Subservient Chicken has to be ordered around to be understood. Could this be art? Could this be what we will do with streaming media? (Thanks to memepool.)
HyperGraph: Embedded Site Map
The site for TAPoR at the University of Alberta has an interesting feature – a dynamic site map. In the lower left of every page (if your browser supports it) is a graph of the page you are looking at with the connections to other pages in the site. This worked for me in Safari, but not IE on the Mac. StÈfan Sinclair showed it to me as just one application of visualization. Now… can we turn it into a TAPoRware tool?
Quantum Computing and Information
Jerry McGann has been talking about quantum models of textuality for some time. (See McGann, “Preface to _Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web_”, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture, Praxis Series, Romantic Circles.)
In general whenever Jerry is interested in something it is worth thinking about, even when I don’t get it. Here, therefore are some links on quantum computing.
An introduction to Quantum Computing is a short and clear introduction.
Quantum Computation and Quantum Information is the site to a book with that title where you can download/read the first chapter.
Seb’s Open Research blog also has an entry on Quantum computing weblogs (Note: blog now gone). This entry got me going on the subject.
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A9: Amazon Search Engine
Search Technologies” href=”http://a9.com/”>A9.com is a new search engine site from Amazon that lets you search inside books in addition to searching the web. There is supposed to be a feature to allow you to link notes to what you find and you can, if you get an account, keep information about your search history.
Remember when people speculated that Netscape could become your OS? As Google and other (pseudo) portals add features we are returning to the possibility of a network portal OS. My kids use MSN for more and more, I use Google for more and more – at what point do I ditch the “personal” computer for an environment available through any networked device?
Spam Blocking
So I have added Spam blocking to my blog. At Matt K’s suggestion I had MT-Blacklist installed. (Thanks Lian.)
Lets see if this works. Now I will turn on trackback.
IBM 5100: First Portable Computer
The IBM 5100 computer from 1975 is apparently the first “portable” or personal computer. The 1981 PC from IBM was the 5150 model.
I learned from an improbably site – The Time Travel Tale of John Titor which provides posts from a purported time traveller from 2036 who came back looking for a 5100. (Thanks to Matt K for the link to this.)
Continue reading IBM 5100: First Portable Computer
Virtual Cities
Future Cities: Virtual Cities is up! Future Cities is an off-site exhibit curated by Shirley Madill while the Art Gallery of Hamilton is closed for renovations. Virtual Cities is the web site extension created by a team of us at McMaster. This was my first community research learning projects – the web site and art online are by students and organized by students. Liss Platt (my colleague) and I facilitated (or whatever you would call it – perhaps curated) the online site. I hope this represents an ongoing engagement of the AGH and Multimedia.
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Problems with Open Source
Fundamental issues with open source software development is an essay in First Monday that lists 5 problems with many open source tools. The essay is by Michelle Levesque at U of T and is based on her experience with adapting an open source package. The problems are:
– Poor user interface design
– Poor documentation
– Feature-centric development
– Programed for the programmers
– Religious blindness
She points out how many of these problems also apply to commercial developments – the question is whether any of these are linked to the nature of open source development. She doesn’t quite complete the job of working from characteristics of OS development to the problems demonstrating the inherent strengths and weaknesses in the approach. That is perhaps for a further study.
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LiveJournal Images
LiveJournal Images is a script that lists all the recent images posted to LiveJournal.com a popular blog site. The script is written in php. (Thanks to Words’ End.
How could this be used for digital art? Could one create a found slide show with this?
Who are the barbarians?
Denys Arcand’s movie Les Invasions barbares (2003) is a sequel to The Decline of the American Empire that nicely works through the clash of two generations, the 60s book-oriented intellectuals of the left and their 90s/00s children who play computer games and make money with computers.
Some of the same issues are posed by the essay in FrontPage The Magic of Images by Camille Paglia. Paglia believes that knowing images is more important than ever, but our postmodern approach to the visual prevalent in universities doesn’t work. It is a literary approach grounded in the theories of our generation not the practices of our children.
My take is that the humanities lost relevance when we abandoned creation for criticism. As important as criticism is, as a practice it is sold as the practice of the custodians of value. There are the struggling artists and programmers who make and the custodians (think Plato’s guardians) who decide what is good. Well … no one pays attention to our connesseurship, even when grounded in French theory. Popular culture passed us by when we detached creative practices from criticism. Students passed us by when we were no longer teaching people to contribute culture, which is what they want to do. While it is expensive to teach the arts, we need to reincoporate them into the humanities. To some extent Philosophy is the last humanities discipline where to study philosophy is still to do it.
Returning to Arcand’s film – who are the barbarians? Are the game playing ADD students that we complain about the barbarians or are we? (Yes, I do have a beard.)
Continue reading Who are the barbarians?