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Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

When a Phillips is not a Phillips — Screw heads demystified.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is a long awaited collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno.

Play the entire album using the above widget. Share the album by sharing the widget: click Embed/Share.

Bert and Ernie cover M.O.P.’s Ante Up.

via [arsoti] : via [mappeal]
Does Winnipeg REALLY Exist? From the people behind the new IncrediblyCool.ca.

Beauty in Symmetry - Manitoba Legislative Building (1939)

Note the outline showing the former parliament building and the diagonal entry paths foreseeing future desire lines.

From the amazing Manitoba Historical Maps Flickr Stream.

Classic. ZeFrank on ideas. [via]

Hearrings [via]

Pirates of the Amazon Abandon Ship

Dutch students “release a Firefox extension that made it easy for people who were browsing books, music and movies on Amazon to download the same products free through the Pirate Bay, the illicit BitTorrent site.”

Amazon serves a take-down notice. Students comply.

Student defend their work as parody:

“[Amazon and the Pirate Bay] might look like opposites, but are actually quite similar in regards to the mainstream media content they provide. Our project demonstrated this practically. So it’s a parody of any kind of media consumerism, whether corporate or subcultural.”

The students weren’t hosting or providing pirated media. They were pointing the way. Will this eventually lead to world governments enacting legislation that limits certain types of linking on the net? Might it eventually be illegal for me or Google to link to the Pirate Bay?

Source: tnyt

I drank the dead man’s scotch straight from the bottle.

– A sentence Michael Van Rooy, Aqua Books Writer in Residence, wrote this week while working on his third novel upstairs at 274 Garry.

Algorithmic Stained-Glass

Mysterious Attainment from a Winnipeg-based FlickrStream. Be sure to read the photo titles.

Aquabooks. Have you checked out their new digs?

“274 Garry Street in the benevolent capitalist shadow of Portage and Main.”

The Worse Day of His Life

A Process That Resonates

Processing is a free open-source programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It was created with artists, designers and hobbyists in mind.

After seven years of alpha and beta testing version 1.0 of Processing was launched yesterday.

I first discovered Processing in late 2003 and started coding sketches in February of 2004. Since then I’ve logged countless hours geeking out with this wonderful tool. I published my early sketches online, but I think the last sketch I shared on StungEye was a crystal growth simulator back in October of 2007.

Lately when I want to do some experimental coding I pull out my Ruby Shoes, but I have started teaching some of my students how to write programs for their cellphones using the mobile version of Processing.

I also own an Arduino, the electronics-hacking version of Processing. Next week Andrew and I are going to use an Arduino to build a random number generator. Why? Well, for use as a consciousness field resonator to test the existents of the Noosphere, of course. :)

BTW, if you want to see what’s possible with Processing check out the work of Robert Hodgin or Glenn Marshall.

If you want to learn Processing you can get started by following the tutorials and the API reference. You can learn from and be inspired by other peoples code. I also recommend the book Learning Processing by Daniel Shiffman.

Computational Expressionism: “Where an artist programs a drawing tool and then uses it to create their own drawings.”

More: An Active Essay on Computational Expressionism (Follow the arrows…)

Safe Without Me
Violinist and DJ bring the noise.

This is the URL http://stungeye.com encoded as a QR-Code using the Kaywa QR-Code Generator.

QR-Codes are a type of 2-dimensional barcode that can be used to encode text or raw data.

QR code can be read by most modern camera phones with the appropriate software.

QR graffiti anyone?

More info: (re)Discovering the 2nd Dimension

This post was inspired by: Tender Lovemaking

I ♥ apod.

(orion nebula, btw)

Our Betta fish has a Labyrinth organ, meaning it can breath air from the surface of the water.

When they gulp air from the surface it gets forced into the labyrinth organ. In the labyrinth there are lots of small maze-like compartments of thin boney plates called lamellae.

The lamellae are covered with membranes. Blood passes through the membranes and the oxygen is absorbed into the bloodstream.

If a labyrinth fish ends up out of the water it can stay alive for a long time if it stays moist. In fact they can even crawl across land to a different body of water if they have to.” -source

Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969)

More: An interview with Kerouac in French on CBC two years before his death.

