Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 750
August 25, 2009
FutureEverything 2010
*Beating the heck out of "FutureNothing," I'd be guessing.
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Launching The FutureEverything Awards and FutureEverything
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We are still reeling from the stunning success of Futuresonic 2009. Our award winning festival drew an attendance of 75,000, (((!))) and featured a huge range of incredible artistic projec
The continuing climate crisis in the capital of Texas
*You have to wonder what Exxon-Mobil employees think when the see scenes like this. Do they have some special Creationist switch in their heads where massive droughts are caused by flying spaghetti monsters?
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/08/25/0825sprinklers.html
AUSTIN WATER UTILITY
Workers prowl the streets for water wasters
New restrictions mean hefty fines for violations.
By Jeremy Schwartz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Peter Varga steers the
Florian Cramer's Floppy Films
*I've got a soft spot for nutty stuff like this. The guy has gone and crushed Oscar-winning movies so pitilessly that their ash-like graphic ruins will fit on an outmoded floppy disk.
http://turbulence.org/blog/2009/07/30/florian-cramers-floppy-films/
*Thanks, Jon Ippolito.
Augmented Reality: Map Torch Light Projector Phone
*It's a world o' new mashups and lash-ups out there.
*Here's a thought experiment: suppose you hold up a smartphone and say, "where's my shoe?" and a laser-pointer jumps out of it and focuses a hot red dot on your lost shoe. Just, you know, one pixel of mobile 3-D graphics. Is that best described as "Augmented Reality?" Clearly it would involve all the usual tools of augmented reality, like 3d calibration, data-base management, whatever Maybe we need a definitional category that involves humb
August 24, 2009
Augmented Reality: YDreams
*Interesting to see a kiosk application. If you can call that device a "kiosk."
Augmented Reality: Maptor concept
*A lot like the Layar or Wikitude apps, but turned inside out. Note that projected-video flashlight has inbuilt GPS.
*I like projected-video augments and think they are underrated, but I wish designers
would stop imagining that customers really really want to carry imaginary geek-junk around their necks on lanyards. We all know that 99.995% of designers would rather be killed than wear a dorky lanyard, so why inflict that on the rest of us?
India and China in Africa
*Well, I see no reason why these two rapidly expanding, crankily jealous land empires should *get into any trouble* because of their ambitions to dominate Africa.
*What could go wrong?
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/siege-of-a...
CNN IBN LIVE
Siege of Africa: China, India battle it out
Sat, Aug 22, 2009
Prejudice dies hard. In 1972, Manubhai Madhvani was arrested in Uganda for being of Indian origin and jailed in a dungeon nicknamed the "Singapore Block".
Di
Dead Media Beat: the Coffeehouse Letterbox
*Before the advent of mass newspapers, London coffeehouses were major centers for the verbal distribution of political, economic and literary information. The social-media scenes of their day, so to speak.
*This is how early newspaper editors data-mined the coffee-house scene for crowdourced text they could edit, publish and distribute. "Button's" was a coffeehouse much frequented by literary types, who, before mass publishing and a royalty system, generally earned their living as hired flattere
Abandoned NASA Projects
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/abandoned-nasa-projects
*"Memories of the Space Age," as J. G. Ballard used to put it.
*Okay, maybe those look pretty Gothic High-Tech, but hey, you shoulda seen the Nazi and Soviet abandoned space projects.
*The Pakistani space programme:
August 23, 2009
Blind Pony Books
*There are days when… okay, maybe an hour or two during certain days… when I can feel like this, but for the publisher here, this appears to be a full-time sensibility.
http://blindpony.blogspot.com/
PONY CREDO
An idea of books from a yearning
to counter the all-polluting imagery-machines
with parables of plants and animals
and old stories
of black robbers and white stags.
Fragments on death like mirrors
from a black sleep
in the forests of fairy tales.
All stories from the dust of the dead
in fragments and
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