[I nearly always disagree with Jaron Lanier, but he’s always worth reading. -egg]

BBC News – Sell your data to save the economy and your future
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22658152

Who will earn wealth? If robotic surgeons get really good, will tomorrow’s surgeons be in the same boat as today’s musicians?

Will they live gig to gig, with a token few of them winning a YouTube hit or Kickstarter success while most still have to live with their parents?

This question has to be asked. Something seems terribly askew about how technology is benefitting the world lately.

How could it be that since the incredible efficiencies of digital networking have finally reached vast numbers of people that we aren’t seeing a broad benefit?

How could it be that so far the network age seems to be a time of endless austerity, jobless recoveries, loss of social mobility, and intense wealth concentration in markets that are anaemic overall?

(via Instapaper)

[Very interesting essay about Google, history, and the nature of photography. -egg]

Google is productive, incessant, monstrous, and very enthusiastic about itself. The company’s bright-eyed but curiously unreassuring motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” In The New Digital Age, the recent book by executive chairman Eric Schmidt and the director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, we find the following words: “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity.” This might almost read as a Panglossian parody of technological optimism, were it not so earnestly meant. And so, Google grows, it makes new things, it makes the world more interesting, though not always to the good. Under the guidance of its founders and of guru-like software engineers like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, it brings abstractions and a whole new level of automation into computer science, and helps sustain our current age of frenzied information collection, massive computation, and feral capitalism.Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you’re doing, and what you’ll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one bings or yahoos anything. And it finishes your sen…All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search. Words typed into the search box could deliver pages of images. I remember the first time I saw this, and what I felt: fear. I knew then that the monster had taken over.

via Google’s Macchia – The New Inquiry.

Perceiving the Flow: Human Figures Composed of Unraveling Stainless Steel Ribbons by Gil Bruvel | Colossal.

Sierra Magazine posted their picks of “Earth’s Weirdest Landscapes.” Some I was familiar with, like the Fly Geyser in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, California’s Mono Lake, and Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. But others are new-to-me strange spots that I would be delighted to explore. For example, above is Lake Hillier in Western Australia’s Recherche Archipelago. Yes, it really is pink. According too Sierra, “some believe (the hue) comes from a dye produced by two microorganisms called Halobacteria and Dunaliella salina, while others suspect the red halophilic bacteria that thrive in the lake’s salt deposits.” Earth’s Weirdest Landscapes (Thanks, Orli Cotel!)

via Sierra Club magazine list of “Earth’s Weirdest Landscapes” – Boing Boing.

[Well-played, sir; well-played indeed. -egg]

Bondsy and the Modern Myth of Barter
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/05/27/bondsy-and-the-modern-myth-of-barter/

(via Instapaper)

Screenshots of Despair: a Tumblr that features shots of computers interacting with humans in ways that seem calculated to make them sad and angry. As Bruce Sterling notes, “Somebody could teach a pretty good interaction-design course with this handy resource. Maybe somebody already is.”

Screenshots of Despair (via Beyond the Beyond)

via Screenshots of Despair: computers making humans sad – Boing Boing.

[Very important point. -egg]

xkcd: Cells.

Wondermark » Archive » #939; A Knight is Technically an Aristocrat.

Venus of Google – Matthew Plummer-Fernandez

“The Venus of Google was ‘found’ via a Google search-by-image, googling a photograph taken of an object I had been handed over in a game of exquisite corpse. The Google search returned visually similar results, one of these being an image of a woman modelling a body-wrap garment. I then used a similar algorithmic image-comparison technique to drive the automated design of a 3D printable object. The ‘Hill-Climbing’ algorithm starts with a plain box shape and tries thousands of random transformations and comparisons between the shape and the image, eventually mutating towards a form resembling the found image in both shape and colour.”

Venus of Google, 2013

From the Long Tail Multiplier Series/ Algorithm27.2 x 14.9 x 8.0 cmz-corp powder 3D Print

via #algopop.