Forager bees loaded with pollen line up to enter their hive. Found after reading The Life of the Queen Bee.

Crate Digging - Don’t Do It! (An Explanation…)

Flash-Based Music Creation Studio AudioTool - Slick!

Fooooooos: Shannon won us a Foosball table at last night’s social.

Snowflake on $5 from this Macro Currency Flickr set.

On Saturday Google and I shared birthdays. Today is NASA’s 50th.

The above photo was taken 8 years before the inception of NASA. It shows the first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida in July 1950.

If you search via the Google link I’ve provided you’ll be time-warped back 10 years.

Music Is Math — The hi-def version is recommended.

This video was generated by mathematically analyzing the music using the processing language.

Exit the Loop, but When?

There is a problem-solving strategy in computer science called recursion. It amounts to programming sets of instructions that are defined in terms of themselves (self-referential, meta).

Douglas Hofstadter’s academic pursuits centre on the connection between recursion and consciousness. Hofstadter maintains that our brains are recursive in nature, our consciousness born amongst the strange loops of our thoughts about thinking.

A recursive definition of recursion: “If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is.”

Linguist Noam Chomsky has theorized that there is no limit to the expressive nature of English (and other similarly structured languages) due to the recursive device of embedding sentences in sentences.

This is the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This post was inspired by a blog on beauty in computer science. My favourite recursively defined fractal is the Sierpiński triangle. I enjoy writing recursive algorithms.

Previously on Stung Eye: Recursion through definition.

BodyWorld a webcomic. I heard the author/artist interviewed on umfm earlier today.

Who Owns Ideas - Bill C61

The copyright amendment bill (C-61) tabled a few months ago “died on the table” when the 39th Canadian Parliament was dissolved prematurely for the upcoming election. Sadly, I’m sure it will be back in one form or another (especially if the Conservatives win a majority).

In the mean while, I’d encourage you to listen to the CBC Ideas episode entitled Who Owns Ideas. [podcast here]

The Panda vs. Reetbot show on Friday was an inspiration. We picked up some new pieces for our walls. Photos from the show can be found in this flickr stream. Oh, and aggie panda tumbles too.

Pill Popping Pacman

Robert Heinlein’s fan mail solution. Grok grok grok.

[Larger Image]

camouflage’ by liu bolin

Maple Leaves

A mathematician named Klein
Thought the Möbius band was divine.
Said he: “If you glue
The edges of two,
You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.
—anonymous

A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside. Unlike a Möbius band band, you cannot properly construct a Klein bottle in three-dimensional Euclidian space.

Two New Wally Glutton Mixes

You’re My Ghost

  • Speck Mountain - Girl Out West
  • Seachange - Glitterball
  • Rilo Kiley - Asshole
  • White Hinterland - Dreaming of the Plum Trees
  • The Ginger Envelope - Drift
  • Peter and the Wolf - Better Days
  • Silje Nes - Dizzy Street
  • Grey Reverend - The First Place
  • Yelle - Tristess / Joie
  • Constantines and Feist - Islands in the Stream
  • John P. Strohm - Where is my Mind
  • Birds Fled From Me - The Resisted
  • Marco Polo - Nostalgia feat. Masta Ace
  • The Black Ghosts - Tears from a Gun
  • She & Him - Black Hole
  • Cut Copy - Feel the Love
  • New Pornographers - Myriad Harbour
  • Reverie Sound Revue - Passes & Passports
  • Kate Nash - Fluorescent Adolescent

Triangle Waves

  • Atmosphere - Shoulda Know
  • Judi Chicago - Chick Feel A
  • Midfield General - Disco Sirens (MR GASPAR Remix)
  • LCD Soundsystem - Get Innocuous (Soulwax Mix)
  • Sebastine Tellier - Divine (Danger Mix)
  • Mylo - Sweet Child of Mine

I’m not a pirate, I just grog a lot.

Mountain Lion Safety. Check out the detail on the top-right human.

No longer
Mushrooms and Mold

light book - cut vellum 8 x 8 x 1/2 inches

Bathroom Tiles

Tired Spiral

Monk
Skateboarding shot at 120 frame per second using a Red camera.

