Just finished Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre – a disturbing book that won the Man Booker Price in 2003. See an Extract. The main character is a teenager that everyone suspects was an accomplice in a school murder spree. The language makes the book – it starts as trailer-trash talk, but you begin to realize that Vernon is brighter than the awful people of his Texas town almost all of whom are disgusting, overweight, twisted, or manipulative. The end gets surreal as Vernon manipulates others once a fellow death-row inmate teaches him about God and working with people’s wants. It is not clear if the final part is a hallucination brought on by the drugs that kill him, or real events after an unlikely pardon.
Continue reading Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre
Pornetry: Poetry and Image Blog
Pornetry – One stop and shop for sex and noodles is a blog that has nothing to do with porn (as far as I can see.) It is a collection of different short photo essays, animations, mpegs and words. I like how he plays with images – clean simple shows.
TouchGraph: Graph Visualization
TouchGraph is graph visualization tools that has been used to visualize relationships between web pages and blogs. Try their GoogleBrowser. Here is what the graph of the TAPoR site looks like, View image.
BlogStreet : Visual Neighborhood uses TouchGraph to show the neighborhood of a blog.
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Latour; The Last Critique
Harper’s Magazine for April 2004 has reprinted an essay by Bruno Latour on “The Last Critique” that examines the role of critique. Latour starts by noting how “social construction” has been coopted by the right to undermine calls to deal with global warming. The right uses critical arguments to call good science into question in a way not anticipated by critical theorists. The problem is a general one with the left – what do we do when our methods are used against us? What do we do when criticism and dissent become reactionary?
What I don’t understand is Latour’s turn at the end to Turing. He sees in Turing’s paper on AI a way forward for critique.
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TrailBlazer; Browser with History
MacWarriors TrailBlazer is a project from Illinois that provides a browser (for Panther) that has a visual history. The visual history shows thumbnails of screens and a graph of your trajectory. Neat. Thanks to Matt and Slashdot.
WebCorp; Liverpool Aggregator
As always someone else has implemented any good idea. WebCorp: The Web as Corpus is an aggregator like the TAPoRware Googlizer that we are developing. We do more on the post-processing, theirs has other strengths. What can we learn from this tool? (Thanks to Ian Lancashire for this.)
Google Labs
Google has just changed their interface. They now point to a “more” section with more services. Google Labs is one of the new services which has a number of interesting experimental projects including one that allows you to volunteer processing for academic use – like the SETI screen saver, but a generic service. Now they should try a Beacon-like volunteer archiving project. See my note Freenet and Beacon.
Vivisimo Clustering Engine
Vivisimo Clustering – automatic categorization and meta-search software is a meta search engine with a great outliner like interface that lets you move through lots of hits. They gather hits from other engines and cluster them into a hierarchy that can be browsed. The idea is obvious once you try it for searches where you want to manage lots of hits. Thanks to Matt for this.
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artdaily.com and thebestdesigns.com – Digital Art
Artdaily.com – The First Art Newspaper on the Net has an extensive list of digital art on the web. Many of the projects are Flash toys.
Another site with links to good designs is The Best Designs.
Visualization of Russian Novels
Your Literary Masterpiece Was Delicious is post in a blog called Idle Words which discusses a cool visualization to SVG that Maciej Ceglowski put together. Another graph of words and characters done in perl and other packages.