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.
Complex Declarative Learning [pdf]
“The most basic observation one can make about declarative knowledge is that human
beings have a lot of it.” Learning and the acquisition of declarative and procedural knowledge. [html version - via google cache]
Symbolic Logic - By Lewis Carrol
“When you come to any passage you don’t understand,
read it again: if you still don’t understand it, read it again:
if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain
is getting a little tired.”
Does Winnipeg REALLY Exist? From the people behind the new IncrediblyCool.ca.
Play My Music Videos
Music-video stream based on last.fm user preferences. Enter a username of stungeye and you’ll get a stream of videos customized to my tastes. (There are problems with bands that have no videos on YouTube like The Goods. And it insists on playing Iron Maiden instead of Iron & Wine.)
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.
![](http://www.owlpages.com/pictures/articles-Owl+Physiology-Feathers-5.jpg">www.owlpages.com)
the ad hominem fallacy fallacy
Debates on the internet tend towards flame wars; however, “if you can’t demonstrate that your opponent is trying to counter your argument by attacking you, you can’t demonstrate that he is resorting to ad hominem.”
“Those who are quick to squeal ‘ad hominem’ are often guilty of several other logical fallacies, including one of the worst of all: the fallacious belief that introducing an impressive-sounding Latin term somehow gives one the decisive edge in an argument.”
A might be wrong, but B’s reply is not Ad Hominem:
- A: “All rodents are mammals, but a weasel isn’t a rodent, so it can’t be a mammal.”
- B: “You’re an asshole.”
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
– A sentence Michael Van Rooy, Aqua Books Writer in Residence, wrote this week while working on his third novel upstairs at 274 Garry.I drank the dead man’s scotch straight from the bottle.
Algorithmic Stained-Glass
Mysterious Attainment from a Winnipeg-based FlickrStream. Be sure to read the photo titles.
How to Backpack
Contains this beautiful maxim: “Never step on anything you can step over. Never step over anything you can step around.”
Turritopsis nutricula
An immortal jellyfish.
“The ability to reverse the life cycle is probably unique in the animal kingdom, and allows the jellyfish to bypass death.”
Aquabooks. Have you checked out their new digs?
“274 Garry Street in the benevolent capitalist shadow of Portage and Main.”
Obsessed with putting ink on paper
The inner workings of the LilyPond music notation system. You might have to be three-kinds-of-nerd* to get into this one. ;)
*Music, Typography, CompSci
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…)
424 River Ave, Winnipeg. via aggie @ some life
Sounds Like Bach
“But the day when music is finally and irrevocably reduced to syntactic pattern and pattern alone will be, to my old-fashioned way of looking at things, a very dark day indeed.” —Douglas Hofstadter
Cuil Theory
One Cuil, denoted by the Interrobang symbol (‽) is equal to One Level of Abstraction or Surreality away from the reality of a situation.
“1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.”
“5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger. You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now. You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go across the street. I hear only children’s laughter. I give you a hamburger. You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.”
Safe Without Me
The Problem of Consciousness
[Video] - “Perceptual consciousness is a mode of exploration of the world, making use of a certain kind of practical bodily understanding. [T]his makes dance, for me, the perfect metaphor for consciousness.”
Violinist and DJ bring the noise.
Some interesting basic kanjis
“One of the coolest things about an image-sign language […] is that it encourages making new words by combining simpler ones.”
Why I Copyfight
“Why does all this copyright reform stuff matter, anyway? What’s at stake? Everything. […]
There’s a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture. […]
[I]f copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow, it would be the end of culture on the Internet too. “ -Cory Doctorow
Tom Sawyer Whitewashing the Fence, Tom Sawyer
— “Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
— “Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”
CryptoPhone
“If you ever have talked on the phone and thought ‘lets hope that this call has not been intercepted by someone’, the CryptoPhone is right for you.”
MP3 Download: Amon Tobin - Foley Room Recorded Live in Brussels
Length of mix: 1:17:00
Available as 320 kbps MP3
Shit: Help the American Department of Defense create a pack of robots that hunt humans.
The US DoD is looking for proposals for the design of Terminators, or in their words, robots to “search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.”
