The Guestbar!
A tiny, guest-edited blog!

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.

Move over mullet -here's another hair do to dis including disturbing comments.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rudy)

posted by karen marcelo at 12:05:14 PM | permalink

IE Crashing HTML

The offending HTML snippet:
---------------------------------
<html>
<form>
<input type crash>
</form>
</html>
---------------------------------

It only crashes the current browser Window
Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 9:53:32 AM | permalink

Blog Graffiti

Cute web toy Blog Graffiti

Link

posted by karen marcelo at 9:47:25 AM | permalink

Tim North

Last night a great artist and friend succumbed to cancer. Timothy North's HOVERDRUM is one of the Ten Percussion Wonders Of The World. It is at once a kinetic sound sculpture, an interactive musical instrument, a low-fi lunar module and a suspended object'de arte. It has even been described as a metaphor of the modern day human condition. Standing at more than 10 feet tall and suspended in air, the Hoverdrum is at once a kinetic sound sculpture, interactive musical instrument and object d'arte.

Timothy North was a member of Naut Humon's Rhythm&Noise and later Sound Traffic Control. He has collaborated with many West Coast machine/sound sculpture artists including Chico MacMurterrie, Barry Schwartz, Peoplehater and O'Vertigo Danse.

He helped produce soundtracks for Survival Research Laboratories and has made guest appearances with Crash Worship and Psychic TV. He has recorded with Blaise Smith, Amber Asylum, Scot Jenerik, Beth Custer, Sky Saxon as well as his own solo material.

Timothy North's most recent project is Sauce of the Future, featuring vocalist/songwriter Susan Maunu with guest appearances by Desmond Shea (Trial, Rhythm&Noise), Bond Bergland (The Brain, Saqqara Dogs, Factrix), Blaise Smith (Minimal Man), Simon Cheffins (Crash Worship) and Markus Wolff (Crash Worship).

Tim will be sorely missed.

Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 8:01:34 AM | permalink

Can Open Content Be Interesting Content?

The DIY publishing/Open Content trend continues in the form of wikis like Disinfopedia, a publicly editable directory of articles from PR firms, think tanks, and industrial experts that try to influence public opinion and policy on behalf of The Man.

Another is Wikipedia that is a multi-lingual open content encyclopedia.

While only editable by Rotten Staff (for now), but perhaps more readable than those other 'pedias, the Rotten Library can be a huge resource (and time sink) containing unique views on almost anything anyone would ever want to know about including anecdotes and images. This is a work in progress so keep checking the What's New section if you want to find out more about things that probably won't be found any place else: from fecal transplants to Uday Hussein's email addresses, the Library has it covered.

Not just meant to be a collection of odd trivia, it should be noted that Daily Rotten has broken several important news stories such as the Taliban nuclear secrets, the Google/Scientology, the FBI keyboard logging through the badtrans virus story, etc. and we can expect more of the same.

Under the covers is an ambitious content management system that includes mail, spam filtering tools, language translation that goes out of its way to display foreign character sets properly, and the only web mailer that can display Russian and Korean on the same page (an impressive feat given the impossibility of displaying 2 different character sets on the same webpage). Headed up by Soylent (who wrote Waffle and worked on Navigator back in the day) this promises to be a relevant work in progress that should be checked periodically.

Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 8:41:29 PM | permalink

Madonna WTF'd

Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 8:37:09 PM | permalink

Pattern and Perception: Interface Between Art, Physics, and Code

The Tech Museum and ZeroOne is sponsoring this lecture at the Microsoft Auditorium in Mountain View.

May 20, 2003
6:00pm reception
7:00pm presentation

John Seely Brown, former director of PARC, will introduce the discussion topic and the dedication to the memory of Rich Gold, longtime director of Xerox PARC's Artist-in-Residence Program and general all round great guy.

Rich is known for many accomplishments, including the creation of RED (Research in Experimental Documents), which studied the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering. One of RED's most successful projects, called Experiments in the Future of Reading (XFR), comprised fifteen interactive new reading devices along with novel content.

Panelists include physicist Jim Crutchfield, co-founder of the Art and Science Laboratory at the Santa Fe Institute; New York artist and programmer John Simon, Jr. and Los Angeles technology artist Jennifer Steinkamp. Anne Balsamo, formerly of RED, and now with Onomy, will moderate.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Steven)

posted by karen marcelo at 11:30:45 AM | permalink

Biomorphic Controllers

More people are exploring the relevance of biology as applied to robotics with numerous interesting biomimetic and affective computing projects around. Seemen founder Kal Spelletich has been exploring physiological sensors and actuators to make the interface between machines and humans (and sometimes dogs) more seamless.

