February 2012
4 posts
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January 2012
14 posts
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stuplimity →
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December 2011
6 posts
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Collective response is the way a group as a whole reacts to its environment. It...
– “Scale-free correlations in starling flocks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 29, 2010
Richard Barnes, Murmur 14, 2006. More images at artist’s website.
More starlings at Village Dog.
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November 2011
9 posts
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If students graduate college without reading Kafka, then we’ve failed to...
– @adamkotsko
To which someone then replied: “Why Kafka?”
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October 2011
18 posts
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Science fiction novels of a half-century ago dramatized conflicts between humans...
– Craig Lambert, “Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work,” New York Times, October 29, 2011
Cf: “Paperwork Explosion”
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shadow work →
Cf: “Paperwork Explosion,” 1967 IBM ad, created by Jim Henson, for the new Selectric word processor. “Machine should work, people should think,” so go the ad’s hypnotic mantra. What seems to have happened in the last 40 years is that the people who make machines - or rather the people who pay them - have invented ever more novel forms of machine-assisted, unthinking,...
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PEOPLE who visit my site — and my server logs indicate repeat visits from the...
– Hasan M. Elahi, “You Want to Track Me? Here You Go, F. B. I.” New York Times, Oct 29 2011
Also see Elahi’s website: Tracking Transience 2.0
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“A corporation falls in the forest - does it make a sound?”
Benj Gerdes + Jennifer Hayashida, Populus Tremula, 9-minute laser subtitled 16mm film, 2010. About the film:
Populus Tremula is a 16mm film loop originating from artistic research into Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger (1880 – 1932), whom The Economist in 2007 called “the world’s greatest financial swindler” and who was ...
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It is about China, Chinese Americans, robots, the effect of technology on our...
– “HBO developing chinese family drama… with robots!” - link
As someone who grew up on Chinese Family Drama, the flesh/blood as well as TV variety, I actually happen to think that remixing CFD as sci fi would be about the only way to make it watchable. I’m all for humanoid...
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redistribute →
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Steve Workers →
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I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the...
– Mike Daisey, “Against Nostalgia,” New York Times, Oct 6 2011 - op-ed on the legacy of Steve Jobs
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Nature Publishing Group announced today that its flagship journal, Nature, will...
– Jordan Suchow, “NPG’s policy on authorship,” Nature 477, 244 (08 September 2011)
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elegy for a non-mac user
When I graduated from college, I sold my Mac Classic to a friend for almost nothing. I had written my senior thesis on that machine. The thesis had been a source of much anguish to undergrad me. But I don’t remember associating those negative emotions with the computer. Or any emotions. Which is a little strange to contemplate - now that Macs and i-anything are all about feelings.
My...