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
Manitoba History: If Day 1942
On February 19th 1942 a fake Nazi invasion was staged in Winnipeg to rally support for the war effort and to promote the purchase of Victory bonds.
“In front of the Main library, all books relating to liberty, democracy, freedom […] were burned.
Reichmarks were given out as change, and were to replace the dollar. One group of Nazis burst into the cafeteria at Great-West Life. Employees were kicked out and some jailed, while the Nazis grabbed all the food.”
As Slow As Possible
In 2001 a 639 year long organ performance began in a German church.
Exterminating Zombies with Jean Baudrillard
An obsession with zombies and the “loss of the real.”
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.
freepressonstrike.com
The staff of the Winnipeg Free Press continue to provide local news coverage while on strike.
I, Pencil
The ‘genealogy’ of a pencil written in support of freedom (as a free market) and the Invisible Hand. Hmmmmmm.
Forager bees loaded with pollen line up to enter their hive. Found after reading The Life of the Queen Bee.
The Manitoba Flood of 1950 - This is why we have the floodway.
(Side Note: Canada Packers Plant or Castle?)
Crate Digging - Don’t Do It! (An Explanation…)
Flash-Based Music Creation Studio AudioTool - Slick!
Never Say Die
Why We Can’t Imagine Death
Twelve Virtues of Rationality
curiosity. relinquishment. lightness. evenness. argument. empiricism. simplicity. humility. perfectionism. precision. scholarship. and the void.
Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours
How to Feel Good About Canadian English
Does the free market corrode moral character?
A Templeton Conversation — Leading scientists, scholars, and public figures weigh in on “Big Questions.”
Steal This Movie 2
An exploration of piracy from the printing press to the internet. (44 minute documentary)
Fooooooos: Shannon won us a Foosball table at last night’s social.
Above, a new way to explore Flickr use Rainbow vomiting pandas.
Snowflake on $5 from this Macro Currency Flickr set.
World Food Crisis & Food Security Conference, University of Manitoba
Oct. 8-10, 2008 — Open to all and free of charge.
Corporate Initiatives on Campus
“Water fountains are becoming an endangered species on university campuses across Canada. That’s one of the findings of a national on-line survey, designed to document the commercial and corporate presence on Canadian campuses.”
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.
Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com
“People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract,” she says. In other words, people sometimes go nuts amid the anonymity of the Internet.
The Rise and Fall of Muxtape
“I believe that for people who love music, the desire to share it is innate and crucial for music itself. When we find a song we love, we beckon our friends over to the turntable, we loan them the CD, we turn up the car stereo, we put it on a mixtape. We do this because music makes us feel and we want someone else to feel it, too.”
Tom's Essay
Suzanne Vega talks about remix culture, being “the mother of mp3”, and of course, Tom’s Diner.
Open Source Food
Over 2000 creative-commons-licensed recipes with tasty photos.
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.
Recursively defined cabbage and other fractal foods make me grin.
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.
Dead Man's Switch
Automate the delivery of emails when you die. Morbid but useful.
The Surprise Test Paradox
An Epistemic Paradox [more @ wikip]
Explore Your Morals
Be sure to register first otherwise you cannot submit the surveys.
Pill Popping Pacman
Kissing the frog
A mathematician’s guide to mating
Robert Heinlein’s fan mail solution. Grok grok grok.
A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media
PhD Dissertation | Anne Galloway
‘camouflage’ by liu bolin
Maple Leaves
nodes.fm
An elective payment music site. Artists upload their music and listeners pay the artist what they want to download their albums.
Tip of My Tongue
Find that word hanging from your tongue.
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 - Indie-tude from 2007-2008ish
- Triangle Waves - Bass-Heavy Mini-Mix (with a dash of dirty)
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.
Winnipeg New Media Workshop - Freestyle SoundKits
Led by Toronto Artist, Jessica Thompson. Saturday, September 13 from 11:00 am – 6:00 pm, Video Pool Media Arts Centre in the Exchange District.
Grey Thumb
A global interest group dedicated to artificial life and evolutionary technology.
“As someone with a green thumb is skilled at gardening, someone with a grey thumb could be thought of as someone skilled with creating synthetic living processes.”
No longer
Logic: An Introduction to the Formal Study of Reasoning
Also see:
- So you think you exist? - In defense of nolipsism.
