:Archive Of June 2003:
Friday, June 27, 2003 - 2:59 PM -
Smart Gallery. Click the pic to go forward. (Oh how I wish more people would do that.) Thank you, Frank. I needed that detour.
Thursday, June 26, 2003 - 9:23 AM -
"Score 5, Grin Factor." Not your average /. submission. Thank you, Peter Wayner.
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 10:04 PM -
"Oxford City Council tried to get rid of the shark on the grounds that it was dangerous to the public, but engineers inspected the roof girders that had been specially installed to support it and pronounced the erection safe." The Oxford Shark.
Monday, June 23, 2003 - 12:19 AM -
Um, wow. A seventy foot slinky. Vids, audio, links... I've got to go back and look at this later. </bisy backson>
Saturday, June 21, 2003 - 4:10 PM -
- A couple of really wonderful shots of the Berkeley Gammasphere [1,2]
- So many neat things at the The Art Of Motion Control that I can't begin to point at them individually.
- Pocketbike.com, filling in as one of those things that you just know must be on the net if you'd only cross your eyes long enough to imagine it.
- A rather large shot that makes me consider having a wallpaper collection after all.
- Scrap Metal XIX, from the gallery of Anna Held Audette.
- Three, from the gallery of Charles Perry.
- Aluminum from Metallography.com.
- Just a little something that makes me want to leave the planet right now.
- "Though recent in its inception, the studio boasts a vast collection of retro and vintage equipment that rivals the register of most collectors and nearly every vintage studio in the world. Its 1972 recording console, for example, was bought directly from the BBC in the UK, and has been used by ITV and many legendary sound pioneers for over 3 decades." Delta Lab.
- Yes, so it costs more than the microlight it is simulating, but darn that's neat, and a great reason to go to the office on Sunday to borrow all the equipment. (large, like 300k large, image.)
- A 1938 toy ignition engine. Lookit the cute little magneto. From the History Timeline of O.S. Engines.
- And speaking of architectural models and floorplans, these would suit me just fine.
Thursday, June 19, 2003 - 2:59 AM -
Science sows the seeds of its own destruction. fOOls!
Friday, June 13, 2003 - 3:34 AM -
"The clip guy. Like the crazy cat lady, but different."
Go with it, Byron. You could do worse than ending up remembered like the pink flamingo guy.
...now there's a saying that would be good on motivational toilet paper.
While we're considering the unlikely but too likely, how about a laser printer in every public and retail stall spamming us with further commercial offers in our brief personal moment? Akin to the advertising on buses and benches; part of the relentless uprooting of public view by private space. Surfaces, like television and the web, are a medium, and one that definitely carries its own message.
Monday, June 9, 2003 - 4:45 PM -
Exertion Interfaces. Yes! I love wall screens and sweaty interactive games. (Um, no, but yes that too.)
- 1:59 PM -
Composed for performance by Bach's Collegium at Zimmerman's Coffee House, Leipzig, between 1732 & 1734.
Sunday, June 8, 2003 - 3:45 PM -
So there was this sci-fi short on an intelligent building acting as self controlled, patrolled, maintaining (not just measuring wear and scheduling repairs but hiring contractors and rating them on past performance with itself and other buildings), as well as handling tenant and visitor needs, and in emergency directing the occupants and emergency personnel to the safest routes within it. Essentially far enough along that the best way to do things for that complexity was to have the building programmed with learning and ad-libbing algorithms supporting simple goals defining a 'will'. The plot portion being that there's a bad fire and it looks suspiciously like some of the building's directions to firecrew sacrificed people over critical structural damage. But that's uncertain, and is complicated by the building's top-dollar reasoning power that had been supplied to handle contracts and legal challenges as efficiently as it sheds rain. A nice touch is there was no protagonist doing a startrek-airshaft battle with the building. The viewpoint is unsettled observer mode, which is far more realistic than the wretched american cowboy hangover that permeates so much that there's a popular anti-hero genre.
Anyway, I remembered it after catching this /. headline. I'll trust intelligent buildings will be just as honest as the companies trying this stunt. No, thank you.
But back to the forward lobe, why don't we get on with really codifying the law structure so legislators quit introducing shit that conflicts with preceding laws? You know, just run it through the sim to see if it'll fly to reduce the horrendous amount of legislation that gets thrown out by the courts. (Or doesn't, when the victims are sufficiently unaware, disorganized, or poor.) I'd rather see that in place and the bugs sorted out well before we consider entering the I-can-see-you! government & business lockdown that we're currently enabling.
Mind you, I'm sitting in a culture that emphasizes an education in patriotism over critical reasoning, so this thought gets added directly to the snowball pile in hell. But I do wonder if it might be a next stage for the OSS movement. Go a step beyond applications, and digitizing like the Gutenberg Project, and into forming architectures and sorting tools for our critical cultural mores as was begun with Hammurabi's Code. Get on with Engelbart's project of making Tools To Think With so we can deal with the problems that have had too much information to solve.
Saturday, June 7, 2003 - 3:03 PM -
BBC: End of the road for the Beetle. Wow. Everybody had one. Ads, book, and monument. It rocked out.
Owen Briggs ©2000, 2006
