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Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel. Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.
Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas...
Several years ago, my friends Marina Zurkow and Marisa Bowe had an idea for tiny images they likened to an Advent calendar. Marina took a bunch of matchbook art and animated them in weirdly simple ways for Marisa's late, great word.com. Word is long gone, but the images are around, and I still find them weirdly hypnotic. Click the spinning wheel to get three new images. (There's more of Marina's work at O-Matic.)
posted by Clay Shirky at 5:33:22 PM | permalink
Positive Returns to Scale
More interesting research on Web power laws (you're obsessed with this
stuff too, right? It isn't just me, is it?) from Lee Giles et
al. This is a good news/bad news report: the good news is that the self-sustaining effects of
popularity are not evenly enjoyed by all types of web sites,
meaning that in some domains, the new sites on the block have a chance
to replace the old guard. The bad news is that the two categories of
web sites where the incumbents have the greatest advantage over
newcomers are News and Entertainment. The category freeest of power-law
effects? Digital photography.
How to Get Rich
More from the Old Skool: Jared "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Diamond's brilliant
and under-forwarded speech from a few years ago on what makes for
innovation over the long term (think centuries).
In a finding that everyone worried about having a single global IP
regime should read, Diamond concludes that innovation requires having
several different legal, cultural and technological regimes at the
same time, in competition with one another. Columbus had to go to
several countries before he got funding for the Nina, the Pinta, and
the Santa Maria. Had there been a pan-European agreement on naval
expeditions, he would never have left port.
posted by Clay Shirky at 11:00:56 AM | permalink
Beauty is only skin deep
Astonishing collection of historical anatomical images from the US National Institute of Health.
posted by Clay Shirky at 6:07:56 PM | permalink
My new coding style is unstoppable!
Continuing the theme of Essays From The Before Time (pre-IMG tag, basically), Dick Gabriel's "Worse is Better" deserves a re-play for first explaining what Cory has labelled "The Principle of Equal Suckitude", as in "TCP/IP sucks about the same amount for everything, rather than being ideal for one task and otherwise unusable." (Warning: LISP humor is involved.)
posted by Clay Shirky at 5:50:51 PM | permalink
Co-co-opted advertorialainment
Endemol, purveyors of Fine RealityTV Products, seems to have hired PR firms to create pseudo-spoofs of Big Brother 3 which look like the work-wasting diversions that get passed from mailbox to mailbox. Looks like the Dancing Hamster and His Ilk are the future of advertising. (thanks, fish...)
posted by Clay Shirky at 8:00:45 AM | permalink
Popularity tends towards gross inequality
If you're obsessed with power law distributions in social systems (and
hey, who isn't?), Jakob Nielsen's 1997 paper on positive
returns to scale in web site traffic is still a good
read. It's a bracing antidote to the namby-pamby egalitarianism you
often find in conversations about weblogs, postulating that massive inequalites between the top 1% of sites
(weblogs, bands, ...) and everyone else is the normal shape of popularity, even in systems without an RIAA.
No one alive has worked harder to explain this phenomenon than
Albert-Lazlo
"Linked" Barabasi, whose "Physics of the
Web" is also a good, if dense read.
posted by Clay Shirky at 7:01:42 AM | permalink
Oldies but goodies...
It's more than 10 years old, but Lessons from Lucasfilm's Habitat is still one of the best descriptions I've ever read of the problems engineers face ("Ve vill arrange everyzink!") when making social environments for actual users ("Dear engineeers -- no chance.") As a primer on the hazards of detailed central planning for social environments, it can't be beat. (Oh, and ignore the frog.)
posted by Clay Shirky at 6:44:18 PM | permalink
to serve coke and to protect brand identity
a bunch of cash strapped cities are considering selling advertising space on their police cruisers. no conflict of interest there, no-sir-ee.
posted by quinn norton at 10:34:14 AM | permalink
Without metadata, life itself would be impossible...
I'm obsessed with social software these days. In the Before Time (<=1994), the standard internet tools like usenet and mailing lists were inherently social, but on most of the Web, the height of interaction was one-click ordering. So I'm thrilled whenever I see anything actually making real conversation possible. Particularly interesting is the way the blogosphere is becoming an inside-out usenet, with the content centralized and the namespace distributed, instead of the other way around. In addition to the inestimable contribution of Movable Type's trackbacks, N.Z. Bear of TruthLaidBear is working on The Weblog Metadata Initiative, which is devoted to "helping match readers with writers."
N.Z. Bear says that project is now at the "Enough talk. Let's do some hacking." stage, so if you're interested in leaving the weblog ecosystem cleaner than you found it, check it out. (N.Z.'s been busy. You can also check out his Weblog Action page, which is all about being "...practical about what it is we, as weblog authors and readers, can actually accomplish to make the world a better place.")
posted by Clay Shirky at 10:18:17 AM | permalink
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