KuiperCliff

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KuiperCliff revamp
2007-03-21 13:44:00
As I stumbled past 100 posts a couple of days ago, and a ripe old 34 years today, I figured I needed a bit of a change. First to go is the old theme. I originally wanted this blog to be more of a workspace/toolbox than an art gallery, and this new theme has a ...
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KuiperCliff QR-coded
2007-03-20 21:19:00
A few days ago I wrote about semacodes and physical hyperlinks in KuiperCliff sematagged. Since then I’ve taken the trouble to read about more about these subjects and the “Internet of Things”. This morning I received an email from a Tokyo company asking me to write about one of their products on this blog. The product, ...
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Death by Robot
2007-03-19 11:50:00
Inkblot Earth posts the fascinating stories of the first persons known to have been killed by robots. In 1971, a certain Robert Williams met his end in an unfortunate industrial accident. There are few details of this incident, but more is known about how Kenji Urada died in 1981, pushed into a grinding machine at ...
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Silver Surveillance
2007-03-18 20:20:00
Rollfilm posted a series of early photographs today, one of which was Louis Daguerre’s amazing “Boulevard du Temple”, apparently the first photograph to show a person (bottom left, at the sidewalk shoeshine): The relative crispness of the shot hides the fact that this was a ten-minute exposure. The traffic was moving too fast to appear on ...
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Extramural
2007-03-18 19:16:00
This photograph by Eric Rechsteiner is one of a series called Murmur, subtitled Tokyo Walls (via sungypsy):   It’s the perfect visual accompaniment to this striking passage from 0.1 Wall (Urban Computing): Walls always set up flows orthogonal to those impinging on them; wherever there is a wall, you can be sure of finding some force - ...
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Wireless meat vibrator
2007-03-17 12:10:00
Over at I Make Projects some electronics geek has thunk up a device that reacts to the relative strengths of local wireless signals. It then transmits this information to the wearer by changing the rapidity of the vibrating “heartbeat” of the gizmo. Wonderful. Apparently, “meat” blocks the signals, so it’ll be a while before we ...
More About: Wireless , Meat , Wire , Less , Vibrator

Out of the Dead City
2007-03-17 11:13:00
At the end of his misunderstood 2006 SXSW Rant, Bruce Sterling makes a very humanist point - he decries the lack of serenity to be found on the internet. We’re all so busy and frantic, forcing our lives to fill the capacity of the technology, that sometimes we forget there’s a real, carbon-based world out ...
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Pseudo-random linkfest
2007-03-16 15:31:00
Number One in an occasional series? I can no longer put off sorting out the scary mess that are my Firefox bookmarks. I’m not a fan of the FF bookmarks system, and my fledgling del.icio.us account is proving a far more flexible replacement. Inspired by Bruce Sterling’s comments yesterday about the original nature of weblogs, here’s ...
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Baudrillard on computing
2007-03-16 14:05:00
A friend of mine pointed me to an article published in Slate a couple of days ago. Le Browser: saluting Jean Baudrillard by Michael Agger is an affectionate tribute to the deceased French provocateur. It includes this passage, quoted from America (1988), which I haven’t read: Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, ...
More About: Comp , Computing , Putin , Drill , Lard

Herbertsmithite::New State of Matter?
2007-03-16 12:38:00
New Scientist reports that “The universe is a string-net liquid“. The physics is way beyond me, but I think a string-net allows for the unification of light and electrons in a model whereby electrons are not fundamental particles, but merely the ends of long strings of “true” fundamental particles. These strings can be arranged in ...
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In-flight surveillance redux
2007-03-15 13:07:00
Exactly a month ago I wrote a short post, “In-flight surveillance“, about a ludicrous euro-scheme to put cameras in the back of aeroplane seats. Britain was taking the lead, of course, but even the airlines were looking askance at this nonsensical project. Today, Bruce Scheneier sent out his monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter, which includes a short ...
More About: Surveillance , Light , Flight , Lance , Redu

KuiperCliff sematagged
2007-03-15 01:06:00
My cellphone is only capable of making and receiving calls and texts - the last bells-and-whistles phone I had here in Cairo filled up with sand. But if I did have a phone with both a camera and web access, etc, it might be interesting to explore semacodes. Semacodes (or “tags”) codify URLs in graphical form, ...
More About: Tagged , Cliff

Modelling the emergence of opinions
2007-03-14 22:46:00
My employers have graciously granted us three days holiday, and I fully intend to spend what time I’m not carousing, geeking around on the intertubes. Item #1 … New Scientist’s tech site reports on a fascinating piece of research into networks, in ‘Computer model hints at how opinions evolve‘. Two isolated groups were gradually linked by increasing ...
More About: Opinions , Opinion , Dell , Model , Modelling

