The DigiBarn Computer Museum has a collection of amusing Screenshots Funstuff including this shot of Word with so many toolbars turned on that they frame the content. Toolbars gone wild.
Category: Playful or Cool
Academic conference to study James Bond
An Academic conference to study James Bond – just what we need to unpack this problematic emblem of masculinity. According to the UPI Newstrack,
Alain Brassart, from France’s University of Lille, said he will explain at the conference, scheduled for later this month, how “the archaic virility of Bond, a personality at once reactionary and rebellious, courteous and misogynist, was able to seduce audiences in the 1960s and today.”
Thanks to Joanne for this after I told her I was buying the boxes of Bond movies in order to study how to do presentations properly … you know … the bad guys always reveal their evil plot in a magnificent presentation well beyond PowerPoint.
Paper iPod
Paper iPod is a little gem of a site with paper cut outs of iPods for those of us who can’t afford the real thing.
Now what else do we need cut outs for?
Haefner: Kite Aerial Photography
Kite Aerial Photography is a photography site by by Scott Haefner that includes 360 degree panoramas taken from kites. Haefner is a professional photographer and site designer whose site also describes the equipment needed to kite aerial photography. The site itself, along with its companion on his Ground-based Photography, is an example of a well designed photo site. Thanks to Shawn for this.
DadaDodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought
DadaDodo is a text generator or “travesty generator” like Dissociated Press. The code is available and unlike programs that randomly cut up text it “it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.” DadaDodo is described by its creator Jamie Zawinski thus:
DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.
Zawinski’s page has a “cut up” look with downloadable code and interesting links, many of which are no longer active, alas. The effect of DadaDodo are hard to interpret without knowing what the corpus is that it starts with. I am tempted to create a TAPoRware version so that it can be used on existing web pages.
Communications From Elsewhere »
Communications From Elsewhere is a journal (not blog!) by Josh Larios with some interesting text generators including a Postmodernism Generator which randomly generates “completely meaningless” essays using a modified version of The Dada Engine written by Andrew C. Bulhak.
For more on The Dada Engine see the technical report from Monash University, On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks. The Abstract reads:
Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.
Josh has collected and connected different “Text Generators” to his journal, including an Adolescent Poetry Corner and a Time Cube screed generator. (For an explanation of Gene Ray’s Time Cube theory see DmitryBrant.com ¬ª On Time Cube. The Time Cube site is another story.)
mandalabrot.net
mandalabrot.net is the home of kiddphunk (Ian Timourian) and his visualizations, experiments and remixes. He has a number of Context Free Design Grammar experiments. Timourian also has a photo kiddphunk site with an doubled way of showing images.
Thanks to Johnny R. for pointing me to this collection of “Explorations of Generative Art, Mathematics, Algorithmic Design and the Beauty of Life / Vol 1”.
visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. (From the About page.)
I discovered this through the del.icio.us.discover project. We need a comparable collection of text visualization projects.
Digital Pens, Again
About a year ago I posted a note about Digital Pens (Anoto, io2, and Fly). An old friend Terry Jones came across the entry and says this about his experience:
The paper is about $8 cdn delivered to your door so its expensive but compared to the cost of a tablet you can buy a LOT of paper.
The really cool thing I like about it is that each page is unique. So in my notebook when I update a page here and a page there and go back to this page and then crerate a new page etc… when I park the pen each of the documents I updated on paper gets updated online. There is also a timeline function in the viewer that lets me see when the various pieces of “ink” appeared on the pen page! I like to be able to write someone a note while I am working on their computer and then when I get back to the office I have a copy too (in the pen) even though I have left them the paper copy. I like the fact that on the subway I don’t feel like a total geek and a target writing on a tablet. I am just writing in a notebook with a pen that is only a little fatter than some modern pens. I like the fact that a notebook boots instantly so to jot down a quick reminder is NOT a 5 minute process of booting a tablet PC, making a note and shutting down.
I bought mine cheap on eBay ($51) and since then bought 3 more at around $60 on eBay and so far every person that has tested them out isn’t giving them back. They come back after a couple of office with their wallet instead of the pen… its been quite funny!
Terry, besides being organizing barefoot waterskiing competitions, is one of the most intuitive experts I have ever worked with. What he describes is ubiquitous computing the way it should be – not about what toys you show off or how you should change for technology, but developing technologies that fit our workstyles.
3D Scanning for People
What every Humanities Computing center needs – the ability to scan humans. See Cyberware Products. I rather like the desktop model, but the scans don’t look that impressive.