For those in New York, he is giving a talk on this at Columbia University on May 8 and a machine demo at the party on May 9.

Link Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 9:22:15 PM | permalink

Urine Control

Which came first the beer pissing game or the urinary UI from the Media Lab submitted to CHI?

Discuss (Thanks, polymorf)

posted by karen marcelo at 8:43:47 PM | permalink

How to Win at Off Road Golf

Last week's championship episode of Junkyard Wars featured 2 teams facing off to build the better Off-Road Golf vehicle. The finalists must build off-road machines that can maneuver over a golf course and hit balls that look like the type called volley. Both machines require drivers for distance and putters for accuracy. SRL's own Kimric Smythe acted as consultant to the Jet Doctor team leading them to victory. The winning design had an accordion for its hood ornament, golf club windshield wipers and features not unlike the Pitching Machine. It also sported a mechanized claw to pick the ball out of tight spots and drop it into the chute to be pitched by a motorized spinning tire that ejects the ball at a nice and easy 45mph. It was amusing to see other types of projectiles besides 2x4s launched in this manner with the characteristic skidmarks on them. This worked way better than the competing team's ball launcher which the Junkyard War's "expert" was so sure would be the better one. Goes to show that just because a design is cartoon-like, it doesn't mean it won't work better. On style alone, this should have been the favorite.

It may be worth mentioning that anything silly in a Peoplehater show is probably due to Kimric. Things like the 12-ft mobile inflatable Peoplehater apes or the small One Night Robot innocently covered in garbage bags pre-show that hid an air compressor that blew the thing up into a quarter block sized giant blob that crowded this Yerba Buena goon (who was trying to chase me down for being a non-union person with a video camera) out of the scene.

If they do reruns, this episode is worth watching just for Kimric's commentary. See Mr. Smythe rip the doors off the van, then argue "No it's not" with the the voice that says "Your door is ajar". Other highlights include announcing "It's on park!" as his crew struggles with towing the van out of a pile of wrecks. It takes a character constantly immersed in absurdity to point out the obvious sometimes.

Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 8:30:20 AM | permalink

The Big Book of JerkCity

jerkcity is one of the more important and interesting comics on the net. Not lifted from a newspaper and using technology rather than artists to create the illustrations, and old talker logs for 'plot', Rands, Pants, Spigot, and Deuce took Microsoft's Comic Chat and made a book out of it. A web comic that works, judging from the knockoffs.

There is a glossary and a Makefile joke on the back cover. Goes nicely with fine herb and N2O.

Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 10:31:03 PM | permalink

¡Viva La Avrilution!

Suffering from delusions of being able to reincarnate as a writer, I accept Xeni's invitation to guestblog.

Not allowed to narq out the things I've been up to lately, I will instead appropriate content available elsewhere because that is what humans have been doing naturally for ages since cavemen formed groups and invented language and started such great oral traditions like storytelling, gossiping, and spreading the word.

Speaking of appropriation, "Mike Schaffer" and his fellow Bay Area revolutionaries, tired with MTV (and others in the business of co-opting their idea of 'cool') sanitizing and dumbing down their "culture" and teenage angst for maximum mass appeal and easy demographic categorization; then selling it back as new but regurgitated, copy protected pop iconography, have put out a call to join the ¡Avrilution!.

The Avrilutionaries urge you to identify with their cause:

Make your own t-shirts, get the FREE
AVRILUTION stickers, spread the meme,
Click here to sign their petition,
Keep a wary eye on the the RIAA.
"It is the cause of the Avrilution! to resist concentrations of power which seek to monopolize and edit the content on which we thrive."

Avrilution: real or media prank? Using the same entertainment medium and symbolism from the music industry to take back their culture, they hack the iconography to signify something else. They have fans creating their own Avrilutionary art and burning up the hotline. They have an anthem and their own handsign! Besides Spin said so! As did MTV, and USA Today. Big media companies like that would check their facts first, therefore it must be real :-). The Avrilutionaries are serious. And, the site's got Che-style graphics! Why even Madonna's new video uses that aesthetic to show that she's serious. I am assured that all indications that Macki is responsible are purely coincidence... Discuss

posted by karen marcelo at 1:15:11 PM | permalink

Welcome, Karen Marcelo!

Today, BoingBoing welcomes a new guest blogger: Karen Marcelo, software developer and SRL teleobliteration engineer. Many thanks to Jim Griffin, who did a terrific job holding down the guestbar while traveling to locations as diverse as Antarctica, Finland, and Austria! Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:30:12 AM | permalink

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