If you're in the mood for sounds generated from the heavenly bodies, then look no further than the simple pleasures of Solarbeat. I'm digging the inclusion of Ceres and Pluto, the largest of the dwarf planets.
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- A Pressing Issue
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Elsewhere
- Twenty years fore and aft
Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people. - The movie set that ate itself
One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I’d stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss. - A critique on the critical
Critical design cannot predict the future. Our ideas of the future are often less radical than the reality. Design however, can invent worlds giving us freedoms to explore various branches of reality. Speculative design is a dreamlike exercise – manufacturing alternate worlds, ones which feel every bit as real as the “real world” we inhabit day-to-day (whatever that is!). It cannot predict the future, but it can shape the present. - How algorithms shape our world
And that’s the thing, is that we’re writing things, we’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. And we’re starting to make our way. There’s a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don’t know what, and they reach in to all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. - Inside the mind of an octopus
Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin. - Innovation Starvation
SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others. Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it. - The Elusive Big Idea
And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. - Thinking in Tumblr
Which is why I recently found myself discussing with a designer why I thought his industrial design client should not publish a commemorative book, but should start a commemorative Tumblr. (I couldn’t believe it when those words came out of my mouth.) Considering this history project, my mind reassembled its pieces as a blog, asynchronic, motley, sketchy. Rough rather than smooth. An archive of affinities rather than a resolved history. There’s a reason so many archives are using it. On a Tumblr, every kind of memory could be collected and streamed, linked, as so many of the “f*** yeah” genre are, by a single word. - Network Realism
So, if Gibson was originally writing “on top of Firefox”, he’s now writing on top of Twitter. The stream contains references, mixed up, to Prada shoes and Idoru dancers. All links. All references, premade scenes waiting to be pulled into the flow of fiction. When the Festo drones appear in the text, they appear in the same location, same architecture as in those product videos. The network’s readymades. Gibson’s been talking a lot lately about atemporality, this idea that we live in a sort of endless digital now. In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.) ... it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are. - Is 2011 a year that will change the world?
For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year’s most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. “One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it,” he says. “In one sense, it’s a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you’ve lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you’re a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It’s probably sitting in a square, in a tent.” John Harris
The Gentleman's Library
- Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map
A street, a city, an epidemic and the hidden power of urban networks
Traversing through four different modes of experience the book centres around a cholera outbreak of 1854. Acting as the unifier, the map provides a visual thesis to the long zoom approach taken with both the story and the solutions needed to understand not only the disease, but germs in general. - Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody
The power of organizing without organizations
As the printing press and radio had profound changes by amplifying the flow of one way communication, the internet is now having even deeper changes in the amplification of group communication. The impact that new modes of communication will create won't be properly felt until the technology ceases to be exciting and becomes banal and invisible. - Thomas De Zengotita: Mediated
How the Media Shape Your World
A sophisticated and highly inventive look at the affects of the saturation post-modernity has had on our daily lives, and possibly the last great book to do so. Immersed in options and unable to discern the authentic from representations, we're helplessly self conscious and unable to prevent ourselves from treating our lives as performance. Thankfully the book is loaded with satire and irony to help navigate the self-referentially loaded book. - John Man: Alpha Beta
How our alphabet shaped the western world
Tracks the history of the latin alphabet as it trickles down through history. At each transitory phase the alphabet is given new meaning and power, and in turn provides the culture with a new set of tools to define themselves with. The strength of the alphabet lies in it's simplicity and it's ability to adapt to new circumstances and environments. - Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You
How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter
While many show open contempt for the perceived dumbing down of culture by mindless entertainment, the book argues the opposite. Instead of looking at the content, the book looks at the increasing complexity and thinking needed to participate with today's video games, movies and tv shows. Our brains are happiest when searching for increased intricacy, adding to the feedback loop making our amusements much more interesting. - Steven Johnson: Emergence
The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software
The metaphor for the world has previously been viewed through the prism of the tree, mechanical clockwork and the atom. Now the humble slime mould with it's bottom up organisation will prove a fitting image for how we see the world in coming decades. As simple rules can account for breathtaking complexity that can be viewed across diverse disciplines, this book acts as a massive precursor to his theory of the long zoom.
- Daniel Harris: Cute Quaint, Hungry and Romantic
The Aesthetics of Consumerism
A fairly thorough critique at not just the visual aesthetics of consumerism but the hidden nuance of scent, tactility, sound and many other details usually lacking from books of this kind. While limited to the low brow the book is scathingly sardonic across all fronts, not just those covered in the title.
- John Henry Clippinger: A Crowd of One
The future of individual identity
Acknowledging the progress brought on by the Enlightenment, the author contends that its overbearing legacy of the Individual needs reconsidering. Looking at evolutionary biology,
game theory, self organising social networks and neuroscience, he makes a considered case for the need for a new type of commons; one that takes into account our ability and need for social emotions and interdependence.
More of his work can be found here.
- James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds
Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations
While a bit of a love in for free markets, the book successfully manages to argue the assumption made in the subtitle. Looking at wide ranging anecdotes, he breaks up crowd wisdom into three distinct advantages – cognition, coordination and cooperation. Coupled with the four fundamentals needed for an intelligent crowd – diversity, independence, decentralisation and aggregation –
the central thesis seems more prescient as time goes on.
- Robert Kinross: Unjustified Texts
perspectives on typography
Fairly heavy reading. The author deals with the ubiquitous yet hardly recognized or understood aspects of typography. More a series of readings and essays than a cohesive book; topics range from newspapers, paperbacks and road signs, while dealing with the notion of what constitutes a typeface. - Mark Buchanan: The Social Atom
Why the rich get richer, cheats get caught and your neighbor usually looks like you
Following the premise that it's the patterns, not people that dictate group behaviour. As physicists are able to anticipate patterns that emerge when looking at atoms, social trends can be viewed in the same way. While other books look at the connections between groups, this is a refreshingly scientific look at the forces and movements of human action.
As expected the author has set up a blog to further the ideas in the book.
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