“Enter the address of the home where you grew up.”
A Google Maps enhanced music video by Chris Milk for Arcade Fire, complete with beautiful boid swarming on the landing page.
Hypnagogia: “You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming?”
DIY Magic. via
Also: The Ganzfeld Technique
“A progressive lending library of electronic components. An internet meme in physical form halfway between P2P zip-archive sharing and a flea market.”
John, a previous student of mine, made this weather-aware application and entered it in the Apps 4 Climate Action contest.
Enter your (Canadian) address to see the average rainfall in your area over the last 7 days. John’s site uses data from Environment Canada’s 1079 weather stations. (See the Rain Caddy About page for a map of all these stations.)
Open Data for the win.
Simple, addictive helicopter game written with HTML5 complete with source code.
Hi folks,
On October 27 of this year the citizens of Winnipeg go to the polls to elect their Mayor, their City Councillors and their School Trustees.
Making an informed vote requires that you know the candidates, their platforms and the issues they discuss.
This is why we’ve created WinnipegElection.ca, a citizen driven website for the upcoming Winnipeg general election.
Our public launch is later this month, but we’d love you to take a sneak peak.
Send your comments and suggestions to winnipeg.election@gmail.com. You should vote in our polls too. We’ll use your feedback to determine how to proceed with the site.
Currently you’ll find:
Recommend WinnipegElection.ca on Facebook:
Follow WinnipegElection.ca on Twitter:
Lightning Over Athens. [via]
42 “stacked shots” taken during a lighting storm. I looked up the term “stacked shots”. It’s like it sounds, a process of superimposing multiple images.
“Stacking was developed for astronomy. The purpose then was to reduce digital noise. When using film, astronomers would sometimes expose for hours at a time (occasionally, exposing the same piece of film several nights in a row, making the exposure equivalent to several days).
Trying to do the same with digital would result in 100% noise, 0% image.
By stacking many images of shorter duration, [digital photographers] can get the equivalent of a very long exposure, each of which has the noise of a shorter exposure. The signals combine in a complementary fashion, while the noise combines in ways that mostly cancels itself out. There are more advanced statistical techniques uszed that can reduce random sensor noise to virtually zero.” —AustinMN @ Panoramio
Video from SuperMe a multi-player resilience and happiness game from Channel 4’s education department.
It’s interesting to see these types of “life-hacking” games trend upwards. Related: EpicWin, RibbonHero, Future of Games, Jane McGonigal.
[via]
Members chime in on what they’ve spent large portions of their life doing wrong.
Glad this didn’t get nixed as ChatFilter. [via]
“If we were trying to build a true, general AI, we would first need to create a way for it to get around and interact with the larger world. And we would need a system for rapid knowledge acquisition, so that we wouldn’t have to manually explain every detail of how the world works.”
Near future AI: Autonomous Automobiles and Learning by Reading.
“This is one of the gifts plants give me. They remind me to slow down, to take the long view, to breathe, relax, and just wait for what happens next.”
From the Stone Soup blog.
More from Stone Soup:
Cross The Road - [via]
“Emend is a service for alerting website owners and authors of grammatical and spelling mistakes found on their site.”
Amendments for your site show up in an ATOM feed. Example: Stungeye@Emend
[via: The comments for a blog post on XML extensibility.]
The maps of the Geotaggers’ World Atlas have been enhanced to show tourists in red, locals in blue. (Yellow could be either.)
Object-Oriented Modeling, when discussed separate from computer-programming, becomes very philosophical.
Objects as Platonic forms.
On Thursday the Canadian government introduced the Copyright Modernization Act (or Bill C-32).
The CBC does a good job of outlining the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law.
The bill is an attempt to strike a fair balance between:
There are things to like in this bill. The format-shifting, time-shifting and backup provisions are long-overdue, as is the expansion of fair-dealings1. The non-commercial “mash-up/youtube” provisions are indeed progressive.
However, any and all use-rights provided by the bill are revoked if the work in questions is protected by a digital lock. This immediately makes backing up DVDs illegal. It also makes viewing DVDs using the Linux operating-system illegal2. Copying a quote from a DRM-locked e-book for a book report or a news story would be illegal too.
