Epitaph

"But these meandering journeys across the Internet soundscape can be taxing. The medium too easily generates anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes. Putting on an old-fashioned disk and letting it play to the end restores a measure of sanity."

Alex Ross / Infinite Playlist / The New Yorker

Digidioramas

Yesterday I was stumbling around the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco's Natural History Museum) and kind of scoffing at their dioramas since New York's are so legendary. (Side note: The Academy's were really nice, I was just being a dick). Then my mum pointed out the elephants in the mural behind the Zebras:



That is fantastic.

I also learned about the Pistol Shrimp and Goby's mutualist relationship, saw a Giraffe-Necked Weevil, and was terrified by a live albino alligator!

Mario Hacks

I just discovered ubu.com, specifically its Cory Arcangel page. I still remember his hand hacked Clouds piece as being the only interesting piece at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The ubu website has a bunch of his stuff, including his collaboration with Paper Rad where they again hand hacked a Mario Brothers cartridge to create a ravey movie:



See, they put a piece of video art free online and the world didn't end! Of course Cory and Paper Rad get all the praise and meanwhile some dude on youtube makes this hack (and makes you laugh) and gets nothing:

Steampunk Keyboard

It's a little late but check out the poor man's steampunk keyboard my dad whipped up for my brother for x-mas!
























For some extreme steampunk technology look at this.

I Love Living in the Future

Thanks to Jordan I've just found out about this fantastic new single for the band Delaware, fantastic not for the music but for how it's presented:



True, it would be a little annoying to have to open every song in your library separately but I'd like the option. Maybe Apple will purchase and incorporate it into iTunes the way they did with CoverFlow (wishful thinking?).

I thought that would be hands down the most amazing technology I'd encounter that week until I read this on Pink Tentacle via BoingBoing:

"Scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs. Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity."

The scientists claimed that with advances in this technology we would be able to see a person's thoughts, dreams, or hallucinations but I find that difficult to believe, at least using this process. It's my understanding that the computer is only able to sort out what your mind is emitting because it has a clear example, a constant, to check it against. While I assume your mind emits the same signals for thought, without this constant it won't be able to identify the variable. And as far as dreams and hallucinations are concerned, do we really see them? And is this machine picking up the raw data entering our mind from the eyes or the data that our mind has finished processing and recognizing? And at what point do dreams and hallucinations occur? Is that monster in the corner added by the paranoid brain before or after the image is processed in your mind? I think we're safe for now.

It's not really surprising that both of these are coming out of Japan, the same people who are actively on their way towards building a space elevator...

Robot Lunch Break

Oh, You Got a new iPhone?

Whatever, I got a fucking alethiometer!

(If you can't afford the plastic version you can download the electronic version here.)

Pump Up The Volume

I just spent way too much money that I don't have so I can do things like this:



And what better song to start with than "The Scenario," [right click to download] the bootleg-only Beastie Boys song briefly featured in the bedroom-based pirate radio station movie Pump Up the Volume:

Coming Soon in 2016

I woke up this morning (an hour late) pissed off because I dreamt that I had bought a t-shirt capable of displaying animated patterns only to wake up without it. I was especially angry because it is clearly inevitable that these will one day be in production but I can't think of a technology more far off that I want so badly (except maybe a Star Trek-esque food replicator which could then be tweaked so that you could illegally download meals). Basically what I want is this:



But I don't want to have to settle for this or this.