- What Am I? - Virtual machines and the mind/body problem
- More…
Analogy as the Core of Cognition
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Mushrooms and Mold
light book - cut vellum 8 x 8 x 1/2 inches
Marathon of Dope
Pay-want-you-want music from Winnipeg rappers Pip Skid and the Gumshoe Strut.
Large Mosasaur Fossil Discovered Near Morden, MB
Who knew that Morden was home to the largest collection of marine reptile fossils in Canada? [More: Mosasaur @ Wikipedia]
Mapping Memory
Web Designer as Information Cartographer
From the wish jar. Also: touch map
picidae
Break through the Internet Censorship
Bathroom Tiles
Tired Spiral
History of Graphic Design
From the University of the Arts in Philadelphia
Liquor and Lit
A Portrait of the Writer as a Drunk
Fair Copyright for Canada
Overview of bill C-61, the proposed amendment to Canadian copyright law. [More Analysis]
The Genius of Miles Davis
with YouTube vids.
Skateboarding shot at 120 frame per second using a Red camera.
Knitted Dome
Summer Memories
More photos (along with the above two) from my summer. [2008]
Phillip Toledano - Days with My Father
Dealing with memory lost.
Frenglish a Muxtape
aka Franglais in tunez.
Working Class Hero (Found exploring the TumblrSphere.)
Canadian Tories Continue to Cut Federal Arts Funding
Contributions cut this week by the conservative government:
- $300,000 cut from the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, which archives and makes available for distribution film, television and musical recordings.
- $1.5 million cut from the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, which helps top up the budgets of independent films and triggers private investment.
- $2.5 million cut from the National Training Program in the Film and Video Sector.
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.
Amazing but True Cat Stories
Written and illustrated by a hive mind.
Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas - 1969
[pdf] - An html version is also available.
Face Swapping: Automatically Replacing Faces in Photographs
Found searching Blogonia for “propositional calculus”:
- Alain Badiou - Course on Logic - Part I
- Alain Badiou - Course on Logic - Part II
- Alain Badiou - Course on Logic - Part III
“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.”
Shoes
Make colorful programs for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
Some explanations, plus a link to a modernized translation of Gödel’s original paper.
“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.
Winnipeg: Love or Hate
Photos of my home town. Many of them were shot in HDR.
Best (and Worst) from the same photographer.
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.
His Winnipeg
An Interview with Guy Maddin [Aug 2008]
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.
The Ampersand
An attempt to give this humble ligature the respect it deserves.
Tilings Encyclopedia
In rhombs, and wedges, and half-moons, and wings.
The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away
A story by Cory Doctorow about geek monasteries that house smart people who can’t get along in the world and put them to work as coders.
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.
21 Aphorisms
from Cabinet Magazine online. (btw)
Words and chords.
The semantic shifts of the Beatles’ chords.
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.
Mom, Dad, I'm Into Steampunk.
“Trade and barter are more valuable to me than any coin.”
Butcher ready for Black Pudding Monday
Mmmmmm Blutwurst. Locally you can pick up some fine blutwurst (along with the non-bloody white pudding) from Winnipeg Old Coutry Sausage, 691 Dufferin Avenue.
Sad Trombone
Or try Instant Rimshot for a snappier retort. Note: This is actually a Sting.
Silent Sky Ontario via APOD
Mix Turtle - A Music Search Engine
Those handy with Firebug should be able to figure out how to download the source mp3s. ;)
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.
- To share a link I tag it in my del.icio.us linkstream.
- To share a photo I tag it in my flickr photostream.
- To post a blog entry I use Tumblr.
- Comments are handled by Disqus which in turn provides a commentstream.
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.
Spartan Programming
A unique coding style whose main objective is minimal use of various elements of the programming language which may contribute to complexity.
Rhinoceros, 2005, Carsten Höller
Via BibliOdyssey. Also found: Fornicating Frogs, a Unique World-View, and Japanese Crepe Paper Fairy Tales.
The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design
“Paragraphs are punctuation, the punctuation of ideas.”
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.
Hyper (2007) Denis Darzacq
“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.
The Development of Intuitionistic Logic
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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.
In which a Tree gets "The Talk"
from WonderMark by David Malki
Curved Hall in Toronto