"art" entries

Four short links: 18 April 2016

Four short links: 18 April 2016

Classic Programmer Paintings, Equality at Work, Bitcoin as Politics, and Raising Robotic Natives

  1. Classic Programmer Paintings — hilarity has ensued. The captions are brilliant.
  2. Equality Takes WorkWomen do not prefer saying less: They anticipate the treatment they will receive when they say more.
  3. Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing ExtremismThe lack of any thorough, non-conspiratorial analysis of existing financial systems means that bitcoin fails to embody any true alternative to them. The reasons for this have little to do with technology and everything to do with the existing systems in which bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are embedded, systems that instantiate the forms of social power that cannot be eliminated through either wishful thinking or technical or even political evasion: the rich and powerful will not become poor and powerless simply because other people decide to operate alternate economies of exchange. […] Because it operates without such an account, bitcoin’s real utility and purpose (and that of the cryptocurrency movement in general) can be better understood as a “program” for recruiting uninformed citizens into a neoliberal anti-government politics, understanding the nature and effects of which requires just the attention to political theory and history that bitcoin enthusiasts rail against. So … not a fan, then?
  4. Raising Robotic Natives — design/art artefacts for generations growing up with robots.

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Four short links: 16 December 2015

Four short links: 16 December 2015

Face Matching, Engineering Rewrites, Public Domain Illustrations, and Robotic Wrapup

  1. Face Director — Disney software to match faces between takes. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control.
  2. Move Fast and Fix Things — blow by blow of an engineering rewrite of some key functionality at GitHub, interesting from a “oh so that’s how they do it” point of view (if blow-by-blow engineering rewrites qualify as “interesting” to you).
  3. Old Book Illustrations — public domain book illustrations, tagged and searchable. Yes, like Font Awesome of engraving.
  4. The State of Robotics for 2015 (TechCrunch) — nice summary/wrapup of what’s out there now.
Four short links: 30 July 2015

Four short links: 30 July 2015

Catalogue Data, Git for Data, Computer-Generated Handwriting, and Consumer Robots

  1. A Sort of Joy — MOMA’s catalogue was released under CC license, and has even been used to create new art. The performance is probably NSFW at your work without headphones on, but is hilarious. Which I never thought I’d say about a derivative work of a museum catalogue. (via Courtney Johnston)
  2. dat goes beta — the “git for data” goes beta. (via Nelson Minar)
  3. Computer Generated Handwriting — play with it here. (via Evil Mad Scientist Labs)
  4. Japanese Telcos vie for Consumer Robot-as-a-Service Business (Robohub) — NTT says Sota will be deployed in seniors’ homes as early as next March, and can be connected to medical devices to help monitor health conditions. This plays well with Japanese policy to develop and promote technological solutions to its aging population crisis.
Four short links: 12 May 2015

Four short links: 12 May 2015

Data Center Numbers, Utility Computing, NSA Art, and RIP CAP

  1. We Used to Build Steel Mills Near Cheap Sources of Power, but Now That’s Where We Build DatacentersHennessy & Patterson estimate that of the $90M cost of an example datacenter (just the facilities – not the servers), 82% is associated with power and cooling. The servers in the datacenter are estimated to only cost $70M. It’s not fair to compare those numbers directly since servers need to get replaced more often than datacenters; once you take into account the cost over the entire lifetime of the datacenter, the amortized cost of power and cooling comes out to be 33% of the total cost, when servers have a three-year lifetime and infrastructure has a 10-15 year lifetime. Going back to the Barroso and Holzle book, processors are responsible for about a third of the compute-related power draw in a datacenter (including networking), which means that just powering processors and their associated cooling and power distribution is about 11% of the total cost of operating a datacenter. By comparison, the cost of all networking equipment is 8%, and the cost of the employees that run the datacenter is 2%.
  2. Microsoft Invests in 3 Undersea Cable Projects — utility computing is an odd concept, given how quickly hardware cycles refresh. In the past, you could ask whether investors wanted to be in a high-growth, high-risk technology business or a stable blue-chip utility.
  3. Secret Power — Simon Denny’s NSA-logo-and-Snowden-inspired art makes me wish I could get to Venice. See also The Guardian piece on him.
  4. Please Stop Calling Databases CP or AP (Martin Kleppman) — The fact that we haven’t been able to classify even one datastore as unambiguously “AP” or “CP” should be telling us something: those are simply not the right labels to describe systems. I believe that we should stop putting datastores into the “AP” or “CP” buckets. So readable!
Four short links: 5 January 2015

Four short links: 5 January 2015

3D Art Reuse, Faceted Data Browser, Robotics Roundup, and Social Signal Interpretation

  1. Lincoln Gallery Reuse — UK gallery placed 3D models of their works online and are sharing what people did with them. Some beautiful art in here! (via BoingBoing)
  2. Kesihif — open source browser for faceted data.
  3. 2014 Robotics IPOs, Acquisitions, and Failures (RoboHub) — good roundup of what happened in 2014.
  4. SSIan open source platform for social signal interpretation.
Four short links: 22 December 2014

