Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 692
February 3, 2010
The TechCrunch Europe Top 100
*High-tech European startups. Or, "Eurogeeks you've never heard of doing stuff that nobody knows about yet."
http://eu.techcrunch.com/the-techcrunch-europe-top-100/
"Welcome to the TechCrunch Europe Top 100. This is a regularly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. The Index is focused on mobile and web companies, although Cleantech and gadget companies will have a presence on the list, which covers the EMEA region. The index has been created in...
Art-museum futurism
Edinburgh College of Art
Future Collections Imagining research collections in the
21st century
February 1, 2010
University of Edinburgh
Curated by Clémentine Deliss, Future Academy & Randolph Cliff
Supported by Edinburgh College of Art, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland
With Bruce Altshuler (Director, Museum Studies, NYU); Charles Asprey (Randolph Cliff); Iain Boyd-Whyte (Architectural Historian, University of...
Conway's Game of Life generates a city
*Allen Varney remarks:
"What will interest you here is not so much the generated cube-city,
which looks kind of weird and implausible, but the way the coders show
up at the end wearing dark glasses and scarves, aiming for an
Italianate fashion statement."
(((Yeah MAN! If any coders looked that on purpose, they would be Processing coders.)))
http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2010/02/voxopolis-3d-city-via-conways-game-of.html
Dead Media Beat: Polish sound-postcards
*Never heard of 'em. Ever. But they're still for sale at flea markets.
*via Stefan Jones, a maven's maven:
http://www.theworld.org/2010/02/02/polish-sound-postcards/
"Back in the late 60s and early 70s it was difficult to get your hands on American pop music. At least, it was difficult if you lived in communist Poland. But Polish pop lovers found a way to get their fix of Donna Summer or Hot Chocolate. It came in the form of the sound postcard (pictured), a small plastic rectangle covered in g...
Near Future Laboratory: design for failure
http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2010/02/03/design-for-failure/
(…)
"If someone wants to extricate themselves from the databases of a service or system, there is almost certainly no quick and easy way — in fact, I doubt there is anyway at all, and most services are not obligated to handle these situations. If I told Google that I wanted to check out fully and completely, even if they wanted to do this, it is doubtful they could. Would someone have to run through all the backup *whatever —...
VURB
*This is likely to be THE place to watch if you are into "collaborative redevelopment," "civic information systems," "urban interface policy," and "urban systems literacy." Especially because I'm pretty sure that these hard-working VURB guys are making those things up all by themselves.
*Keen to see the day when I can step off some plane and truthfully comment, "boy, this town's urban interface policy really needs some collaborative redevelopment."
"VURB is a European...
Dead Media Beat: frailty of storage media
*Yet another in a ragged series of "digital dark age" articles, but this one has a twist: it posits a future brief breakdown of civilization.
*So, say the lights go out for five years… You pull the power plug, wait five years, plug it back in. What's left of the digital infrastructure? Not a heck of a lot, folks.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.300-digital-doomsday-the-end-of-knowledge.html?page=1
*An interesting corollary would be to ask what became of the planet's wealth....
Drive a car, pay with life expectancy
*Statistics are a wonderful thing, aren't they?
*I hadn't heard that about the cigarettes. Five minutes off lifespan per cig. That ought to be written on the pack, shouldn't it?
*The worst thing about this "twenty minutes" business is that you already lost the hour off your lifespan while you were stuck in traffic.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/hour+driving+could+reduce+life+minutes+Study/2514598/story.html
TORONTO — Researchers at a Toronto hospital say that every hour spent driving could l...
February 2, 2010
Cloud Culture
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/leadbeater10/leadbeater10_index.html
(…)
That equation will produce in the decade to come a vast cultural eruption — a mushroom cloud of culture.
The Cloud Culture Equation
More cultural heritage stored in digital form.
+
More accessible to more people.
+
People better equipped with more tools to add creatively to the collection.
=
Exponential growth in mass cultural expression
=
Cloud Culture.
Cloud computing will be like a giant machine for making clouds of...
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