Domed

Knitted Dome

Working Class Hero (Found exploring the TumblrSphere.)

Canadian Tories Continue to Cut Federal Arts Funding

Contributions cut this week by the conservative government:

Federal programs canceled this week by the conservative government:

  • The ProMart program, an artists’ travel support fund. ($4.7 million)
  • The Trade Routes program that supports film and music exports. ($9 million)
  • The Stabilization Project and Capacity Building program, which provides financial and administrative support to art groups.

[source]

Tories cut funding for artists touring abroad. — CBC:

Ideology played a role in decision, spokesperson acknowledges.

Want a ‘culture of innovation’? Fund our artists. — Globe and Mail:

First we have Bill C-10, the bid to deny tax credits to what the Heritage Minister calls “indecent material.” Meanwhile, other art forms have been told they are insufficiently “mainstream” and their funding has been cut through the cancellation of Trade Routes and PromArt.

‘Left-wing’ writer denies applying for travel grant — Globe and Mail:

The cuts to arts programs hit on a favourite theme of the Tories - cutting spending that appears wasteful and elitist - to gain political advantage in some target markets.

Face Swapping: Automatically Replacing Faces in Photographs

Found searching Blogonia for “propositional calculus”:

“A translation of lecture notes from a course on Logic delivered by Alain Badiou in 1980 - 81. It is rather short and deals specifically with Gödel and his theorem of incompleteness.”

Wikiabet

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Also: Alphabet Images.

“Solar panels heat the water, and a wind turbine on the roof generates electricity. Rainwater is collected in a 3,000-gallon cistern, then filtered, treated and pumped through the house for cleaning purposes.”

Choose.

The building on the left is the Winnipeg Clinic. My parents would bring me here to visit our pediatrician.

I remember elevator buttons that weren’t actually buttons but some sort of 1940s high-tech touch sensor. (Or is this actually a memory from The Bay?)

Sitting in the waiting room I would stare out from below one of those beautifully curved awnings, fascinated by the mirrored surface of the building across the street. I searched the grid for a pattern to explain the positions of the different coloured windows.

superimpose

Bridges 2008 - Leeuwarden, NL

Annual conference on mathematical connections in Art, Music, and Science celebrating the 110th Birth Year of M.C. Escher in his Birthplace.

Kite-Domino Tiling.

Fan Out

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a two-volume theoretical work by the French authors Deleuze and Guattari. Its two volumes, published eight years apart, are Anti-Œdipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

Translators note from A Thousand Plateaus:

“This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub- sets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn’t a chapter?”

Read them in PDF:

via wood s lot via Continental Philosophy.

A paragraph by paragraph diagrammatic interpretation of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus, by artist Marc Ngui.

The Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests.

Silent Sky Ontario via APOD

An Inch of Rope

Stung Eye is born again. This is version 3, a lifestream.

This site is now continually (and automatically) generated as I interact with various web services.

I feel so… aggregated.

The site runs on a custom platform that uses CodeIgniter and the Tumblr API. The code is based on a pre-release version of SweetCron. Currently the theme is a slightly tweaked version of the default Tumblr theme. This will change with time.

Various flavours of RSS feeds are available:

The version 2 Stung Eye Archives are still available. I have plans to integrate much of the old non-blog content (sounds, design, programs, words).

If you find any bugs, please let me know. Thank you kindly.

Rhinoceros, 2005, Carsten Höller

The Image Fulgurator is a device for manipulating photographs when they are being taken. The photographer will be unaware. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

“Arabic singing bounced around the world in several directions creating what we call popular music, and […] the British Isles were central to this.” — Brian Eno, part of the Bye bye blackboard exhibit (2005) at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science.

Voronoi diagrams are a special kind of mathematical decomposition of a metric space used in a wide range of fields including satellite navigation, animal habitat mapping, and urban planning. They have also been used to algorithmically generate butterfly models.

A tactile map for sightless navigation in Korsør Station. Flickr-hunted after see another tactile map on lemonodor.

Curved Hall in Toronto