But when I look at my gorilla-heavy resume, when I see all three of my kids laughing, when I think about how much less my life would have been if I’d settled for what I thought I’d wanted, I realize I don’t much care about the sensible things I once did. It’s the ridiculous I love.
—Claude Knobler on NPR
Monthly Archive for November, 2008
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…bored and economically deprived teenagers are transforming 1960s council estates and Victorian terraces into a real-world, multiplayer World of Warcraft
—BLDBLOG
Reminds me of the psychogeographical maps I was obsessed with in 1994. Thought I was over that…
Filip Dujardin makes the only pictures I want to look at. Don’t even think of showing me other pictures.
See the photo set on BLDGBLOG.
Just as I was wishing for such a thing, Appfrica came through with a list of ten Africa Tech blogs (complete with OPML file so you can subscribe to all ten at once.)
Thanks, Jonathan!
Graphic CC-BY Erik Hersman
I was afraid of this.
Scientists using functional MRI machines can see your decisions approximately twelve hours before you make them. Preliminary studies indicate that your brain “banks” decisions during REM sleep and then spends them down during the course of waking hours. This suggests that extended periods of wakefulness can lead to decision deprivation and, eventually, decision debt.
This probably has dire implications for free will, but might be pretty awesome for the sleepers’ rights movement.
Link to article in the journal N4ture. Warning: Paywall
Photo CC-NC-BY-SA jpstanley
This isn’t really news—Wired will probably be on it thirteen minutes from now—but it was news to me.
My architect brother-in-law has just picked up a freelance gig designing navigational interfaces for MAS patients.
As the grinders (ex-grinders, friends-of-grinders, grinder-aware, yadda yadda) among you will have already picked up, a substantial number of MAS patients, unable to establish a working chronology or prevent spontaneous retrieval, end up essentially drowned by their own memories. (This will probably be fodder for song lyrics and satire fifteen years from now, but if it happens to your sister it is no fucking joke.)
Anyway, it turns out there is a growing cottage industry designing bespoke memory palaces for MAS patients (which seems far out until you remember that Pakistan now earns most of its foreign exchange from custom-on-demand prosthetics). Word is: If you’re going to Cuba, for fuck’s sake talk to an architect first. Don’t get stuck in a pole barn with your whole life’s worth of memories. (Or if you do, bring some burning tar and a big fucking knife.)
(Photo CC-BY-NC-SA by lfaisco)
(This is a belated response to Buildings that Blog posted by Warren Ellis last month.)
Now that we’ve had mandatory universal polysensory geotagging for a couple of decades, we can identify everyone who has ever stood on this particular spot, see what they saw, hear what they heard (smell what they smelled, but who needs that).
This has, of course, led to an efflorescence of new kinks, including locaphilia (I find five Ellis posts on the subject to date: here here here here and here), where the fetishist develops an obsessive sexual interest in everyone right here.
Konono N°1’s label Crammed is offering a free 13-track compilation. Get it while it’s overdriven!
(This might be a particularly good one to beam directly into your neurons via high-distortion homemade inductive headphones.)
(Belated thanks for the reminder, Kek!)
My shrink has me on Progenil, which is some kind of weird enpatrogen (I hate that word. Can’t they call it an enmatrogen?) that gives me access to the memories of my ancestors. This is great, but it doesn’t have any lateral effectiveness—no access at all to aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, etc. How long are we going to have to wait for a decent entiogen?
As I understand it, most of the side-effects of this stuff are due to the thousands of ancestors you have once you get back ten generations—or around 200 years—or around 1770 if you’re me. A long time ago, but not way way lost in the mists of time. And once you get to the actual mists… Jesus! It’s motley back there, and a bunch of it comes through in crazy-assed Finno-Ugric dialects that can be really disorienting. You have to just sort of relax and treat it like the sound of the sea.
I’ve been watching this technology for a while, and it has finally advanced to the point where I was ready to buy in (to the tune of $99.99 plus shipping).
The Radio Excavator is a small USB device that allows you to listen to radio broadcasts on arbitrary frequencies at arbitrary points in time. The active ingredient is a digital amplifier that amplifies residual wave-traces. (Although the surface of a pond appears still a few seconds after you drop a pebble, the ripples are in fact still there—they’re just too small to see. The Radio Excavator in essence magnifies the micro-ripples.)
The depth of accessible time has been doubling every couple of years (as predicted by Krink’s Law), and the (low-cost, consumer) device the UPS guy delivered today can reliably extract broadcasts from as early as 1934 (which covers my target year of 1935, hence my willingness to drop a hundred bucks).
The major catch for my purposes is that the Excavator is still (for obvious reasons) dependent upon the user’s physical location. That is, I can listen to radio traffic from 1934 onward on any frequency I like, as long as that traffic would have been audible in Northfield, MN at the moment in question. If I insist on listening to traffic in Addis Ababa in 1935, I’m going to have to find somebody in Addis who owns an Excavator and is willing to record and e-mail me some MP3’s. (Or I suppose I could fly there, but I don’t see that in the family budget in the near-term.) So far Google and the obvious user fora haven’t turned up anyone like that. Anybody have a friend in Ethiopia who might be able to help me out?
