Apologies for the quality of the picture. There was a good 300 feet between me and my sister at that moment. But this is Lindsy Lawrence, PhD and I'm proud to call her my sister.
Oh, and she's way smarter than me.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Pretty Happenin' Degree
Try Staking Awake for Three Years
Three-Year-Old Boy has Never Slept, Parents Maintain 24-Hour Vigil - Mark Frauenfelder @ BoingBoing
Not to belittle the plight of this boy, but I find the idea that this boy has never slept too far-fetched. If true, serious neurological problems should plague the boy: hallucinations, lack of internal body rhythm, trouble with focus, trouble understanding things, and a litany of other ailments that come from prolonged lack of sleep. I just find the story lacking credibility based on what little information given in both Frauenfelder's post and in the original news story.
Unity '08
Can I just say that I'm pretty damn tired of all the posts on an Obama/Clinton unity ticket? It's just stupid pandering to Clinton supports. Sen. Obama, once he does secure the nomination, should pick who he believes is the best running-mate, not the bloggers and pols out of DC. At least there are a few like George Will who believe Sen. Clinton should pack it up and go home already.
Standing In Love
Fromm on standing in love - Mark Vernon @ Philosophy & Life Blog
This is, quite possibly, the best expression of lasting love that I've seen written. I've always worried about the idea of falling in love because it entails the possibility that such love won't last. As Vernon remarks, this kind of love is a battle against loneliness for one's own ego. Falling in love is as much real love as it is being in love with idea of love. He contrasts this with the idea of standing in love--the point at which love becomes and open love, a love that welcomes everyone in because the issue of faithfulness is never in question. I've experienced this kind of love from some friends of mine who open their house with welcoming arms and let their love shine on you as well. There's no fear of loneliness but only the desire to let their love exist as almost a physical æther.
I do fear falling in love on the basis of the potentiality for my loneliness to return. I don't like loving the idea of being in love since it partially negates the other person, the person you are supposed to show the entirety of your love to. But I still have to risk it if I ever want to arrive at the point of standing in love. It's a sublime love and like anything sublime there's a mix of beauty and horror. Still, I leave myself open to that risk since their's no other path to standing in love.
Friday, May 09, 2008
New Model Army in Camp
One of the things I love about the developmental direction the Internet has taken is the DIY ethos that drives a lot of the innovation. I've written on this before and how disruptive this DIY ethos is. Take a few ideas, some knowledge of coding and suddenly you have a website drawing tens of thousands of people. Of course, for every success story there are hundreds of failures, whether of deployment, content or simple timing. Along with that is the ever-important "who you know" factor that can make or break a struggling site. A post on a few well chosen blogs will go miles to making your site the new 'it' site. My own blog struggles with such need for attention, but the attention, however minimal, is still there.
What the "who you know" factor also means though is that sometimes you end up with a clique of sites that trade links back and forth but rarely branch out on new sites. It's both the advantage and bane of web hubs. Yet, I don't begrudge the nature of web hubs and superhubs. Outlier sites, if they stick around long enough, always increase their chances of finding a few links to the major hubs. It's an instance where persistance pays off. While I keep this blog to help with my own sanity as an outlet for my nonsense, I still look forward to the day that this blog becomes something more than a vanity project.
Captain Nemo
Not quite sure why I'm doing this--for certain this girl annoys the fuck out of me--but, well, here you go. Porn on a Friday night.
Open Container Laws
Man, if only my parents had given me booze instead of crack when I was that young.
The Paintings are Waiting
Artists Drzach and Suchy have come up with a new art instillation that involves paintings that change under different lighting conditions. While this is a relatively easy feat using different colors as the U.S. military does to test for color blindness, it does go beyond the mere scratch-and-sniff variety of color-changing art. First, the change in image relies on changes in natural lighting. Second, the paintings are in grayscale with a base-backing of white.
