March 20, 2010
Dog and cat washing machine
Dog and cat washing machine (SLYT)
Hwaet!
Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Daily readings (and podcasts) from the Complete Corpus of Anglo Saxon Poetry, presented by Prof. Michael Drout, Wheaton College. For those that like to read along, the Corpus presented in text (no translation, though).
Two podcasts about sound art
"Starting with the precedents set by Charles Ives and John Cage, VARIATIONS presents the principal milestones of Sampling Music, looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and the mass media, and the way all of these currents converge today." Curated by Jon Leidecker, who records and performs as Wobbly.
"Poet Kenneth Goldsmith presents selections from UbuWeb, the learned and varietous online repository concerning concrete & sound poetry, experimental film, outsider art and all things avant-garde" in Avant-Garde All the Time. Goldsmith's the founding editor of UbuWeb and sometime DJ on WFMU as Kenny G.
(Previously: CodPaste - a 14-part podcast about the history and practice of sound collage and mashups. )
Breakout, on acid
Mind Mapping with the Visual Understanding Environment
The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a free, open source program developed at Tufts University. It lets you create concept (mind) maps and analyze them in various ways. One very useful thing it can do is generate concept maps from .CSV files. Here’s an introductory screencast (length: 6 min 9 sec). You can watch all related videos here. The program runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Father and Son
From the surreal comic duo Tim and Eric (seen previously) comes a fifteen minute short about parenthood: Father and Son.
A Parapatetic Champion of the West
During eight years heading the Interior Department, from 1961 to 1969, for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he crusaded for the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act , the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act . During his tenure, the US added 2.4 million acres to our national parks. And it was to him that Nikita Kruschev famously hinted at missiles in Cuba, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis . Stewart Udall died today at age 90.
Earth Art, with Google Maps
Andy Grauland scours Google Maps for stunning natural imagery. The 19-year old Dane has close to two dozen extracts on his site. Take a look at places where no street view exists, and feel free to zoom/pan. (via, see also (previously))
Bitter tea
The Federal Reserve is so 1913 anyway
Idaho recently passed H.B. 633 (.pdf) that will allow Idaho citizens to pay their state taxes with an official state silver medallion. The news comes just a month after a South Carolina legislator introduced a bill seeking to ban Federal currency altogether, and replace the upstart greenback with gold or silver coins. Meanwhile, Georgia has introduced the "Sound Money in Banking Act" which would require any bank serving as a depository for the state to offer and accept gold and silver coins for deposit. Is gold making a comeback as currency?
Pray with me, while I pretend to pray.
[pdf] Clergymen in the closet -- not because they are gay; because they don't believe in God. Here's a followup.
Vernacular French signage
Not necessarily “naïve”; more like “vernacular.” Jules Vernacular posts dozens of photos of vernacular or unschooled signage on French buildings (in the site’s punning slogan, lettres œuvrières et incongruités typographiques). As ever, it’s amazing that this typography, most of it hand-drawn, hasn’t been wiped out by progress and regularized into Arial (or the Arial of 2010, Papyrus). [more inside]
Cabin of Synth
♫ I can't do this all on my own... ♫
Misunderstanding Darwin
Misunderstanding Darwin: Natural selection’s secular critics get it wrong. Ned Block and Philip Kitcher review Jerry Fodor's (previously) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book What Darwin Got Wrong. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini respond: “Misunderstanding Darwin”: An Exchange.
We Are On the Verge of a Shift to Biosphere Consciousness
Towards the empathic civilisation
The human race is in a twilight zone between a dying civilisation on life support and an emerging one trying to find its legs. Old identities are fracturing while new identities are too fragile to grasp. To understand our situation, we need to step back and ask: what constitutes a fundamental change in the nature of civilisation? The great turning points occur when new, more complex energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, fundamentally altering human consciousness in the process.
The human race is in a twilight zone between a dying civilisation on life support and an emerging one trying to find its legs. Old identities are fracturing while new identities are too fragile to grasp. To understand our situation, we need to step back and ask: what constitutes a fundamental change in the nature of civilisation? The great turning points occur when new, more complex energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, fundamentally altering human consciousness in the process.
Yours, mine & ours—or—There’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity
Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet. Books cease to be individual works but are scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text. The dynamics of the digital are encouraging authors, journalists, musicians and artists to treat the fruits of intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. But what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes metaness and regards the mash-up as more important than the sources who were mashed? The very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. Remix is the very nature of the digital. But do we now face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock?
The Great West Coast Newspaper War
The alt-weekly newspaper war in San Francisco - The titanic struggle between The Bay Guardian and SF Weekly (owned by Village Voice Media), as told by Eli Sanders of Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger.
And She's Climbing the Stairway to Heaven
I've been to Oʻahu several times but until now had never heard of the Haʻikū Stairs, also known as the Stairway to Heaven or Haʻikū Ladder. I'm heading to Oahu in 2011; I think I'll go get some photos. But for now, these will have to do. [more inside]
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