in the log book was 9 September 1947, although sometimes erroneously reported as 1945. The operators who did find it, including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia, were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story. This log book is on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, complete with moth attached. ... more »

(The Spice)

weston — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:08:00 +0000

In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes. ... more »

In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version. Agreeing, he planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí as the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. ... more »

The Man Who Lived On His Bike

weston — Tue, 7 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The Edge Of The World

weston — Mon, 6 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The immediate context is human. The background is the earth set against space. There are more impressive acts of pure science, and pure astronomy. There are many that are captivating: for instance, images from Cassini. There have been, recently, whole earth high-resolution shots. Famously, the blue marble, Sagan's "pale blue dot", a photo of Earth by Voyager 1.

What these other famous images lack however is the obvious display of human scale. Here, Buzz Aldrin, front and center. The relationship of his position, a man 261 kilometers above Mount Everest, a man embedded in technology. Like previous explorers, like journeys to the poles, to the most remote or extreme areas of the planet, the scale is human exploration fundamentally. Perhaps, these days, there's something embarrassingly self-centered about it, about the ego of the explorer, or the audacity of the raw politics of the attempt.

But I think this image represents best, even more than the moon footage, the early space era. There's something very concrete in Aldrin's expression (what we can see of it), an almost zen like intensity, a clarity that is compelling. From interviews with Aldrin he's matter of fact about the whole thing, lacking any deeply radical philosophy or wholeness shtick that may look good on greeting cards. When I look at this image, what I see is simply a very confident "yup, this is what we're built for."

And that's pretty cool.

more images via natgeo

Prof. Welton's Boxing Cats

weston — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:04:00 +0000

Nothing really changes.

Rogue Websites

weston — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:57:00 +0000

If 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.com

No-one has ever lived in the past

weston — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:58:00 +0000

Acme Physics

weston — Tue, 3 Jan 2012 20:05:00 +0000

... 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!

weston — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000

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.