The Big-O algorithm cheat sheet is a useful one to bare in mind. What about a website of cheat sheets for everything?
Water planets ahoy!
Category: Blog
N-body choreographies – the cyclical paths taken by perfect bodies in space. I wonder how many of these are waiting in the universe for us to discover? Beautiful visualisations by James Montaldi.
The NeoLucida from Golan Levin and Pablo Garcia – “a product/provocation with a media-archaeological theme”.
I saw a documentary on Max Ernst recently, the starter of surrealism who described himself as having the “opposite madness to politicians”. He cultivated a respectable exterior and described madness as “a risk worth taking”.
“The Fireside Angel is a picture I painted after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain. This is, of course, an ironical title for a kind of clumsy oaf which destroys everything that gets in the way. That was my impression in those days of the things that might happen in the world. And I was right.”
He said that he was never conscious of making art – merely “trying to express the spirit of the the time” and that “fortunately there is no progress in art” – only different ways of doing it.
Finally, the sale of Instagram to Facebook.
“The sale of Instagram to Facebook for a cool billion in the spring of 2012 was the ultimate Silicon Valley fairy tale: 18 months from launch to offer. But, for co-founder and C.E.O. Kevin Systrom, it was more of a roller-coaster ride, with several missed opportunities, at least two “aha” moments, and one major reboot.”
Via Ben Southworth, how to prototype in XCode from Meng To.
A perfect new drone engine – Ionic Thrusters!
Thoughts on the future of technology from Thiel and Andresson. Why hasn’t technology lived up to its promise? Are we stagnating? Are Dell, IBM, Oracle rust belt tech companies? Could we doing a lot better? AI? Space? Quantum? Next generation life scientists? Was it a cultural decision? Are we all incrementalists now?
The new board from Arduino, the Esplora, perfect for making games, and a Turbulenz, a HTML5 game engine that has just gone open source.
Or via Diederick Huijbers, a new streaming platform for gaming.
Millions of blogging platforms everywhere! Again! Again again? History repeating repeats:
- Ghost
- “Ghost is an Open Source application which allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It’s simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time making your blog work and more time blogging.”
- Post Haven
- “What would it be like to make a service that lasts for 10 years? 100 years? That’s what we’re trying to build at Posthaven. We’re as sick as you are to have to switch services every few years, or worry about running your own servers and getting hacked all the time.”
- Medium
- “Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase the depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages great ideas coming from anywhere? In short, we think that words (still) matter, so we built a better system for sharing them.”
- Draft
- “You don’t need writing software; you need someone’s feedback on your writing.
You don’t need version control software; you need to find all the things you’ve written without fear.You don’t need distraction free text editors; you need to find ways to write more concisely, more clearly.
You don’t need real time collaboration software; you need a bigger audience for your writing.
I’m working on Draft to provide what you need. What I need.”
- “You don’t need writing software; you need someone’s feedback on your writing.
- Svbtle
- “We’re a network of great people mixed with a platform that takes the best things from traditional publishing and combines them with the best parts of the web. We want to make it easier for people to share and discover new ideas.Want to be a part of the network? Awesome. But for now, we’re invite-only.”
Interesting to see the blending of editorial platforms and technical ones. Kind of like printing press manufacturers teaming up with newspapers. Kind of.
Illumiroom is a concept from Microsoft Research. I think it will stay there. The challenges of integrating with all those different living rooms are just too great.
Tips from Andrew Dumont on avoiding burnout:
- Morning Workouts
- An Evening Walk
- Fiction Reading
- A Day A Week (off)
- Intellectual Hobbies
- Small Wins
- A Healthy Diet
- Limiting Decisions
- Yearly Unplugs
The one that I thought was most interesting was “Limiting Decisions”. I always try to reduce psychic or cognitive load wherever possible. Some examples that worked for me:
- I only have one pair of shoes. Thanks to Pete Hellicar for buying them for me for the past three years.
- I don’t buy clothes or furniture or stuff. Just books, magazines and music. I do visit Levi’s once a year for four pairs of jeans. I seem to get given shirts and tops and t shirts, so make do with those.
- I Open Source everything I make. I just don’t want the load of having to market, sell or support things.
Useful tips from Michael Grinich on manufacturing products for the newbie. Or just go straight to Highway 1 and build your product from start in four months!
I’ve been playing for the Oculus Rift for some time – it’s obvious that the first killer (low hanging fruit) app will be some kind of dogfighting game. Eve Online has been experimenting with a cut down version of it’s multiplayer engine – limited in time and number of players. Richard Cobbett posits an interesting future where necks could be snapped by wily players.
It looks like we are going to be stuck with text editing for making code for a while – which are the best fonts for programming?
My first home computer was an Amiga. I asked for one for years from my parents before they finally relented – first a 500+ and then a 1200 with 120 Mb(!) of hard drive space. Mind blowing. Ars have done a brilliant history of the Amiga, with a particularly great post on the demo scene.
