Uncanny Valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis about robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities.
Vida 9.0 -- Paula Gaetano Adi “Alexitimia”
"...reconciling the "wet" domain of nature with the "dry" domain of electronics...."
Quantum Psychology
"In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be" and the Bourland proposal (English without "isness") he called E-Prime, or English-Prime."
I-20 Gallery :: Sergei Bugaev Afrika: Stalker 3 Sergei Bugaev Afrika :Stalker 3, Video on DVD and mixed media installation, 53 minutes," Stalker 3 is found footage, edited by the artist, who has also reworked the sound in collaboration with artist Dmitry Gelfand. The video, which was found by Russian special forces, captures one day - April 16, 1996 - of the war in Chechnya."
QJ.NET - QuickJump Home - Gadgets news - QJ.NET
Forget Blu-ray's 200 GB disc capacity. Say good bye to HD DVD's 1,024 GB (one Terabyte) storage capability. While you're at it you can cross out Hitachi-Maxell's 300GB holographic CD and InPhase's upcoming 1.6 TB rewritable optical disc. Why even the 50,000 GB DVD couldn't hold a candle to the new Rainbow Versatile Disc's (RVD) 123.60 Petabyte capacity. Actually you shouldn't hold a candle to the RVD because it's made out of paper.
HARD TO SAY with William Stob ~ Episode #6 on Odeo
"Wouldn't you like to grasp
why it is that falling in love, and
coming to know, make you
feel genuinely joy's rim."
Juliet Patterson, The Truant Lover
(transcribed from audio...my apologies for the arbitrary linebreaks)
alex dragulescu - dynamic for the people
"Respam is a net.art platform for the collection, implementation, and cultural integration of unwanted, abject data in the form of solicitous messages (heretofore referred to as spam)."
"Specimen of Secrecy About Marvelous Discoveries
"Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries" is a series of works comprised of what Kac calls "biotopes", that is, living pieces that change during the exhibition in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions. Each of Kac's biotopes is literally a self-sustaining ecology comprised of thousands of very small living beings in a medium of earth, water, and other materials. The artist orchestrates the metabolism of these organisms in order to produce his constantly-evolving living works."
United States Patent Application: 0060252371
"a human body communication system for communicating data via an electric field formed by intervention of a human body"
....no infrared, no bluetooth, just high frequency milliamps broadcasting data that is decoded by devices on the body....
What's Next In Science Technology - Silicone fibers contain living human brain cells
".....threads of biocompatible silicone that contain living human brain cells."
It appeared Nov. 13 in ACS' Biomacromolecules
Townsend-Nicholson, A.; Jayasinghe, S. N.
Biomacromolecules; 2006;
Innovation Lab ::: The World's first screen to be made of concrete
"The screen consists of concrete with embedded optical fibres, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light. The light-admission points are on the back of the screen where the fibres are positioned. The light, or the picture, will then be displayed in pixels on the front. The light source can be a projector emitting either pictures or film footage. In principle, the screen is capable of acting as a window since – owing to the combination of the screen concept's light-absorption and optical cables – it has a capacity for transmitting natural light."
BumpTop Prototype - HoneyBrown.ca
BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.
Electrical detection of coherent 31P spin quantum states : Article : Nature Physics
"The electron spin information is shown to be coupled through the hyperfine interaction to the 31P nucleus, suggesting that recombination-based readout of nuclear spins is feasible."
Andre R. Stegner, Christoph Boehme, Hans Huebl, Martin Stutzmann, Klaus Lips and Martin S. BrandtNature Physics advance online publication Published online: 19 November 2006 doi:10.1038/nphys465
Another step toward quantum computing.
"There are rare historical moments when developments in numerous fields enter a period of similar qualitative change before diverging into a multiplicity of new terms. Few of those who live through such a moment can grasp the full significance of what is happening. But all are aware of change: the future, instead of offering continuity appears to advance toward them."
p.322
Berger, J. (2001). Selected Essays. London: Bloomsbury.
Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy
"A philosophy of relativism allows folksonomy to draw on many users with various perceptions to classify a document instead of relying on one individual cataloger to set the index terms for that item...Therefore, a folksonomy universe allows both true and false statements to coexist."
A Woman Waits for Me
by Walt Whitman
Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Cycles Research Institute - Climate
"On a scale of thousands of years, we are due for a steep drop in temperature as we enter another ice age. This could start next week or not for a thousand years, we do not know.
