That would be fun to analyse with SSK: It’s as funny as it’s comforting for a researcher. The hesitations, the constant going back-and-forth, the genius moments as well as the gradual dive down towards self-loathing. It’s all there. Found first while checking out Boing Boing. It comes form Paul Vallett’s blog, Electron Cafe, a nifty [...]
Category Archives: science
“I want my heart to be open”
This is a moving and engaging presentation given by Karen Sandler, executive director of the GNOME foundation, at OSCON 2011. After she received a hypertrophic cardiomyopathy diagnosis, she realized that the source code running her defribrillator implant was closed, proprietary, and unregulated by the FDA. She does a great job outlining the numerous implications closed-source [...]
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Living Bridges
Along the banks of the region’s many rivers, rubber fig trees grow shallow root systems that cling to the tops of rocks and other surfaces. Residents figured out that , using the trunks of other trees, they could guide these roots to grow straight and long – across to the opposite bank. On the other [...]
Genetic Premunition
BUENOS AIRES — An Argentine laboratory announced that it had created the world’s first transgenic cow, using human genes that will allow the animal to produce the equivalent of mothers’ milk. “The cloned cow, named Rosita ISA, is the first bovine born in the world that incorporates human genes that contain the proteins present in [...]
Fract – “Indie Adventure Game”
FRACT – Indie Adventure Game from Richard Flanagan on Vimeo. “FRACT is an atmospheric adventure game set in an abstract forgotten world of analog sounds, samples and glitches. Myst + Rez with a heavy dose of Tron.” The game, designed by Richard Flanagan, “has been selected as one of the 2011 Independent Games Festival student [...]
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Dynamics and technology
By the early 1990s, remarkable advancements in two commercial 3–D modeling software packages, Alias/Wavefront and Softimage, offered revolutionary possibilities for architectural design. Alias, the forerunner of todays Maya, was developed for the automobile industry to model complex car parts, and it got architects talking when filmmakers used it to create the 3–D special effects in [...]
Also posted in art & design, computing, media studies, physics Tagged embodiment, film, materiality, mathematics, programming, space, technology, visibility Leave a comment
Mathematics as language
…little need to insist that mathematics is a language: who after all among those familiar with it would deny the proposition ^ Certainly not those users – accountants, engineers, economists, actuaries, statisticians, cliometricians, meteorologists, and the like – who have no choice but to translate in and out of mathematical expressions and terminology on their [...]
Also posted in Language, philosophy, physics Tagged language, materiality, mathematics, writing Leave a comment
Ontologies
Is an artificial creature a form of life, or a compound of organs ? Should it also be subsumed under the notion of artificial intelligence ? When an “and” is placed between two terms (artificial/natural, natural/cultural, immanent/transcendent), where should the boundary of that conjunction (or disjunction) be located ? Separators, operators, conjunctions can in this [...]
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Topology in media studies
I don’t want to go that far into the math, but often keep finding references to topology in cultural studies and philosophy texts. The first time I looked up “topology”, I was very happy with the New Oxford American Dictionary’s second definition: “the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged”. Then I found [...]
Structures, from and matter
Just discovered J.E. Gordon’s Structures, or Why Things don’t Fall Down. Some of it strongly makes me think of Simondon’s realism of relations: Structures are made from materials [...] but in fact there is no clear-cut dividing line between a material and a structure. Steel is undoubtedly a material and the Forth bridge is undoubtedly [...]