It's a perceptual change also. What was once an image of Marilyn Monroe will transform into one of Marilyn Manson. The paintings shown here are obviously from Psycho's famous bathroom killing. By showing how different light can produce a different image, the artists are playing on the properties of light and materials. Naturally this leads to a discussion on the reality of color and whether it is a real property of the object or a subjective experience of the viewer. Color-blind people might see a different image or no image at all while the small percentage of the population (primarily women) who have an extra color rod in their eyes might see something else. And I won't even go into what synethesists might see. Such complex philosophical questions posed by such a simple painting process. This I like.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
It's the Games, Stupid
Yankee Fan Go Home - George Will @ Washington Post
No time for real commentary, but the op-ed is pretty good, or at least amusing. Have a read by one of the best and real conservative writers still out there.
The Doctorow of Steampunk
Steampunk in the New York Times - Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing
It seems BoingBoing is on the ball about the NYT article on steampunk, but looking at it from an outward-in perspective versus my inward-out one. Still, different opinions make for good arguments.
Some Goodness for the Morning
Video Throwback: Pavement-Cut Your Hair - RCRDLBL
A bit of old fashioned 1990s indie goodness:
Glowing Walls
I don't think I've posted about this yet, but if I have then apologies for the double post. Even so, I think it deserves more attention just for the sheer cool factor. Apparently the bottom layer is silver with a couple of other layers on top and a final wallpaper outer layer. The layering allows for the use of the wallpaper in regular applications, but personally I see this kind of tech being more applicable to avant-garde clubs and anterooms of exclusive consulting or advertising firms. Either way, it's wallpaper that lights up! How cool is that?
Smoke Coming from Recording Machines
This is the reason why I love this band; so loud they break the recording equipment through pure sound. Not that I expect the production studio to be too pleased about that, but still, way cooler than most bands could hope to achieve. Looking at their tour schedule, their stop in Dallas is at the American Airlines Center, not a small venue by any means. So either they're touring with a major act or their sound is so big no other venue will take them out of fear of causing mass seizures. Again, what other band could provide such sheer noise pleasure?
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
The Commercialization of Steampunk
Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds - Ruth La Ferla @ NYT
It's hard to define steampunk because much like any kind of punk, it intentionally defies definition. But some trends are apparent, much like with it's originator: cyberpunk. The ethos is based around the questions of humanity in the face of modernity and technology. While there are fashion statements to be made, the real thrust of steampunk is the idea of electric gods made human like Telsa, adventures like Charles Lindburg and dramas like the stories from the Great War. Steampunk reinvents the end of the 19th century as a time when the industrialist was also the genius of the time, when any technology was possible and society had quickly adapted to the radical shifts without much effort.
Sadly, this was not how it happened. Steampunk writers know this, hence the questions of morality and the human spirit. They are the same question we, and the cyberpunk writers, ask now. To make a tenuous historical hypothesis, I think the responses to modernity during the 19th century (a desire to return to a purer time, virulent nationalism and the rise of fascism, or at the very least it antecedents), kept the West in particular from arriving at any real answers. We are confronted with these questions again due to the rise of the Internet and all of its possibilities. The adventurers of steampunk flying airships and discovering impossible lands (Warren Ellis' Planetary should be required reading for both steam and cyberpunks) are translated into virtual adventurers moving between the physical world and the virtual with ease and where actions on one side have consequences on the other.
I do love the steampunk ethos as much as I love the ethos of cyberpunk. Both put these questions of what humanity means during times of great technological change. And both have their responses in characters that aren't quite sure of what is really happening but retain their humanity after great struggles with technology. The style, fashion and romance of both sub-genres, and now sub-cultures, are merely outward representations of these questions. However, as sub-cultures like steampunk gain wider acceptance I fear that the true punk ethos of anarchist reaction to the mainstream will lose itself in the commericalization of the culture. Just as goth, fetish and even punk its were subsumed by consumer culture, so too will steampunk fall before the needs of retail. Honestly, I believe that cyberpunk will remain the only non-commericalized sub-genre for a while due to its futuristic settings and necessary technological advances. Even so, commercialization will infect it as well.
Despite that, I don't think I will really mind such commericalization. It's inevitable in today's world. What I will mind are those who mistake the accessories of steampunk, the fashion and the attitude for the real ethos of steampunk. They, like the poser punks of the 1990s, will actually retard the progress steampunks seeks to accomplish. By ignoring the real questions steampunk poses, they will become another in a long line of fashion charactures. Yes, the fakers will come, because they have money and material desires to meet. But hopefully there will remain the writers and thinkers of steampunk and cyberpunk who look to constantly reinvent the style and shape of their genres.
