Linear A.
Ancient language, lost to the modern day. Largely undecipherable.
So this got me to thinking . . . what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine's subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?
- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
(via hello-kitty)
in the grim future of hello kitty, there is only the slums of shaolin.
(Previously.)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Pyromaniacal tendencies of Southern New Jersey (via relaxing)
the neighbors next door are shooting off fireworks from their shed and aiming them over my house. hooray, america.
chattr - immutable
i wrote this piece last summer, after spending the fourth of july alone an listening to fireworks go off around my neighborhood.
the number of ways my life has changed since are immeasurable, but primarily i have someone here with me now to share all this beauty with, and living isn’t so bad after all.
DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL.
I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”
A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”
Modern Mechanix - THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (1959)
((and the lonely people are getting lonelier.))
THE FIRST INSTANCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION-INDUCED LOLS??
In an early experiment, the computer was asked to translate the English saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” into Russian. The result was startling: “Invisible and insane.”
PLUS BONUS “oh brave new world!” FACTS:
Most commercial and scientific computer systems are huge affairs that fill a good-sized room which must be air-conditioned and dust-free. The largest digital computers cost from $500,000 to $4,000,000 each and yet they are being produced on an assembly-line basis by several companies.
Concertlog: Johann Johannsson w/ Lichens @ St Mary’s Church, Philadelphia
(via relaxing)
deeply impressive show, on par with the stars of the lid performance in west philly last year. johannsson closed with the analog sequences and dramatic strings of “guidelines for a space propulsion device” and the applause came strong for several minutes, until the players came back for an encore.
but before all this, rob lowe (as lichens) had already blown the audience away with an amazing soundscape/journey created solely with his voice and a looping pedal. it was amazing act that seemed both tailored to the long beard/tie dye west philly crowd, yet far beyond what anyone had come to expect from ambient/looping music.
my only regret was not bringing my taping rig.
(bonus meta rant:
so this tumblr “photoset” thing is kinda cool, but i don’t like that you have to click on it to get to the good stuff. denies you the visceral response that makes tumblr worthwhile.
i thought photosets were going to be a way to have multiple images inline in a single post. which would violate the sanctity of the tumblr concept, i guess. but this doesn’t, because it’s a single flash object? mmkay.
meta-rant over.)
The Sartorialist: On the Street……Green & Blue Al Milano
it’s been a while since the sartorialist has run anything i like…
