A 16-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU) in Minecraft
That is to say, a working computer built inside a video game. (via techdirt via @onesmallfire)
Let’s Kill Interruptive Ads
Here’s what I believe: It doesn’t matter how much money interruptive ads make for publications on the Web. They sap the readers’ tolerance and good will, and any unnecessary amount of that is too high a price to pay. (Videos? Okay, we’re used to that on TV. But serious text-based pubs like Salon and Freeman should chill.)
Here’s what I believe: the biggest challenge the web (and media in general) will have to face over the next ten years is the gradual realization that advertisements aren’t anywhere close to being as useful or effective as we thought they were.
Media Cyborgs
A must read for media junkies:
It’s not just people with, you know, gun-legs; it’s anybody who uses a cell phone or wears contact lenses. It’s anybody who brings a tool really close in order to augment some capability.
Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? Aren’t there people who manipulate it, in all its forms, as naturally as another person might make a phone call, or speak, or breathe?
When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.
To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.
Matthew Taylor’s 21st century enlightenment
Recalling my distaste with The Empathic Civilization, Taylor’s observations feel more palatable, even if the latent utopianism in humanism gives me the willies.
Kodak 1922 Kodachrome Film Test
Striking.
Quote out of context — and some damned good advice.
You won’t pant in the roadside thistles wondering if you’ll ever be able to forget this, won’t vomit your own bile into a heavily ripped faux-leather passenger seat, or feel an indescribable chill when you turn the world over to find a name tag reading “Dale.” You’ll just be fucked.
My fellow graduates, don’t be fucked. Stand up, take a deep breath, and strangle the ham thick breath out of whatever hillbilly is holding you down.
-Ronya
philosophical smelling salts
An old college friend has a few choice remarks about Herzog’s view of nature:
Herzog presents, in extreme form, the sorts of objection we must directly confront and answer if we are to break out of the rut of our current unconsidered, untethered and often contradictory assumptions [of nature]. Our minds are clouded on these matters. We need to wake up from our stupor, and Herzog provides the needed philosophical smelling salts. His comments serve as an opening question to which modern society assumes the answer. Upon reflection, however, we will find hidden contradiction and muddled confusion at every turn as we unpack that answer. And this is exactly why we are in desperate need of taking just this sort of radical objection to modern presuppositions seriously if we are to begin to jump start real dialectic about the universe and and our relation to it (i.e., philosophy properly understood). We need to be shown our desperate need by having someone peal back the layers of accepted ideas and question the unquestioned cultural assumptions about nature to which we have grown accustomed.
from the comments
I had a discussion with my dentist and we came to an understanding that I will have my gold tooth and for no additional charge.
We are VERY pleased!
Cluster Bomb: Rick Neece
I first learned I had no clue what the world was about in nursery school at the age of four or five. (I was shamed for spending too much time on the toilet. Not that that was all it was about.) I became socially repressed and a near complete introvert until I was 17 years old when my family moved to Arkansas–the birthplace of my folks.
When I started High School, in 1969, three years before the move, I was five-foot tall and weighed 160 pounds. I was a round boy and a big sissy. These two things brought me a notoriety I did not care for. Consequently, I sought every opportunity to ‘step away’ from those around me by burying my nose in a book and hiding in a corner or behind a chair.
Read more
Father’s Day
Another perspective? From the archives of elimae.
For the record, I mulled a long time, whether to pull out this old saw today. Still, as with Josh, certain days remind me of things. Some days call strongly such reminders. For those of you who have seen this before, please forgive my indulgence in calling it up again.
Internet dating, 2
Introduction by a 24-year-old male, [REDACTED], located in a city known for deep tans and enhanced body parts:
You see this profile? This is THE most impressive profile I’ve ever seen — it’s mine. I’ve carefully constructed my profile along psychological principles to weed out women whom most men don’t want, and the result has been that I’ve been meeting some really incredible women who are genuinely attractive, intelligent, confident, and playful. Now, rather than refer to 30 years’ worth of research found in academic journals on social psychology and behavior modification, I’ll just sit here all smug and shit and point out that if you read my profile and don’t message or reply to [REDACTED], it’s because you’re some combination of train wreck, stupid, insecure, and boring. True story.
R. Kelly and the “Little Man” Defense: There’s no crying in sex tapes.
With due propers to Dominick Dunne for his high-profile trial coverage over the years (including my favorite — the piece on the Phil Specter debacle), this too is some seriously and deliciously good shit. I am willing to go out on a limb here and postulate that reading about the trial was perhaps far more entertaining than actually attending it would have been.
Read every last entry. There are two sections; one here and the other here.
