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.
To all the wonderful Boing Boing readers out there! Thank you very much for your excellent feedback and your comments and - I'm very flattered - your compliments. A really nice guy even emailed me that he'll try to learn German to read some of my stuff only available in my native tongue. *blush*blush*
The fabulous Boing Boing crew has informed me that my time has come - the next guestblogger is on its way.
I really loved to blog my tips and hints. So I decided to start a small English language blog with my monochrom friends. So, if you like, please drop in to read further postings of me and the Viennese monochrom posse in English.
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The physics of high heels: Scientists calculate how high heels can go. The formula? h = Q•(12+3s /8)
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Tempest for Eliza is a Program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio.
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Turn your weblog into a book: ??? - I quote: "Blogbinders.com helps you turn your blog into a bound book - great as a gift, an archive, or even to sell to your readers!"
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The Pepsi Molotov Cocktail: Quote: "The American artist Joy Garnett, whose paintings are derived from news images, is faced with a legal action for thousands of dollars over this one. This has nothing to do with the protection of livelihood and everything to do with the suppression of free speech and free artistic practice. Don't let the schoolyard bullies win! Show your solidarity with Joy by grabbing this image and posting it on your website or by making your own artwork derived from it."
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Chinese Ghost Stories — An introduction by Daniel O'Brien. Quote: "Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of Hong Kong horror movies, filled to bursting with flying ghosts, hopping vampires, seductive spirits, tree demons, evil sorcerers, living skeletons, possessed limbs and giant predatory tongues. Tsui Hark’s A Chinese Ghost Story in 1987 gave many Western viewers their first taste of supernatural thrills — Oriental style — yet the film was a comparatively late entry in a well-established genre. From Sammo Hung’s ground-breaking Spooky Encounters to King Hu’s valedictory Painted Skin, the 1980s Hong Kong ghost film cycle produced a stylish and distinctive body of work that compares with the best of Universal and Hammer."
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Comp5 is a quicktime simulation of the radiation and motion of stellar gases in the trifid nebula. I find this very fascinating - but I can't tell you why.
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Hardcore Retro Keyboard? De- and reconstruct an Underwood typewriter! (Thanks, curt.poem)
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Faceless: A CCTV short film project. Quote: "One morning, while roaming the streets, the protagonist (MaNu) is stunned into the realization that everyone around her is faceless – they have literally lost their faces [...]" But why? Read the documentation ...
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Utah Man Suing Over Super Bowl Halftime Show: The now infamous Super Bowl halftime show is being targeted by a Davis County man. He wants five thousand dollars in damages, plus another 145 dollars in court costs.
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Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions. Book recommendation: "Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and scholar, brilliantly illuminates the ancient healing traditions of India embodied in the rituals of shamans, the teachings of gurus, and the precepts of the school of medicine known as Ayurveda."
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For the ultimate control freak: cook-it-yourself restaurants.
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Dream Machine: Hopes for a giant collider lie in a worldwide appeal. (SciAm)
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Empirical Aesthetics. Or, Eating a Durian Fruit.
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Force Sting to appear for a bad cause. Please.
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Green Tide: Global Warming as a Weapon of Mass Destruction - by Bruce E. Johansen. "Lord Peter Levene, board chair of Lloyd’s of London, says that terrorism is not the insurance industry’s biggest worry, despite the fact that his company was the largest single insurer of the World Trade Center. Levene says that Lloyd’s, like other large international insurance companies, is bracing for an increase in weather disasters related to global warming. [...]"
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Insect deaths add to extinction fears: British survey hints that species are crashing worldwide.
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Roböxotica 2004 / Call for Papers and Robots: monochrom and Shifz are organizing the first and inevitably leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics (in Vienna/Austria). We try to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. There is an Annual Cocktail Robot Award for 1. serving cocktails, 2. mixing cocktails, 3. bartending conversation, 4. lighting cigars/cigarettes, 5. other achievements in the sector of cocktail culture. And as you can imagine ... these tasks aren't trivial. If you are interested in coming to Vienna to present a robot, hold a workshop or a lecture, please send me an email.
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Dot Smoke: My rant on innovation and smoke rings.
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The male anglerfish and his life as a sexual parasite: "Finding a mate in the dark depths of the ocean is a pretty tough job! So what does a male anglerfish do when he finds a mate? He never lets her go! The male lives as a parasite on the body of the much larger female, taking his food from her bloodstream. In the time their bodies fuse together, forming a sort of two body hermaphrodite. Although this arrangement primarily benefits the male, it also frees both sexes from constantly seeking out new breeding partners whenever it is time to mate. How do they find each other in the darkness? Although at one time it was thought that each lure was designed to attract special prey, it now appears that the unique shape has evolved to attract a male of the same species who recognizes his future mate by her lure." I loooove evolution. (Thanks, Maeks!)
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Deepseacam: "In summer 2004, a cabled observatory will be installed in the north pacific, which allows online transfer of deep sea data via internet connection. [...] While the ocean observatory is still in preparation and testing phase, it is already possible to watch live pictures from International University Bremen's OceanLab."
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Matrix Reloaded Coat? Minority Report Leather Jacket? At Boutique.com ("Our individual client includes artist like Steven King, USA national fingerstyle guitar champion" // "This site is dedicated to Guru Maharaj and Om Sridi Sairam") you can have such stuff tailored. "As avid matrix fans ourselves we have decided to offer our services to fellow fans who are looking for the high quality, highly detailed and accurate matrix reloaded coat not usually found in stores."
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Cobain, once more: I think I break my Never-Blog-About-Cobain vow. In one of his last (still unpublished) interviews, Kurt Cobain said the following: "It might be nice to start playing acoustic guitar and be thought of as a singer and a songwriter, rather than a grunge rocker because then I might be able to take advantage of that when I'm older. I could sit down on a chair and play acoustic guitar like Johnny Cash or something, and it won't be a big joke." Haha.
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Telltale Weekly: DaddyD reports: "[...] the people at Telltale Weekly. They are trying to build up a library of free audiobooks, by selling you audiobooks. By using micro payments, creative commons licensing and a new type of multilevel marketing, they are hoping to prove that new artistic works can be created, artists paid, and business made while simultaneously loosening copyright restrictions. It's a pretty tall order, but I hope they are able to fill it."
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Beyond the Horizon of Events: "War rooms in pop culture or: the »delocalized« concept of rule in negative imperialism" by Krystian Woznicki. Published in the Viennese political art magazine Springerin.
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posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 1:42:26 AM | permalink
Technical Machines and Evolution by Belinda Barnet. "How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical machines have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? The technical artifact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, we can see this in the fact that technical machines come in generations; they adapt and adopt characteristics over time, "one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete." So are we to understand this dynamic from a biological, a zoological or a sociological perspective?"
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posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 1:37:02 AM | permalink
Who Owns The Rules Of War? Kenneth Anderson (law professor at American University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University) does his best to answer this.
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Early man steered clear of Neanderthal romance: "If our early ancestors did breed with their Neanderthal cousins, they didn't make a habit of it, according to the largest-ever study of early human DNA."
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posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 2:15:54 PM | permalink
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