Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 652

Web Semantics: cyberspace in words and warfare

*Nothing I like better than a little of the ol' cyberwar-semantic multinodal-multimodal.

http://www.currentintelligence.net/agenda/2010/3/14/dark-visions-cyberspace-in-words-and-warfare.html

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"War in the modern world is a messy and complex business, in which identities and boundaries are blurred and subverted, in which states are as much concerned about the enemy within as the enemy without, and which is, after the demise of the Soviet Union, not only multipolar, but multimodal and...

Dead Media Beat: dead cloud music

*Maybe you ponied up some money in good faith, but I hope you didn't think you owned any of that vaporous favela, there. "Cloud? What cloud? You see any cloud here? Me neither."

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-kills-lala-music-service/

"Apple closed down the cloud-based Lala music service Friday for reasons unknown, after acquiring it in December. Lala members can still access their online collections, but only until May 31, when Apple will take the service offline completely. ...

The Aetheric Message Machine

*Kinda liking the undead-media thing going on here.

http://www.aetherltd.com/deployment.html

Augmented Reality: puzzle demo

*Awaiting the thousand-piece AR jigsaw puzzle.

Globalized organic ranch bums

*One might have known there would be a website social-media angle in this somewhere. "Yeah man, I really want to get down in that rich, earthy loam with my Internet."

http://www.gnn.com/article/vounteers-see-value-in-farming-for-free/1038246

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Ramfjord and Riddle each paid $20 to become part of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms USA, a group with 9,000 members known by a variation of its acronym, woofers. It's kind of a new millennium version of the traveling hobo willing to work for a...

Wolfgang's V Symphony

*I cordially hate mashups of this kind, but this one is so aggressively and dumbly not-okay that's it's almost sorta okay. I think Beethoven might have found this interesting, especially if you jacked up the club amps to about 90 decibels so that Beethoven could "hear" it.

*Plus, "Wolfgang Gartner," despite his Berlin-style techno DJ handle, is living in Austin. I dunno if that makes this piece better, or worse.

Augmented Reality: YDreams depth-sensing camera

*They're from Portugal, YDreams. Look at 'em pushing the envelope there with a little good-old fashioned tech improvement in markerless registration. Hey, go Portugal.

That Was Her Letter to the World

*From online crowdfunded shtick straight to print-on-demand. i wonder what would happen if this work of Ms Valente's was, like, the best book of the last ten years. I mean, what if some text produced by these means… sans editor, sans publisher, sans promoter, sans bookstore, sans pretty much anything but author and presumably some readers… turned out to be just insanely great?

*Would you even know? Maybe it would be like your situation if your next door neighbor had cocktail parties that w...

Janne Kytannen, Fabbing Superstar

*It's gotta be a healthy sign for the fabbing industry that some laser-sintering, pixel-pushing geek has gone totally rockstar. This is 2010, after all.

http://www.freedomofcreation.com/home/janne-kyttanen-interviewed-by-shapeways

"Shapeways: How did you get into 3D printing?

"Janne Kyttanen: I saw it on some fair in the mid 90's. I had my first computer when I was 8 years old and have been pretty much counting polygons ever since."

(((But, uhm, maybe Janne is pushing it.)))

Shapeways: Do you...

Kalki Koechlin as Indian Eco-Chic

*Is that great, or what? Frankly, this is starting to worry me. It's like they're deliberately trying to push my Indo-global cybergreen buttons here.