Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 668

Dead Media Beat: Charles Babbage

*Reading some Charles Babbage lately on manufacturing and economics, a topic Babbage took up while attempting and failing to build a computer. It's odd how maker-like Babbage's attitude is: he's a geek first and an industrialist second. As a rich kid, an autodidactic genius and a college dropout, Babbage is far, far more interested in neat-o hackerly quirks of manufacturing than he is in the simple everyday facts of money and power.

*This causes him to constantly point out that things...

Centipedes for everybody

*Thanks to demolished barriers to media entry, now everyone can have their own Monica Lewinsky scandal.

*Are people gonna bother? No. They're gonna automate it. Autonomous slander spam.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/

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"That picture of you making out with two guys in college up on Facebook. Or perhaps doing a bong hit after winning a few Olympic gold medals. The random slam against your restaurant anonymously left by the owner of t...

A fine collection of curious sound objects

*Processing and Arduino. Man, I would blog this with my last breath.

http://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/fine-collection-of-curious-sound-objects-processing/

"The installation includes six exhibits, at first sight looking trivial, each object incorporates a very unique ability. Each is accompanied with a little story, all completely concealing the existence of technical components such as speakers or sensors, only small connection ports as well as the uniform black finishing point t...

Design fiction at work

*The ol' alma mater, making bricks out of imaginary straw. "Art Center College of Design Fiction."

http://www.artcenter.edu/mdp/ideasinthemaking2010/research/residency_madeup.html

"made up

"Making, making things, and making things up each describe what designers do. The last of these – often the domain of crackpots and visionaries – has found new relevance for a generation of designers reacting to a rapidly changing world.

"Speculative practices invite the use of fiction to produce as much as...

The acid cartel

*Interesting that, after 40 years, these acid-dazed dropout adventurers can now be back-read as a "mafia" and a "cartel."

*One wonders what would have happened if LSD had been open-sourced and had

never been worth any money. Much like marijuana and alcohol, that drug could be

likely created in massive bulk by lazy hobbyists if it wasn't illegal.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book24-2010mar24,0,2597283.story

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By decade's end, the psychedelic messengers had sidetracked into a...

Arundhati Roy mixing it up with the Naxalite jungle fighters

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/27/arundhati-roy-india-tribal-maoists-1

*Man, no wonder the Indian power structure doesn't know what to do with her. Reading this is like inhaling red pepper.

Arphid Watch: carbon nanotube RFID labels

*At last: cheap throwaway possibly toxic tracking labels that are both "arphids" and "buckyjunk" at the same time.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24852/?nlid=2850&a=f

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Gyoujin Cho, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Sunchon National University, who led the work, estimates that the tags cost three cents apiece. To replace barcodes, RFID tags will need to cost a penny or less. But Cho says this should be achievable if all the layers on a tag can be deposited with a...

Timothy Garton Ash on China vs. Google

*Timothy is a 1989 veteran, and boy, there's been a lot of water under the bridge since a dissident could outwit the state with a thermal-paper fax machine.

http://www.b92.net/eng/insight/opinions.php?nav_id=66071

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"Meanwhile, netizens everywhere have multiple identities: we are individuals, citizens and residents of a particular state (or two), users of particular platforms and products. We are also human beings with unprecedented possibilities of communicating directly with other human...

MacBook 3D, yeah right

*Design fictions are getting slyer and more pranksterish every day. This thing verges on forgery, on hoax. Everybody knows how to do Apple graphic design now. One wonders why they don't dress up as Steve Jobs and do YouTube releases. Matter of time there, maybe.

http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/03/26/macbook-3d-glasses-included/

Cyber security: starting all over again

*Over at WIRED Threat Level, they don't think "cyber" anything makes any sense any more.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/cyber-hype/

*So, there's a political-correctness internal war in the USA over whether cyberwar is cyberwar or not. I'm a veteran of this stuff because I was so often assured there was no such thing as "cyberpunk." One can't deny the objective existence of scary things by saying that certain words sound scary or weird. It's like the abortion opposition between...