October 2010
110 posts
New visual programming language for information... →
With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial…
Hiroshi Sugimoto →
» Bootstrapping a Type System →
HTTP cookies, or how not to design protocols →
For as long as I remember, HTTP cookies have been vilified as a grave threat to the privacy of online browsing; wrongly so. That said, the mechanism itself is a very interesting cautionary tale for…
Interview with Benoît Mandelbrot by Hans Ulrich... →
MANDELBROT: The use of images in mathematics certainly stands completely against the ideology of the 1960s and ’70s, when the sciences were sharply classified according to whether images are or are…
News Flash: Economists Agree →
I believe it is better to introduce students to economics with topics about which there is more of a professional consensus. In chapter two of the book, I include a table of propositions to which…
China’s Growth in Clean Energy Matches Ambition →
China is emerging from the global recession even more dominant in clean energy and with greater ambitions to be the world’s leader in this sector than previously thought, a new report from the…
Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish →
I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.
The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability →
The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability: The RCA’s Approach, by Clare Brass and Octavia Reeve
Printable Robots →
Wiki Home - Make Your Bot! →
Make Your Bot is the home of the under $100 Mantis 3-axis CNC milling machine. The Mantis machines are part of the MIT Machines that Make project. This wiki provides all of the design files and…
Starship Stormtroopers →
Starship Stormtroopers by Micheal Moorcock
Iceland - Michael Schlegel →
Information Warfare - Part 1 →
Consider however the effects of connecting a Tazer into a wall socket LAN port, using a home built RJ-45 or BNC attachment. Fifty kiloVolts will punch through every isolation transformer on the…
Real-time heatmap example with Javascript →
The following demo generates a real-time heatmap with javascript and the HTMLCanvas element depending on the user s mouse movement. The heatmap is applied to the picture on the left.
Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the... →
'Aliens have taken the place of angels' →
Before the term “science fiction” appeared, in America in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such as HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds were…
Robot Invasion Welcomed in Japan →
TOKYO — Could it be that the Japanese view of robots as friendly helpers — and not as the rebellious, violent machines that populate much of Western science fiction — is rooted in the Shinto…
mattermedia →
Research material and annotations: history and theory of art and media
Slavoj Žižek · Can you give my son a job? →
What we have in China isn’t simply a combination of a private capitalist economy and Communist political power. In one way or another, state and Party own the majority of China’s companies,…
Programming crowds →
Both papers describe software that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to farm tasks out to human beings sitting at Internet-connected computers. The best-paper prize went to VizWiz, a cell-phone…
Harold McGee's 'Keys To Good Cooking' For Chefs →
His latest book, the Keys to Good Cooking, is a how-to guide for home chefs in which McGee, a food science expert, explains techniques for kicking recipes up a few notches. McGee details why people…
The robot that reads your mind to train itself →
The Corporate Intelligence Community →
The Goat Rodeo Complex/Difficult situation scale →
Please feel free to use the Goat Rodeo scale (“This is a 4th Degree Goat Rodeo problem”) when thinking about the scope and difficulty of problem areas. Note how many of the things we are struggling…
Chris Berens "Leeuwenhart" →
The Utopia Experiment →
“We live in strange times, caught between two opposing views of the future. On the one hand, the believers in technology and progress promise a world of ever increasing prosperity, a science-fiction…
Making things hard to read 'can boost learning' →
Difficult-to-read fonts make for better learning, according to scientists. The finding is about to be published in the international journal Cognition.
Brothers Quay Shoot a Film at the Mütter Museum →
THROUGH eyes as blank as a tilapia’s Stephen and Timothy Quay contemplate a world that is curious, doubtful, beastly and deranged. These identical twins, 63, have chronicled their world in more than…
The Zero G Coffee Cup →
Astronaut Don Pettit invents a zero gravity cup to drink coffee, and anything else, in weightlessness.
Credit: NASA
All About Polymorphics →
Simon Ramo’s concept of “polymorphic” computing is laid out in stop-motion animation, accompanied by acoustic guitar. The film anticipates parallel, distributed processing and the architecture of…
The 64-degree poached eggs →
Eggs cooked with an immersion circulator are not, strictly speaking, cooked sous vide, since they aren’t vacuum sealed. But they are an excellent candidate for the long-time/low-temperature approach…
Eggs Benedict Project - Kayahara →
1975: And the Changes To Come →
1975: And the Changes To Come
Benoit Mandelbrot the Maverick, 1924-2010 →
The world is mourning the loss of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who may have established a record by earning tenure at Yale in 1999, 75 years after his birth. (There’s an excellent older…
Methods - Usability Body of Knowledge →
Practitioners in usability and user-centered design (UCD) employ a wide range of methods for gathering information about users and their tasks, analyzing needs, creating design solutions, iterating…
Affinity Diagramming →
Affinity diagramming is a participatory method where concepts written on cards are sorted into related groups and sub-groups. The original intent of affinity diagramming was to help diagnose…
Why Rebel Groups Love the Toyota Hilux →
Why rebels and insurgent groups the world over love the Toyota Hilux pickup as much as their AK-47s.