Coolest Photo of the Day
This picture comes courtesy of the Chilean volcano that decided, after 9000 years, to get its groove on again. Apparently, this type of ash cloud and eruption are called 'dirty eruptions'. Even so, it looks glorious.
Sick
College Student Sexually Assaulted While Crowd Cheers - Jessica @ Feministing
This is one of the biggest reason why the culture of education we have in America is so fucked up right now. This group of men, who should all be charged with aiding and abetting the crime, are really nothing but overgrown boys with a sense of entitlement. And our education system perpetuates this by turning college into an extension of high school, except with fewer rules and punishments for the students. This girl did everything she was supposed to do and still was sexually assaulted and had her assailants cheered on. Of course these student will probably get nothing more than a slap on the wrist, thus negating the seriousness of their crime. And so our system of justice fails another woman, which reflects poorly on us all.
New Model Army on the March
This addendum to my earlier thoughts on the rejection of the Internet in favor of reality is based around the ideas and theories on information management. Essentially, this is a defense of the Web 2.0 mindset and the nascent Web 3.0 that has yet to take any firm shape. What the Web 2.o mindset brings to the interweb is self-sustainment; user-generated content becomes the primary content on the web as does the management of that content. Blogs, social networking sites, microblogs, tagging (whether of online content or of physical space as Google Maps has taken to doing) and the rise of tag clouds all point to an interwibble that further blurs the line between online and offline.
There's a part of William Gibson's latest book Spook Country where the main character is taken into a house and told to don a VR headset. What she sees is a room filled with tags attached to every object and even the space of the room itself. While I don't think the VR goggles are quite practical, I do think the idea of spatial tagging is the culmination of four centuries of philosophical efforts to determine meaning and reference. It does so by radically redefining meaning as being exclusively perceptual. It also confirms Wittgenstein's theory on meaning-as-use as spatial tagging will lead to a spatial tag cloud where the most common meanings of an object will rise to the surface without sacraficing the lesser known meanings.
Blogs and microblogs function in a similar way as individual perspectives are both maintained and then joined by tags and tag clouds that expose mass consensus. Microblogs in particular are one of the most contextual forms of communication yet devised. They can be so contextual that inversely they become completely context-free. Such a paradoxical event is evidence of a new way of thinking scratching at the edges of our minds. Those who wish to avoid it would do well to stay off the intertubes permanently.
Tags and tag clouds are the best means at the moment to manage this deluge of opinions, notes and information. Bloggers that provide tags for each of their posts give their readers a sort of index by which they can search for posts more to the reader's liking. Readers can also add tags to a particular blog through sites like Technorati and Digg, thus taking the information management partially out of the hands of the individual. The tag cloud is perhaps the most critical of information management systems as it is entirely user-run. By placing the definition of online content in the hands of users it allows other users to add to, subtract from or simple learn by looking at the cloud.
What Web 2.0 provides is a self-generating, self-regulating internet. Rather than leave it in the hands of so-called experts, it allows the users, those who are there on the ground, to define and catalog what they see. By doing so, the users make the internet more useful as a tool to perceive the world all while redefining that world. Such paradoxical results are the most exciting part of the Web 2.0 shift and only portend the revolution coming.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Tagging Your Laptop
Yes, it's a gimmick by a multinational corporation, but it's in response to a gimmick by another multinational corporation so it's a wash. Still, I like the cyberpunk styling of the Dell covers far more than the ultra-thin Apple laptop. It's far more personalized than the impersonal nature of Apple designs. More importantly, it puts a graffiti artist's work out in the mainstream. Perhaps it might even inspire other people to try their hand at the art form.
Dance Practice as Fashion
Okay, I'm sorry, but taking a standard theater actor's or dancer's wardrobe and calling 'elf fashion' is just plain fraud. It's as if some designer is sitting behind their sewing machine, twisting their mustache, and thinking How can I make something so simple and already available but call it a different name and make millions? I swear to god, if I see someone coming down the street dressed like this and they aren't going to dance practice I'll cut their Achillies tendons, the both of them. Let's see them pretend to be a dancer then, eh? Slovenly design does not get points in my book.
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