Social Media Websites - For Dummies
2007-03-14 20:21:00
There’s a very funny series of caricatures at Drivl.com, taking aim at Del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot and a very cute Reddit nerd. Here’s Digg:
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Tech Link Train Meme
2007-03-14 13:54:00
This is a new one on me, but I’m going to run with it - well, up to a point. Hrafn at inkblot earth has been kind enough to list me as one of five tagged sites he’s contributing to the latest meme tag train - Tech nology & Science. In the mode of the old snail-mail ...
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Images of Aggregation and Flow
2007-03-13 05:35:00
Check out the photography of Emmy award winner Andy Lomas. There are two sets of “simulated aggregate geometry” images, which result from the movement of particles within ‘force fields’. The simulations use “genetic algorithms” to generate the images. The “Flow ” set shows the paths of these particles in motion, the “Aggregation” set the positions of these ...
More About: Images , Image , Greg , Ages

New man-made island in China
2007-03-13 04:14:00
This story is destined to be much-blogged, now that Boing Boing have posted it (with added value, of course). Developers in Chongqing city, west-central China , are refusing to pay this resident’s £1.3m asking price - “he wants 20 million yuan, or he’ll stay till the end of the world.” Looks like the 10m-deep moat around his ...
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Quantum Radar - Lockheed jumps the gun
2007-03-12 05:32:00
The Guardian recently drew attention to the aspirations of Lock heed Martin to develop a “quantum radar” that can “see through anything, from buildings to solid earth”. With the recent D-Wave debacle in mind, I decided to ask someone who actually knows about such things, Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized. Scott was kind enough to give me ...
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The Ugly Bugs Ball(ard?)
2007-03-11 15:33:00
This has been blogged a few times now, I’m sure (what hasn’t?), but the imagery is so arresting I figured I had to post. From SpiegelOnline comes a set of colour-enhanced electron scanning microscope shots of dead insects, recovered from the windshield of a moving vehicle. The mangled corpses of the unwitting victims bring to mind ...
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Mapping the dimensions of crime
2007-03-11 08:19:00
I have no idea (yet) whether many people have been doing similar things, but Michal Migurski at tecznotes has been thinking about how to visualise crime events (I, II, III, IV so far). In attempting to produce a visual framework for presenting crime in the Oakland, CA, area, he started with the idea of residual haunting, ...
More About: Crime , Men , Sion , Dimension , Ping

ParkeHarrison Æthereal Steampunk
2007-03-10 09:54:02
A big and grateful nod to Honky-Tonk Dragon for this link to a series of stunning photographs by Robert and Shana Park eHarrison. They have an aethereal and surreal quality that reminds me of Joel-Peter Witkin and Edward Gorey. Robert poses in all of the photographs, “as an anonymous Everyman figure struggling heroically but futilely with the forces of nature in a drear world.” Disturbing, saddening, nostalgic, wistful, and very steampunk. This gallery of photographs is at the superb Masters of Fine Art Photography site.
More About: Punk , Team , Real , Here

AstroZombie
2007-03-10 09:54:02
I’m not sure why this tickled me so much, it just did: By Dennis Culver, via Warren Ellis.
More About: Zombie , Astro

War & Death - new ?bloat-map?
2007-03-10 09:54:02
Although not normally somewhere I’d go within a hundred miles of, the Daily Mail (via Wired) publishes an interesting series of cartograms. These redraw the globe, with each country’s size remapped according to its relative position within the chosen categories. The “War and Death ” map uses 2002 data, with the Democratic Republic of Congo responsible for a quarter of all war-related deaths that year. No surprise there, with neighbour Burundi (the bloated dark grey blob in the centre of the map) having the highest death rate. The Daily Mail can be described, at best, as an anti-intellectual rag, so they don’t publish any links (nor did an earlier article in The Times). The project that produced these maps is a University of Michigan / University of Sheffield partnership called Worldmapper. They have produced hundreds of maps in 27 categories, from “Food” to “Production” to “Disaster”. I’m looking forward to R...