On a scale of hundreds of years, we are at or possible past a peak of a 500-600 year cycle. This cycle appears to be associated with the rise and fall of major civilisations."
Kim Keever
"....4x5 transparencies of the aquarium setup in my apartment is half the creative process. Getting the film back is when I really see if I have made something interesting..."
Paint me a computer
"Chemists in Poland have constructed logic gates, the ‘atoms’ of computation, out of well-known pigments.
Konrad Szacilowski and colleagues at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow have made chemical switches out of titanium dioxide and Prussian blue, which are both commonly used paint pigments. The switches can replicate the basic logical operations in digital circuits."
K Szacilowski, W Macyk and G Stochel, J. Mater. Chem., 2006DOI: 10.1039/b606402g
Wireless Brain Machine Interface
Figure 5: Plots showing the locations of the external antenna and the implanted BMI device. Left: Sagittal view of the entire head, Right: Closer sagittal view of the region containing the implant.
EIJI INA: Waste, EIJI INA, Ito, Toshiharu
Ito, Toshiharu (introduction). EIJI INA: Waste. 72 pp., 41 color plates and 4 colour and b figures. 4to, boards. Tucson, Nazraeli Press, 1998.
http://www.neave.tv/#humans
Three Legged Legs™ ||| Humans!
Three Legged Legs™ ||| Humans!
Humans! is a 60 second global awareness PSA sensationalizing the excessive, all-consuming nature of the human being. This cute and naive Earth stands no chance against such an insatiable parasite. Witness its utter demise in a fun and sickening kind of way.
Andy Goldsworthy on Transience
"At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." -Andy Goldsworthy
"many hamsters were harmed in the making of this film"
a parable about scientific positivism
http://www.carlitopolis.com
a parable about scientific positivism
http://www.carlitopolis.com
Shaking the World
Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation as A Novel Sensation Interface
TARO MAEDA, HIDEYUKI ANDO, TOMOHIRO AMEMIYA,
MASAHIKO INAMI, NAOHISA NAGAYA, MAKI SUGIMOTO
Siggraph2005 Demo of Radio-Controlled Walking
BREITBART.COM - Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans
Nippon Telegraph Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But more sinister applications also come to mind.
I can envision it being added to militaries' arsenals of so-called "non-lethal" weapons.
A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration at an NTT research center. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head _ either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved.
I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off.
The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation _ essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear that help maintain balance.
Guide to Reality: Strawson Continues His Journey
Strawson offers this definition of “Equal-Status Fundamental Duality monism” (ESFD monism for short):
Reality is substantially single. All reality is experiential and all reality is non-experiential. Experiential and non-experiential being exist in such a way that neither can be said to be based in or realized by or in any way asymmetrically dependent on the other (etc.)
Formally only available to the illuminati, this placard is now within reach of any practicing enigmatist with a color printer.
Reuters AlertNet - Altered cottonseed could feed millions -scientists
Scientists have found a way to use the cotton plant, long a source of fiber for clothing but inedible by humans, to feed potentially half a billion people a year.
Kinetic Sculptures: Wind Powered Robots at Ministry of Tech | Technology, Gadgets, Web 2.0
"Wind powered robot
Theo Jansen is the Dutch creator of what he calls “Kinetic Sculptures,” where nature and technology meet. Essentially these sculptures are robots powered by the wind only."
ATTEMPT AT INVISIBLE SPHERE
A"rtist attempts to build an invisible sphere. 215 monitors are placed directly opposite 215 cameras, allowing the viewer to peer directly through a eight hundred pound mass of steel, glass and electronics."
Genpets.com
Say Hello to the all New Genpets™ from Bio.Genica!
The Genpets™ are Pre-Packaged, Bioengineered pets implemented today!
That’s right, Genpets are not toys or robots. They are living, breathing genetic animals.
BOMB Magazine: Marina Abramovic by Laurie Anderson
marina
Marina Abramovic, The House with the Ocean View, 2002-2003. Performance view. Photo: Steven P. Harris. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery.
Lean In Close | Tribes
“Now,” says Steve, “Tribes has its own visual and text editors. I’m just the guru. The consultant.” Steve explains.
Tribes will be fifteen years this October. Steve and Co. have showcased nearly 400 artists in the gallery space on the second floor of a four story townhouse.