The supremacy of digital-locks promoted by this bill must not be allowed to pass into law. If you value free-speech, your ability to re-purpose culture, and your right to use your purchased media as you see fit, I ask that you write your Member of Parliament to express your displeasure over the DRM provisions in Bill C32. (If anything, a bill that includes DRM provisions should mandate explicit labeling of all digitally-locked media.)
You can find your MP by searching for your postal code on openparliament.ca.
I recommend following these tips on discussing bill C32 with your MP. For the most impact, voice your displeasure using hand-written snail-mail.
Footnotes
Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire would not infringe copyright. Parody and satire were not previously considered fair dealings in Canada.
In order to view legally purchased DVDs using the Linux OS one must break the digital locks on the DVDs. The reason for this is that the DVD industry has not provided any other way to view DVDs when using open-source software. Since I use Linux for all my DVD viewing, C32 would make watching movies a criminal activity for me.
Michael Geist’s initial reaction to the Canadian copyright reform bill (C-32) announced today.
Looks like an improvement over C-61 but DRM is still poised to trump fair dealing.
“The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products.”
The Secret Powers of Time by Philip Zimbardo.
It’s worth your time to watch this video. :)
Related: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory a TED talk by Daniel Kahneman
P.S. Zimbardo was the led researcher behind the famous Standford Prison Experiment.
Lessons from fashion’s free culture a TED talk by Johanna Blakely of Ready to Share.
These are interesting ideas to ponder considering that our Canadian government is about to propose a major (and perhaps heavy-handed) restructuring of our copyright laws.
Related: Terms & Conditions - A short video on Digital Rights Management.
A dark solar filament seen across the surface of the sun.
Related: Video of Large Eruptive Solar Prominence.
The 50 greatest Hip-Hop samples according to Kon & Amir. [via]
Two days ago I released my first Ruby gem. In coding parlance gems are software libraries created to enhance the Ruby programming language.
My gem is call glutton_lastfm. It’s a wrapper library for version 2.0 of the last.fm API. The source code and documentation is available on my github account.
This gem allows you to query last.fm for:
For example, here’s a program that searches for tags and images related to Buck 65: artist_tags_and_images.rb
I wrote this library to:
I also wrote it as part of a larger data-mining project I’m working on. (Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write a post on datasets and the soon to explode dataset market.)
The glutton_lastfm source-code is released unlicensed into the public domain.
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process.
Anthropologist David Graeber explores the 5000 year history of dept on the Long Now blog.
Hitler can’t get a Folk Fest campground pass.
Update: (2010-05-01) The above video was part of a video remixing meme based on the movie Der Untergang. Was it taken down by the film’s production company? Was it a fair use parody?
Old-school optimalism, which aims at pushing technological boundaries in order to fit in “as much beauty as possible”, versus new-school reductivism, which idealizes the low complexity itself as a source of beauty.
Tweets may soon include optional payloads of structured data. The purpose and usage of these annotations?
“Annotations are a blank slate that lend themselves to myriad divergent use cases. We want to provide open-ended utility for all the developers to innovate on top of.”
— Marcel Molina - Early look at Annotations
Possible Useful Annotations:
Algorithmically generated Russian Dolls. (Open with a browser that supports html5 canvas, in other words, not Internet Explorer.)
See what your representatives are saying, and what laws they’re proposing.
Also, they provide a Hansards of the House API while in turn they make use of the How’d They Vote Postal Code API.
This is a pole covered in bubble gum. We visited friends in San Diego over the weekend. This is one of many photos of our trip.
Nature by Numbers - A short movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature.
I recommend watching in high-def and full-screen via the above link.
See the theory page for more information on the math that inspired this video.
A search for meaning within a game within a game. This 20 minute film by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman gets meta faster than you can say eXistenZ. ;)
The principles of Christopher Alexander’s classic book on the use of patterns in architecture applied to the architecture of online social spaces.
Mr. Alexander’s ideas are also influential in the world of object-oriented programming.
If an activity can be learned;
if the player’s performance can be measured;
if the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion;
then that activity can be turned into a game.
via: Lost Garden ✈ Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game
Pomplamoose VideoSongs have two rules:
Some nice songs:
[via]
This weekend I’ll be exploring:
Step one: Install Eclipse, PhoneGap and the Android SDK along with JQTouch, iProcessing and MobiOne.
Step two: Play around. Create a few sample apps.
Step Three: Tomorrow Andrew and I will deploy these apps to his Android phone.
