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.
Sonny Liew is illustrator and painter; fascinating artwork.
Link
Index on Censorship was founded in 1972 by Stephen Spender with the goal to protect the basic human right of free expression. Quote: "For the past 31 years, Index has reported on censorship issues from all over the world and has added to the debates on those issues. In addition to the analysis, reportage and interviews, each Index contains a country by country list of free speech violations. These lists remain as extensive today as they were in the early days of Index."
Link
The special effect of physics: Jürgen K Singer, a research scientist in rendering, published an interesting article on PhysicsWeb. Quote: "From the dawn of history people have tried to convey to others an impression of the mental images they see in their mind's eye. We have come a long way since the Renaissance times of Albrecht Dürer and his attempts to use Euclid's mathematical methods as a basis for painting. Today, movie directors want to make us believe that worlds that never were and never will be are as real as our living room. One is well advised to remember, however, that "movie physics" is an approximation of reality, and that it may differ substantially from the real world if artistic vision or viewing conventions demand it. [...]"
Link
posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 2:09:43 AM | permalink
Europe's fastest supercomputer: Research Center Jülich (Germany) presented new 5+ Tflop/s supercomputer.
Link (sorry, german only)
Fish farms still ravage the sea: Peter Aldhous writes on Nature that sustainable aquaculture takes one step forward, two steps back.
Link
Galaxy's Largest Diamond: Quote: "The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros."
Link
CSS Zen Garden: A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design.
Link
A Linux Distro for Barbie?
Link
Scenes from a Bigfoot Conference: Article by Rob Boston, published on the CSICOP page. My favourite paragraph:
»Johnson claimed that in quantum physics, electrons do not obey the classical laws of physics. They can, for example, move through barriers, he said. When Bigfoot is in this quantum state, Johnson opined, the creature has no mass or weight and is "just a wave." Bigfoot's quantum nature, Johnson told attendees, may explain the lack of clear photos of the beast. "He probably communicates with cameras," Johnson said. "He knows when they are around. He won't let you take a picture."«
Link
Cockroach Scouts: Glueing genetically modified yeast cells to the back of a cockroach could transform it into an agile biochemical weapons detector.
Link
The Following Programme Is Not Suitable For Those Of A Nervous Disposition: An introduction to the Golden Years of British Television Horror - by Phil Tonge (on Headpress)
Link
A Critique of Imperial Reason: Thoughts on the impact and receptive history of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s »Empire«. Article by Nicolas Siepen in the Viennese political art magazine 'Springerin'.
Link to Critique of Imperial Reason
Link to Springerin frontpage
The Gameboy Music Club: To quote their homepage: "The Gameboy Music Club is an initiative of the Spielgemeinschaft GB Vienna. They play using the music programs nanoloop and little sound DJ. For this, Nintendo's Gameboy is used as an instrument. The Spielgemeinschaft GB Vienna is a group of players who are enthused over micromusic and whose aim is to create an easy access to the endless world of today's (contemporary) music [...]"
(Email contact)
Link
Georg Paul Thomann: The São Paolo Biennial is well-known as one of the most important and biggest art exhibitions in the southern hemisphere. It forms a counterpart to the geographical concentration of art in the Western world. The worldwide hegemony of Western art has been maintained throughout art history, in aesthetic theory as well as on the practical side in terms of presentation and discourse. Nevertheless, we, the group monochrom, were pleased, albeit only as the national representatives of a racist mini-state, to participate in such an event.
Since February 2000 Austria has been governed by a very right-wing government. Thus the independent art curator’s selection of monochrom as Austria’s national representatives at the São Paolo Biennial 2002 was a quite an interesting political statement. We decided to do a tactical-ironical project. Instead of doing an exhibition as monochrom, we decided to send Georg Paul Thomann to Brazil. Who is Georg Paul Thomann? He is a fictitious 57-year-old Austrian avant-garde artist. We wrote his complete biography (around one hundred pages) and asked fellow artists, writers and pop theorists to write articles about his life and work, which were published as the catalogue of the exhibition. It took the media quite a long time to actually figure out the whole art-avatar maneuver.
The Thomann biography grew to be an amusing overview of pop, art and intellectual history during the past four decades with fictitious guest appearances from people like William Gibson, Peter
Handke or Alan Jenkins. Anyway, you might like our approach - and by the way: Georg Paul Thomann saved the country of Taiwan ...
Link
Loose Lips: How do I call that? Electro Swing?? Anyway, it's a song about techno-surveillance by Austrian Swing Group "5 in Love". Sorry, I only found the song in wma-format. (The homepage of "5 in Love" seems to be a little bit outdated).
Link
TinyApps: DaddyD types: "[...] TinyApps is a collection of software that doesn't exceed 1.44 mb (I can remember when that would have been a big program), is free (no adware), and is completely self contained. [...]"
Link
World of Ends: Doc Searls and David Weinberger tell us "What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else."
Link
Collection of Philosophy Cartoons with topics as Logic and Language, Ethics, Socio-Politics, Metaphysics and Epistemology. And they are funny.
Link
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Its purpose is to document the inner workings of those pioneering games of the video arcade era. Remember Pacman, Space Invaders, DigDug, etc, well, they are all documented and what's more fully playable in the MAME project.
Link
Beauty is a cultural construct - of course. Have a look at this detailed collection of pictures of "Miss" elections over the decades. (via ronsens)
Link
Minus 24x: My short rant (manifesto?) on support hotlines, humor, inability and Mr. Peter.
Link
Zero by Zero: Quote: "Our society seems to be very technologically advanced. Looks like everything has been thoroughly studied but the depths of the oceans. Our mathematics is so advanced that it's mind boggling to many people. We have built buildings way high in the sky. Bridges longer than many cities. Obviously we are capable of great technological know how. And yet it saddens me to bring this topic up at such a late stage in the game. Yes the old division by zero problem. [...]"
What an interesting leisure time activity.
Link
Hand-drawn holograms
Link
Turing Train Terminal: Severin Hofmann and David Moises, two really clever monochrom associates, built a Turing engine out of scale trains. They decided to put some hundred tons of scaled steel together to build a train system that can count to 3.
Link
No border network: "The no border network is a tool for all groups and grass root organizations who work on the questions of migrants and asylum seekers in order to struggle alongside with them for freedom of movement, for the freedom for all to stay in the place which they have chosen, against repression and the many controls which multiply the borders everywhere in all countries. This network is different from lobbying groups and NGOs because it is based on groups of grass root activists and intends to stay so."
Link
Phoenix 1000 is a 65-meter (213') personal luxury submarine. Interested? Buy it for 78 million bucks.
Link
textz.com: They are not Project Gutenberg. In corporate terms they are the evil Project Gutenberg. They are the & in copy & paste. Have a look at their concept/manifesto.
Link
posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 11:08:44 AM | permalink
Guestbar Archives