Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 737

No Signal: a dramatic necessity

*Horror film plots can't exist in a world of ubiquitous computing. Mobiles chase horror away. They're like garlic for vampires.

*It's a strange dark salute to the power of mobiles. Mobiles are warping the structure of daily life more severely than a zombie invasion.

*It's not just this horror genre, either. Consider lovelorn, romantic torch songs. "Missing" by Everything But the Girl. Great song (if they'll let YouTube hold onto it), and a case in point.

*Tears your heart out, right?...

Meanwhile, in the Rings of Saturn

*That's messed-up.

Jia-Rui C. Cook

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-0850

jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne C. Brown 202-358-1726

Headquarters, Washington

dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2009-142 Sept. 21, 2009

Cassini Reveals New Ring Quirks, Shadows During Saturn Equinox

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA scientists are marveling over the extent of ruffles and dust clouds revealed in the rings of...

Arphid Watch: Social RFID at PICNIC09

*Straight from the mouths of the herd of horses.

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/106889/en

Phone-tapping spam

*That's interesting. I never got one of these before.

MMS PHONE INTERCEPTOR - the ultimate spy software for Nokia mobile phones - you can install one REMOTELY from YOUR PHONE to ANY PHONE around the world.

Now all you will need to do in order to get total control over a NOKIA mobile (target) phone of a person of your interest is to send the special MMS to that target phone, which is generated by our unique MMS PHONE INTERCEPTOR LOADER. This way you can get very valuable and otherwise...

Toxiclibs: Building Blocks for Computational Design

(((This is where the Processing mavens take you behind the VJ screen and show you all the ropes, wrenches, screws, paint-pots and rusty bolts.)))

"toxiclibs is an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing. After 2.5 years of continuous development & refactoring, the collection consists of >14k lines of code, 124+ classes, 18 packages bundled into 7 libraries. The classes are purposefully kept fairly generic in order to maximize re-use in ...

Australia: the continuing climate crisis

"Oh my gosh. It's like dark time."

The Snail on the Slope: a generative science fiction movie

*How on Earth could I not like this?

*It's entirely abstract and created completely in Processing. Yet despite its stark lack of plot, characters, set design or dramatic tension, "Snail on the Slope" actually feels kind of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

*Well…. to be entirely frank, it feels more Stanislaw Lem. Yeah: it's like a futuristic movie, as some future cinema would be described in a brainy, wry and extremely Polish Stanislaw Lem essay, about cybernetics, from around 1965. After...

Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML)

*Gosh, that's starting to look like actual no-kidding mainstream computing.

http://www.mobilizy.com/enpress-release-mobilizy-proposes-arml

PRESS RELEASE: Mobilizy Proposes ARML to AR Consortium

September 22nd, 2009

Mobilizy proposes Augmented Reality Mark-up Language to The AR Consortium

SALZBURG, Austria: SEPTEMBER 22nd 2009. The nascent field of Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) is on the verge of becoming mainstream. In recent months an explosion in the development of practical AR solutions has g...

European Augmented Reality headmounts flying in outer space

*Too bad the laptops in the International Space Station are so old and feeble they can't run those gizmos properly.

*Probably still worth it for the burning envy from Yankee and Russki astro-cosmonauts, writing on paper with their elderly, backward pressurized space pens and sturdy wooden pencils.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMVX51OWUF_index_0.html

(…)

Technology demonstrator

The WEAR system, which was carried to the ISS on the Space Shuttle in August, is a technology demonstrator rather than a...

Ellen Allien, Berlin Techno Goddess, does her laundry

*Original, commercial video by professional musician:

*Fan tribute:

*Paging Henry Jenkins: some kind of vernacular-video Convergence Culture fit going on here.