Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 753

Augmented Reality, DELICATE BOUNDARIES, Christine Sugrue

*It won the prize at the SHARE FESTIVAL where I was guest curator.

*It's a video-projection augment. This "magic" metaphor of bugs coming out of the screen was incredibly powerful. I saw thousands of people interact with this artwork, and I never saw anybody look overhead to seek out the beam of the video projector. You could explain it to them if they asked how it worked, and then they would kinda nod happily, glance overhead for maybe a second, and then go right back to dragging bugs "in and

Augmented Reality and atemporality

*Together at last. And they're together *in Torino.* In the opening of this video, that's the newly retrofitted Venaria Reale hunting-palace that this iTacitus guy is checking out.

*In my novel CARYATIDS I set a technology quite like this in the island of Mljet, but it's keenly gratifying to see it show up in dear old Torino.

http://www.popsci.com/entertainment-amp-gaming/article/2009-08/historic-european-locales-will-offer-true-glimpse-past-augmented-reality-tours

"The BMT Group and the Fraunhof

Supernova crowdsourcing

http://arfon.org/hunting-for-supernovae/

"Over the last few days we've been running a little project to see if the Galaxy Zoo community can help find new supernovae from the Palomar Transient Factory). Turns out it works pretty well.

"Developing the website to power Supernova Zoo was a fun challenge; the Supernova and Galaxy Zoo websites look pretty similar and obviously share many features but there were some new problems to solve that we hadn't faced before…"

(((They farm out fresh pics of galaxi

The Parody Microsoft Vision of the Future

http://gawker.com/5337769/the-real-microsoft-future?autoplay=true

*I like to augment people's texts with (((sarcastic remarks in triple parentheses))), but the snarky voiceover parody on this gorgeous Microsoft video, man, that's just plain cruel.

via @gregnaughton

TSA arrests, grills world-famous movie star

*Has Bobby Jindal been informed?

http://www.zeenews.com/news555566.html

I don't wish to participate in US' religious paranoia: SRK

Updated on Saturday, August 15, 2009, 13:28 IST

New Jersey: Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who was detained for as long as two hours early on Saturday at the Newark airport in the US, thanks to his surname 'Khan', has reacted strongly to the episode calling it 'uncalled for'.

Speaking exclusively to Zee News about the incident that has left him deeply saddened, Shah

Dead Spime Watch

*You may be mighty spimey, but that doesn't make you bulletproof, ladies and gentleman. "Technology under capitalism," what are you gonna do?

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/08/13/desktop-factory-hits-the-dead-pool/

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/11/nabaztag-cant-make-rfid-cool-has-to-file-for-bankruptcy/

*"Entropy requires no maintenance."

Look Into the Past FlickR pool

*Some or these work like gangbusters, while others are actively irritating. Those effects have little to do with the formal qualities of the photograph. The ones with the

prettiest buildings, best lighting angles and most cunning Photoshop techniques

tend to be as vapid as novelty postcards.

*A good vocabulary for this would have to include historical insight and collage.
Collage can be achingly surreal or merely annoying, and a great deal of clumsy cultural
engineering goes on in the effort we

Dead Media Beat: Obsolete Technology, 40 big losers

*Only 40?

*The poetry of loss, ladies and gentlemen. Think of the lists ten years from now.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/169863/obsolete_technology_40_big_losers.html

*Thanks, zorca, valiant and patient defender of Dead Media Project.

How to Write, by Rudy Rucker

*A word to the aspirational here: although I have written quite a lot WITH Rudy Rucker,

I have never yet written anything LIKE Rudy Rucker.

http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2009/07/27/how-to-write/

Fusion-power pistonpunk

*I don't wanna come across as the big grumpy naysayer here, but this Canadian

gizmo that hits molten lead with piston hammers is the weirdest atomic power

scheme I've ever heard of. Cute, too!

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/

(…)

"The prototype reactor will be composed of a metal sphere about three meters in diameter containing a liquid mixture of lithium and lead. The liquid is spun to create a vortex inside the sphere that forms a vertical cavity in the middle. At this point, two