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The botmaker who sees through the Internet – Ideas – The Boston Globe
“Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.
By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi’s bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they’re more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation—ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free.
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Zimmer on writing: “Don’t make a ship in a bottle”
“To write about anything well, you have to do a lot of research. Even just trying to work out the chronology of a few years of one person’s life can take hours of interviews. If you’re writing about a scientific debate, you may have to trace it back 100 years through papers and books. To understand how someone sequenced 400,000 year old DNA, you may need to become excruciatingly well acquainted with the latest DNA sequencing technology.
Once you’ve done all that, you will feel a sense of victory. You get it. You see how all the pieces fit together. And you can’t wait to make your readers also see that entire network of knowledge as clearly as you do right now.
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Does shouting at an injured person have a medical basis?
” If someone’s about to fall into a coma, there’s nothing you can say to change his mind.”
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” “As soon as I walked into that dusty, remote town and the smiling children started coming up to me, I just knew my Facebook profile photo would change forever,””
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Outrage at young tractor driver who caused puddle ‘tsunami’
“There must be a better way to clean your tractor”
Dang “youngsters”.
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How I *Know* Things Aren’t Alright – A Hack-a-Thon Story | ThinkThankThunk
“I was sitting in my office at BIG grading the 3-4 page papers from a cookie cutter assignment on the history of Isaac Newton and planning out which stickers to use in my next toy-economy sticker chart, when I realized I was having a nightmare. Har Har.”
. . .
“Then the student, already skeptical of the day, said, “Yeah, but are you actually going to do what the students come up with?”
THINK ABOUT THAT STATEMENT..
THINKABOUTIT.
THINKABOUTITANDLETITBOTHERYOU.
She’s not wrong, and nor is she stupid, far from it. She’s just responding to what her usual experience must be. Sad.”
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portrait is comprised of 1700 coloured block characters and a unique DNA sequence (CTAG)
“New work completed. F.A.C.E. was commissioned by Dennis McCormac, Director of Platform Development at the Genomics Lab of Canada. The 36×48 portrait is comprised of 1700 coloured block characters and a unique DNA sequence (CTAG) that determines the shape of McCormac’s face. The result is both a visual representation of the subject, and a DNA sequence that presents a portrait of a different kind. F.A.C.E. will be on permanent display in the MaRS building in Toronto and will be featured in an exhibition in 2014 spotlighting artists using science to inform their work.”
portrait is comprised of 1700 coloured block characters and a unique DNA sequence (CTAG) “New work completed. F…. http://t.co/TpPDpmIPpv
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) January 30, 2014
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One must imagine Sisyphus happy – Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos
““Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
– The last lines in the essay The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
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