umair haque: hacking means taking things that suck and making them better

umair haque is always worth reading. though like almost everyone he's way better when he's throwing out new ideas than when he's complaining about people's reaction to them.

Hacking means taking things that suck and making them better. Hacks aren’t always elegant, though they should be. But the logic of hacking is elegant: find things that suck, and make them better.

link

vertigo

i found this recently and i can't remember where. maybe BLDBLOG? or we make money not art?

anyway: i can't look at it without unease. i stumble across it in my pictures folder every day or so and it always unnerves me.

making wikipedia better

EVERY NOW AND then i come across someone from an academic background who scoffs somehow at wikipedia. i say, as calmly and politely as possible, 'kindly sit down, shut up, and make the fucking thing better'. wikipedia has its faults but making it hard for you to improve it is not one of them: along with linux it's one of the great collaborative projects of our age. if you don't like it, make it better.

ryan holiday* has some good advice on how to meaningfully contribute to it. as he says, 'the last thing you should do is act like you're entitled to the benefits without paying for your share.'

1) Fix grammar and spelling
2) Work on pages for books you read, as you read them
3) Double or triple source citations
4) When you're reading an news article that mentions hard sales figures for something (for example, that certain book sold 20,000 copies) add it to the product or artist's entry. Those are rarely ever featured on Wikipedia and are great, credible support. They are also really easy to cite.
5) If you go to a decent university, use your schools account for Lexis Nexis to dig up old press than other people can't find. A lot of interesting stuff is stuck behind the pay wall.
6) Delete PR fluff when you see it. (this entry is a good example. You could do this page a big favor using only the delete key)
7) When you see articles tagged for Notability, add sources until you can delete the tag. You can usually find enough through Google News.
8) Link relevant articles together. Every good article should have a See Also section, if it use it to connect the dots as you find them. (or create the section)
9) Cite books whenever you can, they are much harder to dispute and give you more room to paraphrase.

*ryan holiday both a) reads and blogs about a lot of old greek and latin authors and b) curates a website with pictures of cute dogs doing silly things. he's an interesting guy, in short, and i usually enjoy what he has to say.

link

the camera rotated slowly in the middle of the room. afterwards he spray-painted the room white and replaced the camera with a projector

displacements, by michael naimark.

(found at todayandtomorrow.net)


Displacements - Michael Naimark from today and tomorrow on Vimeo.

scrapple 'scans a table surface as if it were a kind of music notation'

scrapple, to quote its creator golan levin:

is an audiovisual installation in which everyday objects placed on a table are interpreted as sound-producing marks in an “active score.” The Scrapple system scans a table surface as if it were a kind of music notation, producing music in real-time from any objects lying there. The installation makes use of a variety of playful forms; in particular, long flexible curves allow for the creation of variable melodies, while an assemblage of cloth shapes, small objects and wind-up toys yields ever-changing rhythms. Video projections on the Scrapple table transform the surface into a simple augmented reality, in which the objects placed by users are elaborated through luminous and explanatory graphics. The 3-meter long table produces a 4-second audio loop, allowing participants to experiment freely with tangible, interactive audiovisual composition. In the Scrapple installation, the table is the score.

link to scrapple project

matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around.

RUDY RUCKER ON fundamental limits to virtual reality.

..come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

maybe the aliens are postcolonial?

the fermi paradox goes like this:

1. we exist, therefore intelligent life has happened once.
2. the universe is so vast that anything that can happen once has probably happened a lot of times.
3. where is everybody? specifically, why can we find no radio-emission-type evidence of other kinds of life ?

milan cirkovic's answer: we could only detect civilisations at interstellar distances if they were expansionist. that is, if they were devoting considerable resources to occupying as much of space as they could. but maybe the other intelligent life in the universe is not imperialist or expansionist? there's no reason why alien politics should follow models familiar to us, after all. it's quite possible that any civilisation sufficiently advanced to be able to have a go at colonising space might, along the way to becoming that advanced, have worked out a very good reason why it wasn't the best thing to be doing with their time.

charlie stross has more to say on the fermi paradox, all interesting.

link to circovik's paper

make yourself useful

'MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL' is, IMO, the simplest advice for anything trying not to get eaten alive by the internet. to be more specific, 'make yourself useful to a world which has the internet'. why? because the internet is competition writ large: your competitors are no further away than you are.

making yourself useful means focusing on creating value for other people. the alternative, if you want to make money, is to focus on extracting value from people. most companies do a mix of both. to the extent that they do the latter we are willing to desert them in droves when something better comes along.

EMI could make itself useful, apparently

IAN ROGERS WAS general manager of yahoo!music, now runs topspin. he's written an open letter to the head of EMI suggesting ways in which the label could

a) not be eaten alive by the internet and its children and
b) make itself useful.*

techdirt's summary is neat, and goes like this:

Put together various mini-labels under which similar types of bands are associated. And, include on those labels a few of the "big name" EMI artists. Thus, for all the fans who are fans of some huge artist, by creating these affinity labels, it will help drive the fans of the big name artist to those other bands as well, knowing that they all have a similar sound or musical philosophy.

ian's argument is that the only real advantage a major can provide a new artist is in marketing power, and that that marketing should be about building an audience's trust through maintaining a strong identity.


*'make yourself useful' is, IMO, the simplest advice for anything trying not to get eaten alive by the internet.

link to ian's letter
link to techdirt article

long-lost incidental music from spiderman cartoon found, swings, rocks

THERE WAS AN animated spiderman series back in the late 60s and early 70s. most of us can sing the theme song but the incidental music is also great and has been long sought-after by lovers of the, well, hard to find. folks like Kliph surely-this-isn't-my-real-name Nesteroff, who wrote a great article on the WFMU blog about his search for master tapes of the music.

he updated today with the news that he's found music from a couple of the seasons, and made a podcast in which you can hear a bunch of this great shagadelic material for yourself, contrasting the scratchy versions you can hear beneath the dialogue in VHS versions of the series with the glorious full-spectrum sound of the master tapes. my favourite track so far is from 'revolt in the 5th dimension'.

you can download it here.