The Hypemachine, Groveshark and SoundCloud understand that the future will be streamed.
You can listen to (in their entirety) every album of the Hypem top 50 of 2009. The top 50 was crowd-sourced from the top 10 lists of over 500 bloggers. The albums are hosted by Groveshark.
Yes, the Hypem leaderboard gets gamed now and then, and it sometimes get clogged with meme-ooze, but the web’s messy like that.
SoundCloud is a mix-hunters paradise. I’m listening to Dj Czech’s “Bucket Of Grease” mix right now.
The goal of this challenge was to write a computer-program capable of playing the game Tron.
The rankings for my Ruby bot:
The rankings were determined using tournament play along with the Elo rating system.
Early non-minmax versions of my bots are available on github. The winning C++ bot source is also available; as is a brief explanation by the author.
I enjoyed this challenge immensely. My Ruby programming skills also benefited from this Code Kata.
Update: A detailed examination of the winning bot. And if you’re brave, a Haskell bot explained. ;)
Also: The tron battle continues on dhartmei’s server.
The future of games, a talk by Jesse Schell. [28 minutes]
Even if you’re not a gamer this is a must-watch video, especially the second half on the implications of “games that break through the reality barrier” and the attention economy. I’m not sure I welcome the “gameification” of life, but it does feel like the inevitable progression of the capitalist spectacle. “A world where points are distributed for paying attention — to ads, activities, or other people.”
Adding to the conversation:
Amsterdam is now home to the world’s first open source restaurant. Everything you see, use and eat is downloaded from Instructables.com.
It’s an experiment in combining free culture with food concepts.
iProcessing is an open programming framework for native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for the iPhone.
This video shows two AI players battling it out for Tron supremacy as part of the Google AI Challenge.
If you’ve ever wanted to learn about game-AI programming you might want to look into this challenge. Bots can be written in C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, C#, Javascript, Go, Scheme, Lua and Clojure.
If you don’t know where to begin, you can try your hand at learning game-AI by playing Ruby Warrior, a roguelike that you play by implementing a Ruby class containing your player’s control logic.
The first of a series of columns by Steven Strogatz on mathematics “from pre-school to grad school”.
“The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.”
[via: dad]
Media: Photoshop / Custom Processing sketch.
I cannot remember the source of the ladybug. It was part of a free sprite library created by an indie-game developer.
The Evolution of Remix Culture - How Remix is becoming a platform for collective expression by, and conversations between, social groups.
Although I essentially agree with the ideas presented in this video, there is something about expressing ourselves in terms of pop culture that brings to mind Baudrillard’s Simulacrum. But really, I should learn to stop worrying and the love spectacle. :P
Oh, and bonus points for the Glass Bead Game analogy.
Quick! My first animated gif remix. :P
Learn to use the Scientific Method to deduce specific program behavior and to target, analyze, extract and modify specific operations of a program (mainly for purposes of interoperability).
File under: Information that could one day be illegal to posses (given the current direction of copyright reform).
Why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
Here are the slides from my presentation today at the RRC Directions business conference.
Click the “full” button to view in full-screen mode.
A container game within an essay on metagames and containers.
“All the ways in which we build around and on top of our creations greatly impact the way they’re used.
Boundaries may not be physical anymore, but they remain powerful.”
I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at the RRC Business and Applied Arts Conference entitled “Launching Your First Web Start-up”.
I’ll post the slides for the talk here tomorrow afternoon.
An API for LCBO store, product, and inventory information. Created by Carsten Nielsen but not affiliated with the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.
John Nunemaker on Talent vs Practice via Giles Bowkett
“We are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.” —Erik Naggum
Capitalism as communal risk management.
(Articles like this are best read using the Readability bookmarklet.)
“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. [W]hen it is squandered through luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone, under the pressure of the ultimate necessity, before we were aware it was going.
So it is: the life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.” — Seneca the Younger
Release your source-code free and unencumbered into the public domain.
“The author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.”
It’s time for me to move away from CC Licenses and Unlicense all my publicly released code. I’ve been using the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license but I no longer feel the need to force attribution and place non-commercial-use restrictions on my work.
I should probably do something similar for all my creative output (prose, poetry, photos, art, etc).
Five (naïve) assumptions we make about creative individuals:
Some of my favourites from Ebert’s list:
I would have added:
Surely I’m forgetting some…