Eric J. Heller Gallery || Random Sphere I
Sphere and Random Sphere show random superpositions of waves on the surface of a sphere. Random waves are the paradigm for quantum chaos. This is as close as quantum mechanics can come to chaos.
The Museum on the Digital Shoreline
The rhizome is that which: "connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states... It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a milieu from which it grows and which it overspills... The rhizome proceeds by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots... the rhizome pertains to a map that... is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits"
Deleuze and Guattari
Violence — Poet Seers
One
Day
Too
Your
Inner
Violence
Shall listen
To loves wisdom
And bow to
Silence
By: silent lotus
Kenneth Patchen
The image before me when I mention your name is that of a gorilla with a heart of gold. I don't hesitate to add immediately that this name which you have chosen to mask your multi-faceted soul has become an obsession with me. It suggests cold dynamite lying carelessly on a beautiful lawn where children play at croquet with iron mallets. It suggests a perfidy so transparent as to become magnetic.
New Robot Shrugs Off Injury -- Wu 2006 (1116): 2 -- ScienceNOW
It looks like a four-armed starfish, but so far it's unaware of its own shape. After flailing its arms for a while, however, the robot gets a sense of its design and begins to walk. The real feat comes when engineers remove a part of its leg: The robot senses a change in its structure and begins walking in a different way to compensate. The demonstration is the first proof that a robot can generate a conception of itself and then adapt to damage, a handy skill to have in unpredictable environments.
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BLOOM - An Installation Project for the Massachusetts Mental Health Center by Anna Schuleit
BLOOM - An Installation Project for the Massachusetts Mental Health Center
by Anna Schuleit - 2003
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Artdaily.com
Andy Warhol, You Are The One.
PONTIAC, MI.- In what many have dubbed the world's first multi-media presentation on July 23rd 1985 at the Lincoln Center in New York, the maverick art legend Andy Warhol stood on stage using a new computer to paint a portrait of pop star Debbie Harry in his own unique style.
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http://www.odedezer.com/
(All sketches and typo works created by Oded Ezer © For more works take a look at: www.odedezer.com)
Mkaku.org: Articles and Essays (The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations)
Physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study estimates that, within 200 years or so, we should attain Type I status. In fact, growing at a modest rate of 1% per year, Kardashev estimated that it would take only 3,200 years to reach Type II status, and 5,800 years to reach Type III status. Living in a Type I,II, or III civilization
For example, a Type I civilization is a truly planetary one, which has mastered most forms of planetary energy. Their energy output may be on the order of thousands to millions of times our current planetary output.
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Aharon Shabtai--Poets Against War
In time of war
I side with the villages
with the mosques
in this war
I side with the Shiite family
with Tyre
with the mother
with the grandfather
with the eight kids in the mini van
with the white silken headscarf.
In the name of the beautiful books I read
In the name of the kisses I kissed
May the army be defeated
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New Materials -- New Media -- New Art
The detail is in the devils
By
Rohe van der Mies
This is an experiment in "Real Virtuality," in which a real object is made to appear virtual. The individual images were generated with a Wilkington-Smythe variable-size image generation system. They were then suspended over a rear-illuminated high-frequency moiré screen tuned to give a varying green background.
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photo-eye | Carlos Tarrats
Copyright © Carlos Tarrats, 2006, All Rights Reserved
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Stem cells let blind mice see again | COSMOS magazine
PARIS: Blind mice have had their sight restored using stem cells transplanted into their damaged retinas, British scientists say.
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Autopoesis
Autopoesis
Autopoesis is both a concept about self-maintaining systems, especially biological ones, and an epistemological theory about cognition and self-reference.
Humberto Maturana and F. J. Varela proposed the concept of autopoesis (as opposed to allopoetic) as the organization of living things, which maintains their lasting unity and wholeness in the midst of continual turnover of constituents, specifically through self-production. For them, autopoesis is the necessary and sufficient condition for the minimal units of life. Autopoesis defines the minimal mechanistic features of the simplest possible living entity. It describes "how life works." All living systems are autopoetic, and all physical systems, if autopoetic, can be said to be living.
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Edge: THE PANCAKE PEOPLE, OR, "THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD"
Lewis Fry Richardson's answer to the question of creative thinking by machines is a circuit diagram, drawn in the late 1920s and published in 1930, illustrating a self-excited, non-deterministic circuit with two semi-stable states, captioned "Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable of only Two Ideas."
