Tag: technology

Saw a great slide recently, “Privilege: The human version of “works on my machine”.”


Learning by Sarawut Intarob on 500px.com
Learning, by Sarawut Intarob

The American elections continue, with reactionaries on the left and right, worse on the right. Everyone has fallen on the right, except for Trump, who runs on a campaign of divisiveness and scapegoating. The educated, the ones with options, don’t seem to understand why he’s still around, still a force. The language he uses in “debates” consistently register at the fourth grade level, the “solutions” he offers are the equivalent of trying to fix a broken garburator by hitting it with a hammer. How can this man, who seems like a parody of himself, like a satirical rendition of a concept too awful to look straight in the face, be relevant? But that seems the crux of it; options. It’s easy, when you have them, to be blind to the desperation of those who don’t.

You can convince yourself anything is fine if you don’t think you have any other options.

And America’s narrative of money and power? It’s fading, and failing, and sad. Even the tech bubble seems to be slowly deflating. Meanwhile, headlines are painting a larger, bleaker picture. “World’s carbon dioxide concentration teetering on the point of no return; future in which global concentration of CO2 is permanently above 400 parts per million looms.”

Yet this is the same world in which Google’s AI is writing post-modern poetry, there is less crime than ever known, and extraordinary art is being created everywhere people go. The world which provided the above photo, which I find tirelessly inspiring. It displays a glimpse of the world I want, a mix of contrasts, varied and rich in experience, with education and tools for all and everyone, no matter their circumstances. Education, tools, and options.

So, wild ones, when you try to talk with those who hold opposing viewpoints, especially those who accept the scapegoat as truth, maybe point them over here: It’s Okay To Be Gray, by GlitchedPuppet and Siderea’s three part explanation and take-down of what’s going on with Trump’s campaign, which I consider essential and file unequivocally under REQUIRED READING – The Two Moral Modes: Part One, The Two Moral Modes: Part Two, The Two Moral Modes: Part Three.

Cirque du Soleil’s dance of drones and a road-trip proposal


SPARKED: A Live Interaction Between Humans and Quadcopters

Bonus: Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich, and Verity Studios also posted a behind the scenes video that goes into the progeneration of the film.

-::-

Kurios, the newest Cirque show is going to be playing the west coast this winter. In my quest to see EVERY Cirque show, I have seen an unlikely number of Cirque productions – five or six tent shows (in Vancouver, Seattle, and Montreal), and four of the eight shows permanently installed in Vegas – and Kurios is easily one of my very favourites, right up there with “O”. (I saw it in Montreal during it’s opening run while I was there for ReCon.) It’s a clockwork time-travel, turn-of-the-century bit of deliciousness, dipped in retrofuturistic science fiction and with an undeniable City of the Lost Children vibe. Very brass, electricity, and polished wood, but bright and colourful and sweet.

It’s playing Seattle from January 29th, 2015, to February 22nd and I would very much like to go with as many of you beautiful people as possible. (Unlike the majority of my road-trips, this is being proposed far in advance.) So, with that in mind, who would like to come with me? Let’s plan!

“Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace?”

I’ve signed up to try an experimental VR rig at the SFU Surrey iSpace Lab as part of a study investigating spatial perception in virtual environments. How cool is that? It comes with a motion sickness warning, so I’m pretty stoked, even though the machine they strap you into looks clunky as only old/new technology can. My appointment is today at 4 pm.

Locals can sign up to be a participant at this Reddit thread, though this week is booking fast. The entire study apparently takes just under 90 minutes. Compensation is $15. The only caveats are you that have to be 19 or older and that the head-mounted display doesn’t work well with glasses, so you either need normal vision or contact lenses.

Welcome to CanSec. I love it here.

  • Globe&Mail: LulzSec hackers reportedly brought down by own leader.

    Woke up in a massive hotel bed in the sky, fluffy and white and perfect, after an evening of late night hot-tubbing and room service, with a cell phone next to me connected to London. On the table in the main room is a small black robot that walks and dances, next to a package of Dita Von Teese brand bottled Perrier brought in from Paris. The laptop’s spring loaded keys light up blue and it runs facial recognition password software which loads quickly but doesn’t like the lighting.

    Today is the booze run, checking and fixing the stickers, booking the arcade machines, planning for the Whistler cabins, setting up the staff room, and programming our phones to talk to the white plastic surveillance bunny, so we can instruct it to say ridiculous things. (We’re all addicted to the creepy bunny. It watches you masturbate). Tomorrow the conference starts all proper like and then the real fun begins.

    • the realized dangers of only having one archive

    I was going to be sending postcards on Saturday to everyone I met at the conference, to be friendly, for fun, the better to keep in touch, but I have been neglecting those plans and nearly everything else this past weekend, (the hundred other things that I wanted to get done before being sucked into CanSec), caught up instead by a personal catastrophe – the partial erasure of my only photography archive.