France bans vlog violence
2007-03-10 09:54:02
France bans vloggers from filming and distributing ‘acts of violence’. Weber said that a state requires a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force“. Will this new law ensure that France, through professional journalists, also has a monopoly on the legitimate recording of force? Rodney King. March 3, 1991, nearly 16 years to the day: Infoworld.com OhmyNews
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Technosexual is real? Fcuk Android Today!!
2007-03-10 09:54:02
A designer I?ve never heard of, but am probably meant to know, called Manish Arora (flash site, beware!) has been putting on shows at London Fashion Week (extreme narcissism, beware!). As an Indian, he has, of course, been patronised by the press. This fashion nonsense isn’t the kind of thing that would normally raise the slightest interest from me. The only thing that keeps me from calling most fashion (and related parasitic pursuits) “utter wank” is the fact that I get up every day and pull a pair of jeans on. Ergo I?m clothed, and somehow be-fashioned. But then this image came via Boing Boing, of one of Arora’s models, backstage at, er, LFW: It’s a beautiful shot of a beautiful woman, even if she’s done up like an extra from Farscape. It was only in the morning I’d learnt there was a term “technosexual“. So I found this great site, which features Hajime Sorayama’s Gynoids, of which this is the least masturbatory: Read ...
More About: Techno , Tech , Today , Nose , Real

Syllogomania - Infohoarding
2007-03-10 09:54:02
Wired has an article called “Downloading Is a Packrat’s Dream“, which tells us about those people who seemingly can’t bear to leave anything un-downloaded. Call it syllogomania, compulsive hoarding or, in this time of the web, infohoarding, but this “may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of the digital age.” Quite often, this compulsion is borne of not having enough information to make effective decisions about collection or disposal. Sometimes this manifests itself as disposophobia, the fear of throwing anything away. Is this going to cause a problem, as data production exceeds storage capacity? No, of course not - at least, not on the individual level. If a few thousand people end up at SA (Syllogomaniacs Anonymous) then our world can cope. But is there a broader, sociological manifestation of this in our collective inability to dispose of data? Are corporations and governments displaying a ‘rainy day’ aversion to ditching re...
More About: Info , Mani , Oman , Logo , Mania

Global data production to outstrip storage
2007-03-10 09:54:02
Rod at Perfectly Reasonable Deviations posted this story from Business Week magazine about how global data production will outstrip available data storage capacity at an unspecified point in the near future. Global data generated rose to 161bn gigabytes last year (161 exabytes), up from an estimated 5 exabytes in 2003. The current study (by IDC) estimates available global storage in 2006 at 185 exabytes, rising to 601 exabytes in 2010. Unfortunately, data production will have risen to 988 exabytes in the same period. Rod suggests that free data storage, as per gmail or wordpress.com, for example, is therefore not sustainable, and providers will inevitably have to start charging consumers for storage privileges. That’s entirely plausible, and some people (i.e. me) regard the plethora of free web services as nothing more than a massive loss-leader anyway. Is that a solution? Do we need all this data? Technology is fuelling a compulsion to remember and record everything, and we d...
More About: Product , Storage , Data , Production

Everyland, Everyman
2007-03-10 09:54:02
Strange Maps came up trumps again recently with a map of ‘The Most Generic Country Ever ‘. There is little that is human on this map except city, canal, road, crossroad and village and, of course, ‘Country or Kingdom’. ‘Boundary of Country’ looks more like a footpath. There is a real sense of exploration and colonisation, which reflects the imperial outlook of Britain in 1897. But what would have been added to a map like this since 1897, were we to redraft such a map for the early 21st century? There are several candidates: nuclear reactor, oil rig, motorway. You could add digital telephone exchange, dormitory town, out-of-town shopping mall, light industrial estate, central business district, enterprise zone. I would add a submarine cable, even though they have been in place since the 1850s, and a military base, for controlling the natives (us). In that vein, we should have television and radio transmitters, and a propagandist centrale (you take...
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CTheory mourns Baudrillard
2007-03-10 09:54:02
CTheo ry ’s Arthur Kroker can barely have had time to wipe the tears from his copy of ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ before writing a short piece memorialising ‘The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard ‘. I like Kroker, but occasionally his po-mo waffle makes me gag a bit. Luckily, he seems to have come up with the most memorable passage I have yet seen regarding Baudrillard’s legacy: If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in the way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will surely unwind precisely in the way he envisioned - a political conflagration of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating, reality-principles. When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard’s thought had about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descend...
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Towering Silent
2007-03-10 09:54:02
Inspired by BLDGBLOG’s post ‘Tower s of Silence‘, I found the following photograph at vonb.co.uk. This may or may not be a Zoroastrian excarnation platform as in the original post, but there is almost no information on the website. The photo was taken by someone called Claus von Bohlen und Halbach, who is the translator of this book, the descendant of this character, and whose great-grandmother lent her name to this.
More About: Ring , Silent , Lent , Erin