Weblogsky

Austin350

2008-05-05T13:12:10Z

I've been blogging at the new Austin350 web site. We're looking for more bloggers for that site - if you're interested, contact me.

Air Jelly

2008-05-05T04:14:17Z

Saw this video of jellyfish art at Beyond the Beyond:

Maker Faire on Twitter

2008-05-03T14:13:07Z

If you couldn't make it to the Bay Area Maker Faire, you can track the event on Twitter. [Link]

Call for creativity: communication systems and urban architecture

2008-05-01T04:59:55Z

Adam Green field posted this at Speedbird:

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

The exhibition continues the League’s commitment to supporting original research into the implications of ubiquitous/pervasive computing for architecture and urbanism. In fall 2006, the League, along with the Center for Virtual Architecture and the Institute for Distributed Creativity, presented “Architecture and Situated Technologies,” a 3-day symposium organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, that brought together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of Situated Technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. The project continued in winter 2007 with the publication “Urban Computing and Its Discontents,” the first of nine pamphlets to be published over the next three years that explores how our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other Situated Technologies.

“Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most”

2008-05-01T04:14:54Z

Thanks to Bill Anderson for sending me a link to this rightfully angry piece by Thomas Friedman, who says that "we have no energy strategy."

If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

Dad's groceries and the inevitability of death

2008-04-30T04:38:34Z

My friend Bruce and I made a run to the local H.E.B. supermarket this evening, chatting all the way about the economy and families and, of course, groceries, and as we were checking out, I made a fond recollection of my Dad, who absolutely loved the grocery store. He would wander slowly through, pondering various items, buying too much of this or that. Never hurrying to finish and leave... he really loved shopping for groceries. Bruce got this immediately: our parents were raised during the depression, and wandering through a well-stocked supermarket with enough money to buy whatever you might need made them feel just incredibly secure. We take it for granted today, but it really meant something to them. And we probably shouldn't take it too much for granted. Grocery prices are accelerating, and food items you took for granted before now may be out of reach in a couple of years. What would my Dad think if he was here today? (Coincidentally I met earlier today with Mary Matthiesen of Conversations for Life! about dying... thinking how profoundly your life changes after your parents have died. We take our supermarkets for granted, and we're in denial about death... we don't talk about it. Mary's thinking (and I heartily agree) that we need more conversations about the reality and implications of death. Because we avoid the subject and hide the fact, it's a huge mystery for so many of us, often experienced as something more traumatic than it needs to be - we've all got stories, she says, of the death of a parent or someone we know, and often the experience is pretty terrible. We don't have a framework for it, or a tradition (they're fading). We fear rather than accept the inevitability. Pondering this as my eyes get fuzzy. Visits to the grocery store don't leave me feeling terribly secure.

FringeWare history

2008-04-28T00:29:01Z

Scott Casey has published a history of FringeWare, Inc. from his perspective (he joined the company after I left). It's 'way incomplete, but what's there is generally accurate, and it's cool to see a remembrance. Update: Johannes at Monochrom saw this post on Twitter and posted a followup about his first U.S. appearance at the FringeWare store. He posts the announcement of that event from back in '98:

FringeWare is pleased to announce our in-store presentation of Austria's culture-jamming heroes from "monochrom" magazine, currently travelling throughout North America on their 1998 "monochrom bringt amerika den sozialismus tour". The illusive and infamous "der jg" and company of media subversives will appear for a special signing of their publication, and also spin as DJs for a show featuring "a really strange mixture of austrian and german music scores..." FringeWare will provide the beer.

Twitter is useful

2008-04-26T20:55:28Z

For some, Twitter just seems weird at first glance. Why would anybody sign up for a microblogging system with a 140 character per post limit? I personally had no hesitation, because I could see it as a variation on the always-open chat room, the kind of virtual coworking space that so many Open Source projects have used, often hosted by Freenode's IRC servers, at least until Campfire came along. Twitter is kind of like chat, only instead of a chat room you have a chat network - you don't see everybody in a particular virtual space, but all the people whose posts you choose to follow, often people in your own social network, some of whom will follow you back. You're in a conversation that can vary depending you who follow... and it can be even more complicated, with a public comment feed and people who opt out of it, and protected private feeds that you can only follow with permission, and direct messaging that's one to one. If many people you know and work with are on Twitter, that can be useful. If you have problems that collective intelligence can solve, Twitter's useful there, too. Marshall Kirkpatrick posts about Twitter for journalism, where it's useful for picking up on stories as they occur, for performing ad hoc interviews, and to get feedback on pieces you've written. I've been using Twitter as a matter of course when I write articles, asking questions of the people who follow me and working pretty effectively with the responses I get. Kirkpatrick quotes Suw Charman-Anderson: "No, it's not a random sample. But since when are 'man on the street' interviews?" If I could just get all my clients and colleagues to use Twitter, it could be one stop shopping for ideas and productivity.