    The quick and dirty background: Everything has been on one drive. Because I am financially strapped, I’ve never been able to afford a back-up. Tony, in his wisdom, was kind enough to give me a 2 terabyte drive as a holiday present, destined to become the new archive when my 1 terabyte drive filled up, which happened this past week.

    The quick and dirty events: I let a programmer friend help set up the transfer of my archive of over 110,000 files from the 1 terabyte to the new 2 terabyte. There was an error, so instead of merely copying what was left to copy, it cross-referenced the drives and deleted a great swath of files before I could shut it off.

    The quick and dirty result: I’ve spent the majority of the past two days on data recovery, staying up late, getting up early, trying different programs. I believe that I have recovered as many of the files as I will ever get back, approximately 50% of what was erased. It is difficult to tell what is gone, but so far it seems I have lost my childhood photos, an entire wedding, a massive block of personal pictures from 2007, 2008, and 2009, three days of 2011, seven folders of client work, and every video I’ve taken in the past five years. I expect to discover more gaps as time goes on, but the damage seems negligible compared to what it could have been.

    Everyone who knows about the tragedy has assumed that I would be livid or heart-broken or a mix of the two, but instead the loss seems to have struck a far deeper, nihilistic chord, more appropriate for death, thickly flavoured with the acceptance and understanding that at the heart of things, we are all, every one of us, completely doomed, so why care? Odd, maybe, but I believe it speaks well of me, that I am depression-immune to this disaster, still carrying the seed of happiness that was planted at the conference, the new, uncorrupted self that refuses to be cursed.

    invisible lights

    Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo.

    A four meter high rod studded with 80 LEDs was used to create light-paintings that present a long-exposure, line-graph cross section of the strength of the various wifi networks available in downtown Oslo. The invisible made visible, but not quite. Fascinating stuff. More on the process, as well as past projects, here and here. Also: the resultant photo-set.

    Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.

    The First Decade of the Future is Behind Us:

    “Imagine it’s 1995: almost no one but Gordon Gekko and Zack Morris have cellphones, pagers are the norm; dial-up modems screech and scream to connect you an internet without Google, Facebook, or YouTube; Dolly has not yet been cloned; the first Playstation is the cutting edge in gaming technology; the Human Genome Project is creeping along; Mir is still in space; MTV still plays music; Forrest Gump wins an academy award and Pixar releases their first feature film, Toy Story. Now take that mindset and pretend you’re reading the first page of a new sci-fi novel:

    The year is 2010. America has been at war for the first decade of the 21st century and is recovering from the largest recession since the Great Depression. Air travel security uses full-body X-rays to detect weapons and bombs. The president, who is African-American, uses a wireless phone, which he keeps in his pocket, to communicate with his aides and cabinet members from anywhere in the world. This smart phone, called a “Blackberry,” allows him to access the world wide web at high speed, take pictures, and send emails.

    It’s just after Christmas. The average family’s wish-list includes smart phones like the president’s “Blackberry” as well as other items like touch-screen tablet computers, robotic vacuums, and 3-D televisions. Video games can be controlled with nothing but gestures, voice commands and body movement. In the news, a rogue Australian cyberterrorist is wanted by world’s largest governments and corporations for leaking secret information over the world wide web; spaceflight has been privatized by two major companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX; and Time Magazine’s person of the year (and subject of an Oscar-worthy feature film) created a network, “Facebook,” which allows everyone (500 million people) to share their lives online.”

    showing the rest of the projecter art-nerds how elegantly it can be done

    The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

    A stunning video-mapping show projected on Prague’s already mind-bendingly beautiful medieval Astronomical Clock to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the clock’s construction. (4 months of work, 5000×1200 resolution, 2x Christie 18K HD projectors.)

    nicola tesla as david bowie as nokia

    Nokia developing phone that recharges itself without mains electricity

    A new prototype charging system from the company is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves – the weak TV, radio and mobile phone signals that permanently surround us. The power harvested is small but it is almost enough to power a mobile in standby mode indefinitely without ever needing to plug it into the mains, according to Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, UK.

    The difference with Nokia’s prototype is that instead of harvesting tiny amounts of power (a few microwatts) from dedicated transmitters, Nokia claims it is able to scavenge relatively large amounts of power — around a thousand times as much — from signals coming from miles away. Individually the energy available in each of these signals is miniscule. But by harvesting radiowaves across a wide range of frequencies it all adds up, said Rouvala.

    The trick here is to ensure that these circuits use less power than is being received, said Rouvala. So far they have been able to harvest up to 5 milliwatts. Their short-term goal is to get in excess of 20 milliwatts, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely without having to recharge it. But this would not be enough to actually use the phone to make or receive a call, he says. So ultimately the hope is to be able to get as much as 50 milliwatts which would be sufficient to slowly recharge the battery.