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“All the words written on the Ficlets site are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.”
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Pictures of control panels
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Month: March 2007
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links for 2007-03-10
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A Lisp vector graphics library
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“I believe that we have to admit that Western cultures do tend to display a disrespectful attitude towards Asian and other cultures.”
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I wish they’d post the article about Joywar.
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Electroluminescent wire and glowing panels. Entirely excellent stuff and very cheap.
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The Poverty Of Historicism
Popper followed up “The Open Society And Its Enemies” with a critique of Marxism called “The Poverty Of Historicism”. The Historicism of the title is Marxism’s Hegelian spirit of history.
Impersonal, super-human forces such as history or the spirit of the age are bullshit. But at least they are unfalsifiable and incomprehensible bullshit. Markets have no such defence. Their claims are falsifiable, and they are historically tractable.
Markets are bullshit. They are painted as Conway’s Life with pennies but they are fractal smoke-filled rooms. And, oh, the sweetness of the air as we hear about market forces, the logic of the market, the market, the market, the fucking market. The market this, the market that, the market ate my homework. But the market is a human construct.
The poverty of historicism, of Marxism, of Leninism, of Stalinism, of, Gods of all denominations help us, Mao Tse Tsung thought, is the poverty of Marketism. The faithful of the market, marketarians, are the Party Members of carefully constructed legal fictions where the comforting fantasy of the paradise of the invisible hand has been replaced with the comforting fantasy of the unavoidable screwing over of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
That markets appear to work for those they serve is no more here nor there than the benefits of party membership. The smug useful idiocy of the wannabe market rich, of economic libertarians and other hilarious self-flaggelants, is even less to the point.
Markets work in the same way that party membership worked. You cannot blame those whose heads you stand on for not standing on your head anywhere outside of an Escher etching. People need to wake up from the fantasy of markets and soon.
Smithian Hegelism, marketism, is the historicism of The End Of History. The poverty of historicism hasn’t changed, only the trance-words have.
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links for 2007-03-06
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Granada media take note. Teachers who tell off the children who are present over the children who are absent are venting frustration, not addressing a problem.
Here’s the first successful image created by the new composition system for draw-something:
The forms share some vertices because of the new composition system, and their colours relate because of using AARON’s new colouring system. This is the third run of the new code: the first had a bug, the second wasn’t interesting. So there’s more tuning up to do, but this image shows how things will and can work.
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links for 2007-03-04
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“It’s amazing how the Olympics have come to symbolize bullying corporate greed; overreaching, violent “security measures;” drug abuse and destruction of public facilities and low-income housing.”
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“Cognitive Daily ran an experiment to find out how good people were at recognizing famous faces and other things in extremely low-resolution photos.”
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How to build Arduino for GNU/Linux on PowerPC
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How fractional work works.
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Cello And Digital Delay
I found another MySpace page for someone who uses a cello and a digital delay to make music. If you’re not familiar with digital delays they’re short loop sampler foot pedals, like KT Tunstall uses for performing “The Black Horse And The Cherry Tree” live. If you’re not familiar with cellos, go and listen to some Rasputina or to “Hounds Of Love”.
There’s a feminist analysis to be had here but I’m not really qualified to make it.
Instead I’m interested in what the equivalent for visual art would be. Charcoal and scanner? Palette knife and digital camera? A dialogue between old high cultural skill and new media reproduction that empowers the individual, making something very new with a lineage. I scanned and arranged paint samples years ago but I was limited by the technology I had available at the time.
One important consideration is that a digital delay doesn’t alter the texture or richness of sound any more than any other performance or recording technology. Scan and print paint or pastel and you lose colour and texture. Reproduction transforms visual media much more markedly. You either have to plan for inkjet, which limits your use of the media, or you have to choose media that will survive scanning. Printmaking and illustration media for example.
Another way of handling this is to use a pen that happens to output mouse movements rather than ink. A Wacom tablet. This can then be worked into vector composition of bitmap pen actions.
The irony of a cybernetically superhuman classicism or folk is reproduced by such a set-up, and if the indexicality of it can be as well then this might be worthwhile.
I wonder what examples there are of this kind of thing?
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Don’t Buy Discgo
If you want a USB memory key for something other than windows, don’t buy a Discgo Classic. They have some crapware called U3 on that will get in your way and deny several megs of the disk’s space to you on Linux and Mac at the hardware level.There’s an uninstaller, but it only works on Windows. Despite the packaging claiming Mac and Linux compatibility.Who at Discgo was stupid enough to think that this adds value?
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links for 2007-02-28
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Inkscape graphics tutorial
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Fantagraphics are *brilliant*! Give them money to help them defend themselves against libel charges!
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Corporate support for the arts is decreasing, here are the numbers.