Finally, a bit of perspective on this whole day by day thing. The proportion of a day to some other significant events or periods in the history of the universe.
Monocopters are just as brilliant as they sound.
An argument for the “switch” statement being the highest level of C.
“The
switchstatement is the only part of the language where you specify anintent, and the choice of how to make that a reality is not only out of your hands, but the resulting code can vary in algorithmic complexity. “
The Internet’s most horrible items. A daily blog. The worst things for sale on the internet.
What if…. from XKCD. The good news is that Twitter will never run out of things to say.
“How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud?”
Below I repost the Critical Engineering manifesto in full:
The Critical Engineering Working Group
Julian Oliver Berlin, October 2011 Gordan Savičić Danja Vasiliev
THE CRITICAL ENGINEERING MANIFESTO
0. The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.
1. The Critical Engineer considers any technology depended upon to be both a challenge and a threat. The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless of ownership or legal provision.
2. The Critical Engineer raises awareness that with each technological advance our techno-political literacy is challenged.
3. The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.
4. The Critical Engineer looks beyond the ‘awe of implementation’ to determine methods of influence and their specific effects.
5. The Critical Engineer recognises that each work of engineering engineers its user, proportional to that user’s dependency upon it.
6. The Critical Engineer expands ‘machine’ to describe interrelationships encompassing devices, bodies, agents, forces and networks.
7. The Critical Engineer observes the space between the production and consumption of technology. Acting rapidly to changes in this space, the Critical Engineer serves to expose moments of imbalance and deception.
8. The Critical Engineer looks to the history of art, architecture, activism, philosophy and invention and finds exemplary works of Critical Engineering. Strategies, ideas and agendas from these disciplines will be adopted, re-purposed and deployed.
9. The Critical Engineer notes that written code expands into social and psychological realms, regulating behaviour between people and the machines they interact with. By understanding this, the Critical Engineer seeks to reconstruct user-constraints and social action through means of digital excavation.
10. The Critical Engineer considers the exploit to be the most desirable form of exposure.
As Barry Threw says:
“@tarikbarri is creating the best real-time visuals out there today”
You can see some of Tarik’s work here – for me it’s a toss up between Mr. Barri and Mr. Bereza – his work for Jamie Lidell‘s latest tour was great.
Duration is a lovely way of laying out generative work on a timeline.
Finally, VHX is a platform that I’ve been using quite a bit, mostly for documentaries, but features are being released on it now too.
Last week I met with my old friend from CRD days at the RCA, Jussi Ängeslevä. Jussi has been working for Art+Com for a few years now, and he drew my attention to two open source software projects that have emerged from A+C in recent years – Y60 and Creative Computing.
Kate Hollenbach of Oblong recently announced the release of greenhouse:
“Oblong’s SDK for creating gestural, spatial, multi-screen interactive systems. Internally, we’ve done a lot thinking about physical space, screens, gesture, and input devices, but we haven’t yet shared that openly with the world. Greenhouse is our first step toward sharing what we do with developers and creative coders outside of our own walls.”
Jussi also pointed me in the direction of the delicious Squama project: “Modular Visibility Control of Walls and Windows for Programmable Physical Architectures”.
| @pornelski 25/03/2013 14:10 “They say git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.” |
What a lovely description for Git! It also led me down a rabbit hole of definitions.
| @memotv 29/03/2013 16:11Truth behind the harlem shake, an internet meme created by marketers. bit.ly/14BxDwa |
Memo tweeted recently about the truth behind the Harlem Shake.
I was recently thinking about a quality metric for BitTorrent – do people use the ratio of Seeders to Leechers already? Surely a high Seed and low Leech is best of all.
Finally, Bloomberg with the news that mining for virtual gold in the form of Bitcoin is just as bad as mining for gold in the real world.
We at Hellicar&Lewis have been speaking to Sedition about making some films for their digital art platform. I wonder what happens when hackers break into their back end? Would the collectors be mad? I remember the first time that I saw a .torrent file for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and thought about how those limited edition laserdisc owners must be feeling. Or if one of the owners digitised it themselves? Or if Barney did?
Keri Elmsly has taken over at The Media Space at the Science Museum in London.
Universal Everything have kicked off the first show there.
In reference to the previous post about 80% of NYC’s carbon footprint being down to air conditioning, Stanford have the solution.
“a typical one-story, single-family house with just 10 percent of its roof covered by radiative cooling panels could offset 35 percent its entire air conditioning needs during the hottest hours of the summer.
Radiative cooling has another profound advantage over other cooling equipment, such as air conditioners. It is a passive technology. It requires no energy. It has no moving parts. It is easy to maintain. You put it on the roof or the sides of buildings and it starts working immediately.”