Frustrated with her declining musical career (and perhaps resentful of Kelly’s astoundingly successful one), Sparkle hatched a scheme to extort her rich ex-mentor and to turn the words of her hit song “Be Careful” into reality. (“You better be careful what you do to me,” she sang, ” ’cause somebody might do it to you.”) While Kelly was out making beats one night, she enlisted a pair of underemployed porn actors to bust into the singer’s log cabin and film themselves having sex, peeing, etc. Meanwhile, Sparkle and Hankerson harvested outtakes from Kelly’s copious back catalog of music videos, then took advantage of the thriving black market in Little Man-quality digital-effects wizardry to Frankenstein together Kelly’s face and the urinator’s body. (Sparkle’s motive for putting her niece in the video is less clear. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that she was mad at her for, say, borrowing her glitter without permission.) After Kelly refused to pay to keep the video under wraps, Sparkle sent the video to the Chicago Sun-Times, willing to make her niece collateral damage to disgrace the man who’d done her wrong.
The defense rests.
-Ronya
The politics of oil spills and mass transit
Image by Pro-Zak via Flickr
Intended outcomes aside, is this cynical?
“Now I can’t promise folks that the oil will be cleaned up overnight,” Mr. Obama said. “It will not be.” More businesses will be hurt and people will be angry. “But I promise you this, that things are going to return to normal.”
I do understand the context: the president was speaking to people who have lost jobs and paychecks, whose livelihoods are insecure, and whose futures are uncertain. We can only hope that their lives will return to normal as soon as possible.
But these are times, in policy terms, when things should not return to normal. Yet, I am worried that they will.
Pride ’87 LA
“Two-four-six-eight. You can’t even get a date.”
What did J.D. Salinger, Orson Welles, and Charlie Chaplin have in common?
Why, it’s Oona O’Neill:
Greatest ad ever?
And yet the joy is entirely in the small details. Rooney’s ginger nest of a beard. Or his tuxedoed ping-pong interlude in a wood-paneled rec room. English fans will instantly recognize that the billboard hanging above Rooney’s squalid trailer, cruelly taunting him (it’s a photo of French star Franck Ribery, with the Tricolour flag painted on his naked chest and arms) is a clever parody of an actual, well-known Rooney billboard in which the Brit posed with the St. George cross splashed across his pecs. Even non-soccer fans, who may not catch all the references, will deduce that loving care was poured into each frame of these 180 seconds.
Remembery…
from our weekly manager’s lunch at Lew’s. The system was playing 80′s music, a song came on that made us stop talking. I started head-bopping. Kristopher started head-bopping, too. Matt asked, “Who is this?”
Me: “The Thompson Twins?”
Someone: “Oh, Matt, that was before you were born.”
Someoneelse: “No, it’s not the Thompson Twins, who is it?”
Me: “I used to dance my ass off to this song.”
Me: “I one time had on my long, Christian Dior, camel-hair coat, checked out of coat-check, leaving near closing time. This song came on. I ran out on the dance floor to dance my ass of to it. By myself.” (In memory, the skirt of my coat flared. I looked like a whirling dervish.
We had to ask the waitress. “Oh, it’s The Human League,” she said.
Some of us: “OH! The Human League!” (with nodding around the table).
Matt: “Who?”
Matt: “Who?”
Tetro
Personal opinion: It could have been edited a bit more. I was bored in moments.
Your assistance is requested
At my first real office job, one morning our publicist walked around the office saying to each person, “Today’s my birthday! Give me a hug!” Ours was an uncommonly touchy-feely office to begin with (or, put another way, a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen), in which, for example, one of the department heads would routinely demand backrubs, and people would give them to her, but I nevertheless thought this was a remarkable—and smart—way to approach the having of one’s birthday. Leave it to a publicist to think of such a method.
So, here I am.
Today’s my birthday! Give me a hug!
One-sentence eulogy for ‘Law & Order’
I’ll even miss that revolving door of near-indistinguishable smart chicks in tight skirts, the A.D.A.’s who inspired the Saturday Night Live joke about Jack McCoy as a “kindly old grandfather who teaches cynicism to a series of supermodels.”
Something I’ve Started
Look into my eyes
And feed me a cracker:
Professor Jin Zhang of the University of Western Ontario has developed contact lenses which could help monitor diabetes by changing color with the user’s glucose level variations. The users will be alerted to dangerous sugar levels with a change in lens color, without needing to undergo regular blood tests. The hydrogel lenses are embedded with nanoparticles which change color by reacting with the glucose in wearer’s tears.
dynamo
Independent filmmakers will soon have a new option for renting their films to viewers online: Dynamo, a start-up set to be announced at South by Southwest on Saturday evening, which will allow video producers to set their own prices and embed their videos wherever they want.
We Have A Lucy, Don’t We?
(via)
Largely why I was hated in high school
Phil once asked somthing like “is there a photo of yourself you wouldn’t show someone?” This would be it, if I were showing it. The dude on the left was my neighbor to the north of our house in the background. We shared a driveway.
