tldr is an application for navigating through large-scale online discussions. The application visualizes structures and patterns within ongoing conversations to let the user browse to content of most interest. In addition to visual overviews, it also incorporates features such as thread summarization, non-linear navigation, multi-dimensional filtering, and various other features that improve the experience of participating in large-discussions. (tldr)
See also: Srikanth Narayan
For anyone who’s watching this space via RSS/Atom: I’ve changed how things work around here a little bit, and will be using WordPress to host a lot of material beyond the typical blog fare. If you’d like to receive all this extra material, then you don’t need to do anything and can keep your feed settings exactly as they are. If you’d rather just get my blog feed, click here.
Junkshop/steampunk social-network-enabled automatic music machine:
Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components, all housed in a modified wardrobe. Its emotions are shown on a 100 year old school galvanometer; a motor-driven crank drives the bellows of an Indian classical instrument modified with 13 robotic servos; a switched fan pumps air through a Farfisa organ retro-fitted with robotic keys; 12 chimes are struck by suspended solenoids; numerous percussion instruments are hit by beaters attached to motors, including a cigar box with an integral spring “reverb”; and a purpose made vinyl record is cued robotically to play through antique brass gramophone horns. In addition to these musical components, Cybraphon has several internal light sources that are controlled on four fader channels, and infra-red motion detectors to monitor people watching it.
All these elements are controlled by a hidden computer via MIDI, DMX, and Arduino boards. And wire. Lots and lots of wire.
The computer runs custom software (coded in Python and MAX/MSP) to monitor the web and update Cybraphon’s emotions according to the rate at which its popularity is changing over time. All mentions of Cybraphon online that are indexed by Google are noted, as well as activity on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, MySpace, and this very website. (cybraphon.com)
Via Grand Text Auto
UK social software consultant and writer Suw Charman-Anderson, working for the Carnegie Trust UK, has been conducting some forecasting and scenario-making research concerning the future of social technology and the Internet. Her enormous mindmap of keywords and phrases associated with where things might be heading in the next 15 years is definitely worth a look, containing as it does a bevy of bite-sized-yet-thought-provoking future-visions like “personalized manufacturing”, “crime based on openness” and “consolidation and closure of news outlets.” Also worth taking a look at is a series of interviews Suw conducted wherein she poses thoughtful questions about the future to a variety of scholars, entrepreneurs and activists, including JP Rangaswami and Ross Mayfield. These interviews are each individually quite edifying, as is the base set of questions Suw asks — indeed, these questions are an excellent starting-point for any discussion of the future, and so I post them here (see the Carnegie Trust’s “futures thinking” page for more on this methodology):
1. Predetermined driving forces
What forces appear to be predetermined?
What changes in the broader environment appear unavoidable?
What assumptions are these changes based upon?2. Uncertain driving forces
What might happen over the next 15 years that would affect social technology?
If you could have any question answered about what will happen by 2025, what would it be?
How uncertain are they?
Which are becoming more certain?3. Wildcard events
What type of unexpected developments could totally change the game?
What could undermine existing assumptions?4. Connections and criticality
Are any of these driving forces connected?
Which are the most important?
Which small changes could have big consequences?
Which of these driving forces are critical?
This optical illusion is hard to believe…but the Photoshop test bears it out.
You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals… Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. (Discover)
Dutch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader was last seen in 1975 when he took off in what would have been the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic. He left behind a small oeuvre, often using gravity as a medium, which more than 30 years after his disappearance at sea is more influential than ever before.
In 1975 Ader embarked on what he called “a very long sailing trip.” The voyage was to be the middle part of a triptych called “In Search of the Miraculous,” a daring attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 12½ foot sailboat. He claimed it would take him 60 days to make the trip, or 90 if he chose not to use the sail. Six months after his departure, his boat was found, half-submerged off the coast of Ireland, but Bas Jan had vanished. (basjanader.com)
The Crypt of Civilization is an airtight chamber at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta containing books, records, consumer goods and other artifacts. It is scheduled to be opened in the year 8113 C.E..
On May 25, 1940, Jacobs and Peters sealed the crypt in a solemn ceremony that was broadcast by Atlanta’s WSB radio. Some notables present at the ceremony were Dr. Amos Ettinger, Dr. M. D. Collins, Mayor William B. Hartsfield, Ivan Allen, Clark Howell, Governor Eurith D. Rivers, and Postmaster General James A. Farley. They welded the door shut and fused onto it a plaque with a Message to the Generations of 8113 from Jacobs:
“This Crypt contains memorials of the civilization which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. In receptacles of stainless steel, in which the air has been replaced by inert gasses, are encyclopedias, histories, scientific works, special editions of newspapers, travelogues, travel talks, cinema reels, models, phonograph records, and similar materials from which an idea of the state and nature of the civilization which existed from 1900 to 1950 can be ascertained. No jewels or precious metals are included.
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.” (wikipedia)
More: Oglethorpe University’s website for the project contains a complete list of the time capsule’s contents, and Modern Mechanix has some scans of an article about the making of the Crypt from the December, 1938 edition of Popular Science.
Today I Die is another poetic text-and-animation game from Daniel Benmergui.
Tenori-on is an electronic musical instrument, designed and created by Japanese artist, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori of the Music and Human Interface Group, Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology. It consists of a screen, held in the hands, of a sixteen by sixteen grid of LED switches, any of which can be activated in a number of ways to create an evolving musical soundscape. The LED switches are held within a aluminum frame, which has two built-in speakers located on the top of frame, as well as a dial and buttons that control the type of sound and beats per minute produced. There is also an LCD screen on the bottom edge of the frame. Using the connection function, it is possible to play a synchronized session, or to send and receive songs between two of the devices. (Wikipedia)
See also: Monome
From Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics:
…let us imagine an infinitely small piece of elastic, contracted, if that were possible, to a mathematical point. Let us draw it out gradually in such a way as to bring out of the point a line which will grow progressively longer. Let us fix our attention not on the line as line, but on the action which traces it. Let us consider that this action, in spite of its duration, is indivisible if one supposes that it goes on without stopping; that, if we intercalate a stop in it, we make two actions of it instead of one and that each of these actions will then be the indivisible of which we speak; that it is not the moving act itself which is never indivisible, but the motionless line it lays down beneath it like a track in space. Let us take our mind off the space subtending the movement and concentrate solely on the movement itself, on the act of tension or extension, in short, on pure mobility. This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration. (165)
I wonder how Bergson’s meditations on time and free will would have played out had he been able to mess around with the Khronos Projector, a time-spatializing Processing sketch by Alvaro Cassinelli. This online instance is a stripped-down version of Cassinelli’s 2005 installation:
The Khronos projector unties time and space in a pre-recorded movie sequence, opening the door for an infinite number of interactive visualizations. Using the Khronos projector, event’s causality become relative to the spatial path we decide to walk on the image, allowing for a multiple interpretation of the recorded facts. In this sense, the Khronos projector can be seen as an exploratory interface that transforms a movie sequence into a spatio-temporal sculpture for people to explore at their own pace and will. (Khronos Projector)
