Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 649

High-IQ hacker overachiever dude in the slammer

*Where the system chose to put him. There are other systems that just woulda shot him.

*There are not a million guys like this, but sometimes I feel like I've met a million guys like this. Boy, this story makes me tired. Any hacker glamour one might see in this situation went away a long time ago, for me. It really burdens the soul.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/watt-reports-to-prison/

*Interesting subculture, prison. Full of guys who are in there because they were doing favors f...

The Invisible Crazy Robot Hand

*Nobody is less surprised than me than interacting pieces of software can do weird emergent stuff and act all buggy. This is not, like, some surprising discovery. It's more like a law of computational physics.

*For the stock market to go into a "tornado" of dark pool trading is not all that great, though. Especially when days tick by, and nobody knows what the hell actually happened. That is not a stable market, folks. That's not a free market, either. Why would any sane person have...

Carbon Tunnel Algae Park

*That video is one classy piece of architecture-fiction.

http://wpa2.aud.ucla.edu/info/index.php?/theprojects/winners/

The wit and wisdom of Denis Diderot

*Maybe they called it 'the Enlightenment' for a reason.

"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money, or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will...

'Agents and Provocateurs' in Dortmund

* * *

Agents & Provocateurs

HMKV in the Dortmunder U - Center for  Art and Creativity

May 14 – July 18, 2010

Opening: Friday, May 14,  2010, 18:00, basement under the Dortmunder U

Greeting: Birgit Jörder, Mayor of the City of Dortmund

Welcome: Dr. Inke Arns, Artistic Director of HMKV, Dortmund

About the exhibition: Dr. Beata Hock and Franciska Zólyom, co-curators, Budapest / Berlin

In the framework of Scene Ungarn in NRW — 40. internationale Kulturtage der Stadt Dortmund 2010

With works by more...

Facebook backlash time

*It's in the air this season, so if you're into that, you might want a look at a couple of these ticked-off screeds.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/

http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/it-time-abandon-facebook

*Personally, I'd be interested in what happens to all this Facebook data when Facebook pulls a Friendster and naturally implodes in another five years or so. By 2016, there oughta be room for all that stuff on a single Chinese thumbdrive.

*How 'bout the entirety of G...

Arphid Watch: tracking hardwoods

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hawaiian_hardwood_company_grows_rfid.php

"In other words, you can watch your trees mature via Google Earth."

21C reappears in the actual 21C

*Erik Davis, Jonathan Lethem and Philip K. Dick. This interview is really and truly amazing, in, like, some deep, classically-amazing sense.

http://www.21cmagazine.com/#317929/Jonathan-Lethem-Chronic-Obsession

*I can't imagine this thing appearing in any venue other than 21C. That zine was the hairiest Australian magazine in the history of the universe. And now they put the archives online, and they're trying to pile something on top of that.

*That's a genuinely scary crowd. Really...

The Science and Entertainment Exchange

*It's a federally-supported science-entertainment complex from the National Academy of Sciences. Golly gee whiz. Apparently these characters are actually in the business of creating design-fiction diegetic prototypes for Hollywood blockbuster product. Until today, I had no idea that they existed. They read like they themselves oughta be design fiction. It's like looking under your couch and finding Narnia.

http://blog.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/

*Look at the depth of talent on...

It's been a busy spring over at Cocktail Physics

*I wonder how the physics pop-science writer schtick got so totally io9-ized. This woman's lifestyle is a complete quantum freak scene.

http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cocktail_party_physics/2010/05/gaga-for-science.html

"And there you have: a movable feast of science-inspired elements to provide fodder for the Spousal Unit's Gaga-esque rock opera about cosmology. For those who remain unconvinced, earlier this year, Improbable Research featured a couple of interesting equations: one a GA GA ...