Social enterprises

2008-04-22T04:23:14Z

Some organizations that are structured as nonprofits with social missions, or social enterprises, are run like businesses and generate sustainable revenue sources, though earnings are retained, not distributed.

“There is a lot of discussion taking place right now about a whole new organization form around social enterprise,” said James Fruchterman, president of Benetech, a social enterprise incubator based in Palo Alto. “Many of these efforts can make money; they will just never make enough to provide venture capital rates of return.”

These organizations tend to be tech-oriented, "driven in part by a set of microelectronics technology trends that have sent shock waves through many industries, from publishing to music and movies." [Link]

Serious worldsaving play

2008-04-18T04:35:58Z

My latest article for the Austin Chronicle, in the just-released "green crush" issue, is about sustainability and gaming. The article mostly focused on an interview with Pliny Fisk, who's thinking hard about serious, robust sustainaqbility games and how they might work. [Link]

Fisk has been thinking hard about how to build a green game that's engaging and fun but with serious real-world implications, such as location-specific modeling of the balance that sustainability requires. One kind of game would focus on and simulate real city environments. It would explore models that maximize efficiency and minimize the environmental impact of the built environment. Fisk sees four flows that would be relevant: materiality flow, energy flow, information flow, and monetary flow.

"Any one of those things can work related to the others," he says, "but they can also work independently. One measure of a city, from an information standpoint, is how much of the information network is actually reinforcing that place. How many newsletters and how many organizations and how many information sources are actually supporting and talking about the city, its people, its business?" There are also social information flows. "You could link people based on similar attributes and needs and so on. It's very much a peer-to-peer and can be a place-oriented way of operating." So an eco-game might include a city-centric social network.

Doing the math for NASA

2008-04-17T03:46:32Z

A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates of a asteroid strike on earth in 2036. Nico Marquardt calculated a 1 in 450 chance of collilsion, vs NASA's 1 in 45,000. Oops, says NASA, he's right. [Link]

Screw sustainability?

2008-04-17T03:23:47Z

The supposedly brilliant Howard Bloom makes up a definition of sustainability ("...merely hanging in there, merely surviving, merely sustaining. It implies a penny-pinching earth, a miserly existence, a nature that punishes change, and a nature that prefers small tribes to large groups of human beings.") The he explains at length why we should "screw it." Commenter brettski rightly calls Bloom on his sustainability fantasy, posting an accurate definition: ""Sustainability is a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. The term, in its environmental usage, refers to the potential longevity of vital human ecological support systems, such as the planet's climatic system, systems of agriculture, industry, forestry, and fisheries, and human communities in general and the various systems on which they depend." [Link]

Honoria's through with nice!

2008-04-16T21:09:21Z

Honoria's being a mean art teacher, insisting on critical thinking! Her blog post to that effect is pretty great. [Link]

From now on your critiques cannot start with a compliment. That means no more "That looks great" or "Your drawing blows me away."

I am making this rule because the comments are too shallow. You are not getting into observation or analysis or interpretation of the works. Just saying something is good or bad and then giving your advice is OK as far as it goes. But I would not be fair to you unless I demand a more professional level of communication. My job is to make you the best prepared you can be for your creative career!

Why are food prices rising?

2008-04-15T13:30:11Z

Good post (and comments) about rising food prices at the Becker-Posner blog. To what extent are prices increasing because of rising fuel costs? What's happens when you divert more and more food crops (corn) to ethanol production? Is the growth of population/demand a factor?

Being human

2008-04-14T13:29:01Z

The Edge asks whether human beings are unique, via an excerpt from the book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael Gazzaniga, a leading neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. There's quite a bit to ponder. Early on Gazzaniga says "We humans are special. All of us solve problems effortlessly and routinely." I'm not sure where he's been looking, but I find that problem-solving is seldom "effortless." But this is interesting:

Although we are made up of the same chemicals, with the same physiological reactions, we are very different from other animals. Just as gases can become liquids, which can become solids, phase shifts occur, shifts so large in implications, it becomes almost impossible to think of a foggy mist being made up of the same stuff that makes up an ice berg. And yet the different substances have the same chemical structure. In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar stuff can become quite different in its reality and structure. Indeed, I have decided something like a phase shift has occurred in becoming human. There simply is no one thing that will ever account for our spectacular abilities, aspirations and capacity to travel mentally in time to almost the infinite world beyond our present existence. Even though we have all of these connections with the biologic world from which we came, and we have in some instances similar mental structures, we are hugely different. While most of our genes and brain architecture are held in common with animals, there are always differences to be found. And while we can use lathes to mill fine jewelry, and chimps can use stones to crack open nuts, the differences are light years apart. And while, the family dog may appear empathetic, no pet understands the difference between sorrow and pity.

Also interesting is the suggestion that, by studying these differences, we learn so much more about what it means to be human.