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Innovis Research - PhylloTrees
PhylloTrees: Phyllotactic Patterns for Tree Layout
We explore the use of nature’s phyllotactic patterns to inform the layout of hierarchical data. These naturally occurring patterns provide a non-overlapping, optimal packing when the total number of nodes is not known a priori. PhylloTrees are a family of expandable tree layouts that we developed based on these patterns.
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Piet Zwart Institute - Words Made Flesh
WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer
Media Design Research
Piet Zwart Institute
institute for postgraduate studies and research
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.
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adi da
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is a fundamental fear of being without a world. You are constantly servicing the impulse to always have a world and also to have that world be basically comfortable.
That impulse underlies all forms of "cosmic religion" — or the religion of preserving beings in the cosmic domain, of granting everybody a world and making the world more and more congenial by at least getting rid of darker influences.
The "Perfect Practice" of the Way of Adidam, however, is not about "having a world". It is about entering into the Domain That Is Prior to the cosmic domain.
People generally do not have the disposition for such a practice. As long as there is identification with the body-mind, you do not want there to be no world. In fact, you insist that there be a world — and that it be congenial to you. Therefore, you will not relinquish your world.
In other words, you will not accept the Position you are actually in, the Position That Transcends the conditional (or cosmic) domain, until your craven attachment to the body-mind (and, therefore, to having a world that is congenial) relaxes profoundly, such that you know the world for what it is and (thereby) realize a native detachment.
Then the "Perfect Practice" can begin.
— May 19 and May 7, 1995
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Kali's Child
Also relevant here is the manner in which my dialectical category of "the erotic" has been misread by some as flatly monodimensional, as if it meant simply "sex," when in fact the erotic only begins with physical sexuality and moves out (really "up") from there into the sublime, "sublimated" realms of symbolic vision, mystical experience, mythology and theology. I could, no doubt, address such a misunderstanding in the same way that Freud answered his own critics. In an effort to show that his own concept of "libido" was not the "outrageous innovation" that people supposed it to be, the analyst called attention to how sexuality lay in an unbroken continuum with the "higher aims" of "love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas." "All these tendencies," Freud writes, "are an expresson of the same instinctual impulses."13 Then, as if to move even higher "up" along the continuum, Freud invokes--appropriately, I would argue--the erotic mysticism of Plato and the love theology of Paul: "In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love," he wrote, "the 'Eros' of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis . . . and when the apostle Paul, in his famous epistle to the Corinthians, praises love above all else, he certainly understands it in the same 'wider' sense."14
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On Lionel Kearns -- vispo
He is a Linguist. Which is interesting because one of the reasons I became so excited about his work is he seems to understand that there has been a synthesis going on, over the last seventy years, more or less commencing with the work of Godel and Turing, between number and language, between mathematics and language studies, between the arts and sciences, between any pair of fields that code their material in such a way that it can be turned into information. Kearns is a language man. Kearns is a real thinker. Kearns is a media man. Kearns is a polyartist. Kearns has been contemporary since the mid sixties. I can't think of any other poets from around here except maybe bp Nichol who might have written anything in the sixties about digital poetics and issues.
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Military Malignancy
In Context: U.S. Military Spending Versus Rest of the World
Consider the following:
The above sources compare the given fiscal year budget request with the latest figures for other countries, which are sometimes two years old. Still using those statistics for other countries, however, a comparison can be made here of the US Fiscal Year 2005 spending against other equivalent data:
* The US military spending was almost two-fifths of the total.
* The US military spending was almost 7 times larger than the Chinese budget, the second largest spender.
* The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion.
* It was more than the combined spending of the next 14 nations.
* The United States and its close allies accounted for some two thirds to three-quarters of all military spending, depending on who you count as close allies (typically NATO countries, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea)
* The six potential “enemies,” Russia, and China together spent $139 billion, 30% of the U.S. military budget.
Some of the above statistics come from organizations such as the Center for Defense Information, and the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. They often include a global comparison. The one for Fiscal Year 2007 has been produced as a graph here:
Military spending in 2005 ($ Billions, and percent of total)Country Dollars (billions) % of total Rank
Source: U.S. Military Spending vs. the World, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, February 6, 2006
Note created October 5, 2006
High Military Expenditure in Some Places - Global Issues - www.globalissues.org/...
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