Four short links: 22 December 2014

Manufacturers and Consumers, Time Management, Ethical Decisions, and Faux Faces

  1. Manufacturers and Consumers (Matt Webb) — manufacturers never spoke to consumers before. They spoke with distributors and retailers. But now products are connected to the Internet, manufacturers suddenly have a relationship with the consumer. And they literally don’t know what to do.
  2. Calendar Hacks (Etsy) — inspiration for your New Year’s resolution to waste less time.
  3. Making an Ethical Decision — there actually is an [web] app for that.
  4. Masks That Look Human to Computers — an artist creates masks that look like faces to face-recognition algorithms, but not necessarily to us. cf Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled.
Four short links: 16 October 2014

Four short links: 16 October 2014

Eye Catcher, Exoskeleton, Homebrew Cray, and Information Architecture

  1. Eye Catcher (We Make Money Not Art) — the most banal-looking wooden frame takes thus a life of its own as soon as you come near it. It quickly positions itself in front of you, spots your eyes and starts expressing ’emotions’ based on your own. Eye Catcher uses the arm of an industrial robot, high power magnets, a hidden pinhole camera, ferrofluid and emotion recognition algorithms to explore novel interactive interfaces based on the mimicry and exchange of expressions.
  2. FORTIS Exoskeleton (Lockheed Martin) — transfers loads through the exoskeleton to the ground in standing or kneeling positions and allows operators to use heavy tools as if they were weightless. (via CNN)
  3. Homebrew Cray-1A – fascinating architecture, but also lovely hobby project to build the homebrew. The lack of Cray software archives horrifies the amateur historian in me, though. When I started building this, I thought “Oh, I’ll just swing by the ol’ Internet and find some groovy 70′s-era software to run on it.” It turns out I was wrong. One of the sad things about pre-internet machines (especially ones that were primarily purchased by 3-letter Government agencies) is that practically no software exists for them. After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Musuem and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90′s.
  4. How Do Committees Invent? — 1968 paper that gave us organizations which design systems […] produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. That was the 1968 version of the modern “your website’s sitemap is your org chart”.
Four short links: 11 December 2013

Four short links: 11 December 2013

Surveillance Future, DNS Control, 3D Printed Room, and Reality Check

  1. Meet Jack, or What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data (ACLU) — sham slidedeck which helps laypeople see how our data exhaust can be used against us to keep us safe.
  2. PirateBay Moves Domains — different ccTLDs have different policies and operate in different jurisdictions, because ICANN gives them broad discretion to operate the country code domains. However, post-Snowden, governments are turning on the US’s stewardship of critical Internet bodies, so look for governments (i.e., law enforcement) to be meddling a lot more in DNS, IP addresses, routing, and other things which thus far have been (to good effect) fairly neutrally managed.
  3. 3D Printed Room (PopSci) — printed from sand, 11 tons, fully structural, full of the boggle. (via John Hagel)
  4. Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising — awesome tumblr, great post. (via Keith Bolland)

Four short links: 19 September 2013

Four short links: 19 September 2013

Art and Money, Probabilistic Programming, Feature Flow, and Good Drones

  1. How Jim Henson Turned His Art Into a Business (Longreads) — When Henson joined on to the experimental PBS show Sesame Street in 1968, he was underpaid for his services creating Big Bird and Oscar. Yet he spent his free nights in his basement, shooting stop-motion films that taught kids to count. If you watch these counting films, the spirit of Henson’s gift shines through. I think any struggling artist today could count Henson among their ilk. He had all the makings of a tragic starving artist. The only difference between him and us is that he made peace with money.
  2. Probabilistic Programming and the Democratization of AI (YouTube) — talk by Brian Ruttenberg, examples in Figaro, a Scala library which is apparently open source despite hiding behind a “give us your contact details” form.
  3. Linux Panel — love the crossflow of features: “Embedded today is what enterprise was five years ago,” Kroah-Hartman said. “You have a quad-core in your pocket. The fun thing about Linux is all the changes you make have to work on all the things.” The advances in power management driven by mobile devices initially weren’t that interesting to enterprise developers, according to Kroah-Hartman. That quickly changed once they realized it was helping them save millions of dollars in data center power costs.
  4. A Drone’s View of the Colorado Floods (DIY Drones) — some amazing footage.
Four short links: 23 April 2013

Four short links: 23 April 2013

Processing for Illustrator, Archiving Tools, Sweet Retro Art, and More Database Tools

  1. Drawscript — Processing for Illustrator. (via BERG London)
  2. Archive Team Warriora virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive. (via Ed Vielmetti)
  3. Retro Vectorsroyalty-free and free of charge.
  4. TokutekDB Goes Open Sourcea high-performance, transactional storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB. See the announcement.