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mefi
Generative Creativity
is a course offered by the University of Sussex through their Informatics department. The
lecture series discusses tools and techniques for generating graphics, music, jokes and riddles, and more.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 10:31 AM on April 7, 2008
(7 comments)
Two Years Before the Mast.
"In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor,before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened." At the beginning of his third year of Harvard a severe attack of measles interrupted Henry Dana's studies,
and so affected his eyes as to preclude, for a time at least, all idea of study. The state of the family finances was not such as to permit of foreign travel in search of health. Accordingly, prompted by necessity and by a youthful love of adventure, he shipped as a common sailor in the brig, bound for the
California coast.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 12:09 PM on September 14, 2004
(22 comments)
Lather, rinse, repeat.
"The forums are ablaze with vitriolic rage. Haters pan the device for being less powerful than a Cray X1 while zealots counter that it is both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal. The virtual slap-fight goes on and on, until obscure technical nuances like,'Will it play multiplexed Ogg Vorbis streams?' become matters of life and death." Perhaps
1 Infinite Loop has an archetypical drama.
[more q daily newsfilter]
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 12:00 AM on August 5, 2004
(9 comments)
Searching for Bobby Fischer the Great Brain.
"The Great Brain books are based on the true life stories of John D. and his family, in particular his older brother Tom, who is so clever he always seems to get his way... While we were reading the second in the series,
More Adventures of the Great Brain, we learned about a camping trip that J.D.'s family went on in Beaver Canyon, Utah. We recognized some landmarks described in the book, and decided to go on a field trip to try to find the town of Adenville where the Great Brain lived.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 12:37 PM on June 4, 2004
(37 comments)
Interview with David Crosby.
"The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died. They haven't a clue, and they don't care. You tell them that, and they go, 'Yeah? So, your point is?' Because ...they don't care. They're actually sort of proud that they don't care.... Now they're going in the tank, because the world has changed, and they did not change with it...I think the only way to sell records that I know about now that does look really, really, really promising is iTunes."
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 3:10 PM on May 30, 2004
(46 comments)
"At the center of the universe is a horribly wounded angel.
It is nothing anyone would call conscious, and is only in the barest, barest sense of the word still alive. If anything resembling awareness remains, that awareness consists of nothing but an infinite field of gridded black and white squares, a test pattern scattered with dancing dots that shift and jump and blur into one another.
This test pattern is useful. "
This piece of fiction, which appears on
kuro5hin, evokes echoes of
Douglas Hoftsadter (
Godel, Escher, Bach) and Nancy Willard (
Things Invisible To See,
Sister Water , and
lots of children's books) simultaneously. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 7:51 PM on September 13, 2003
(13 comments)
"I think the word they are replacing is 'invention.'
Only now we innovate, which is deliberately vague but seems to stop somewhere short of invention. Innovators have wiggle room. They can steal ideas, for example, and pawn them off as their own. That's the intersection of innovation and sharp business. " Cringley puts his finger on a crucial difference, touching not only on the core of ethics but on the connection to real progress.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 5:44 PM on September 5, 2003
(9 comments)
Why I Hate Advocacy.
Baseball, politics, and programming languages? Mark Jason-Dominus created a classic article that is really about the general human tendancy towards flawed dialogue and the pitfalls surrounding evangelism, even though it's specifically directed towards the perl programming community. Indeed, as
in the past, some may see the "spectre of Metafilter itself" in Mark's words.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 11:07 AM on August 4, 2003
(19 comments)
RAGBRAI
(the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa). Perhaps a better way to experience
Iowa than the
CornCam... or consider
smaller rides.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 6:22 PM on July 24, 2003
(13 comments)
Saving the Net
isn't just really about saving the net: the article is a great point of confluence on the issues of Intellectual Property, Property and Success as American values, as well as the future of the Internet as a true commons. Especially interesting is the observation that Presidential candidate Howard Dean's campaign contribution lead – raised via the Internet – is owed to a huge number of small donations, not to a small number of large special interests. If he's being bought, it's by his voters."
[via Slashdot]
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 8:17 AM on July 23, 2003
(9 comments)
Faster. Genius. Chaos. What Just Happened.
Gleick's website, in addition to existing to promote his excellent books, has some rich content goodness and an "admittedly peculiar" collection of links. "No particular order. No apologies," he says.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 10:44 AM on July 10, 2003
(3 comments)
Ebay Will Buy Oracle?
Tim O'Reilly reads the trends and tea leaves, and forsees a day when "The value will be driven up the stack to data." One implication of this is that web-service based companies will take over the world. Thus his prediction that Ebay will buy Oracle, which is less a specific prognostication as a potential example.
[via slashdot.org]
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 12:00 AM on July 5, 2003
(12 comments)
Irony in a Nutshell.
Not an O'Reilly publication, but you can use it to teach yourself Irony in 24 hours. For dummies. And a reference for the rest of us.
posted to MetaFilter by weston
at 9:34 PM on June 28, 2003
(27 comments)
