Technology
The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats
An online exhibition created by The National Library of Ireland. When you enter the tour, you can scan through 200 artifacts & manuscripts and “attend” three in-depth tutorials exploring the evolution of three major poems (‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’). You can also listen to Yeats, one of Ireland’s towering poets, reciting his famous poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’
Manifesto for Slow Communication
Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication (via WSJ)
The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit
The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit – the punched paper cards used to program early computers are direct descendents of similar cards used to program Jacquard looms during the height of the industrial revolution, More so terms like ‘interlaced’ (among other synonyms) which describe the way pixels are weaved onto the screen, only [...]
Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias
The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden.
Bioplastics in Switchgrass
This past Monday Metabolix announced an incredible development: they have found a way to generate “significant amounts” of ecologically-sound bioplastic by growing it directly in switchgrass.
Hidden Van Gogh painting revealed by giant X-ray
It’s rare that new paintings by Old Masters are discovered. But that’s exactly what happened in the case of a recently uncovered work by Vincent Van Gogh. It was found at a museum in the Netherlands — but the painting wasn’t lost in some dusty corridor, it was hidden under the paint of another Van [...]
Ah, Freedom
In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom [...]
My cranium is open source
Our mental privacy and cognitive liberty depend first and foremost on the difference of interconnectivity. Moreover, the very concept of the individual, as currently understood, depends on the difference in interconnectivity. Once this difference changes, i.e. internal states of the nervous system are becoming increasingly accessible, our very notion of privacy, privileged access, cognitive liberty [...]
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I [...]
Muxtape K.I.S.S.
Made my first Muxtape in no time early this morning. You can access it by clicking here.
Other than Google, of course, this has to be the simplest user interface out there/in here, at least where music is concerned. With such an elegant design at play I found it very difficult to turn away from [...]
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