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A lot can happen in a minute when algorithms are at hand to…

A lot can happen in a minute when algorithms are at hand to process and store all this data. Infographic by domo, but discovered and discussed here.

The story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama – News – Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2012/president/2012/12/23/the-story-behind-mitt-romney-loss-the-presidential-campaign-president-obama/2QWkUB9pJgVIi1mAcIhQjL/story-0.html

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Social media turns into boring old media

Warren Ellis, always a shrewd observer of online media, supposes that we’ve reached peak social media, the point at which exciting new communications forms ossify into dull media titans:

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

His closing remark is “I wonder if anyone’s been thinking twice about giving up their personal websites.” Good question.

The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle

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HOWTO convert an MP3 to a playable, 3D printed record

Instructables user Aandaghassaei has posted a HOWTO for making a 3D printed record that plays on a regular turntable. Her method converts any digital audio file to grooves ready to print. It’s a bit fuzzy, but still rather exciting! I’m waiting for the way when taking a snapshot of a vinyl disc can be the first step toward deriving its audio content, converting that back to a shapefile, and printing out a high-fidelity duplicate.

In this Instructable, I’ll demonstrate how I developed a workflow that can convert any audio file, of virtually any format, into a 3D model of a record. This is far too complex a task to perform with traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to the STL file format (used by all 3D printers). Most of the heavy lifting is done by Processing, an open source environment that’s often used for coding interactive graphics applications. To get Processing to export to STL, I used the ModelBuilder Library written by Marius Watz (if you are into Arduino/Processing and 3D printing I highly recommend checking this out, it works great).

I’ve uploaded some of my complete record models to the 123D gallery as well as the Pirate Bay. Check Step 6 for a complete listing of what’s there and what I plan on posting. Alternatively, you can go to Step 7 to download my code and learn how to make your own printable records from any audio file you like.

3D Printed Record

Yayoi Kusama’s legendary installation, Obliteration Room, where thousands of children were given colorful stickers and unbridled freedom in a stark white room. January 1, 2012

Magnificent pools of three-dimensional goldfish painted layer-by-layer in resin by Riusuke Fukahori. January 9, 2012

Towering 28 meters high, the Luminarie De Cagna was the centerpiece at the 2012 Light Festival in Ghent, Belgium. January 31, 2012

Using strategically suspended translucent materials and other objects, artist Rashad Alakbarov paints using shadows and light. January 20, 2012

Nope, not a photograph. This amazing portrait was drawn by 29-year-old Portugal-based attorney Samuel Silva based on a photograph by Russian photographer Kristina Tararina. According to the artist he used nothing but colored BIC pens. August 22, 2012

This beautiful installation of umbrellas was recently spotted in Águeda, Portugal by photographer Patrícia Almeida. Almost nothing is known about the artist behind the project or its significance, but it’s impossible to deny the joy caused by taking a stroll in the shadowy rainbow created by hundreds of parasols suspended over this public walkway. August 21, 2012

These completely absurd photographs of dogs swimming underwater by photographer Seth Casteel took the internet by storm. The collection is now available as a book. February 10, 2012

There’s nothing that captures the imagination like mysterious underwater lifeforms, and the discovery of these bizarre ‘crop circles’ off the coast of Japan this year was no exception. The artistic culprit turned out to be nothing more than a tiny puffer fish looking for a hot date. September 19, 2012

Lithuanian photographer and artist Tadao Cern created this series of hilarious portraits entitled, Blow Job, that depicts individuals enduring extremely high speed wind directly to the face. He even followed up with a disturbing video. May 16, 2012

German artist Cornelia Konrads creates mind-bending site-specific installations in public spaces, sculpture parks and private gardens around the world. Her work is frequently punctuated by the illusion of weightlessness, where stacked objects like logs, fences, and doorways appear to be suspended in mid-air, reinforcing their temporary nature as if the installation is beginning to dissolve before your very eyes. April 24, 2012

Constellation is an ongoing series of portraits by New York artist Kumi Yamashita. Each image is constructed from a single unbroken black thread wound through a dense array of galvanized nails mounted on a painted white board, meaning that the darker areas within the portrait are formed solely from the density of the string. June 12, 2012

Artist Guy Laramee completed a number of new sculptural works where he transformed thick tomes into incredible topographical features including mountains, caves, volcanoes, and even water. Many of the works are part of a project titled Guan Yin, a series of work dedicated to the forces that enable individuals to endure grief and pain, or in his words “the mysterious forces thanks to which we can traverse ordeals.” June 12, 2012

In one of the years most popular articles, artist Anna Schuleit sat down with us for a brief interview regarding her 2003 installation titled Bloom at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center which she filled floor by floor with 28,000 potted plants prior to the buildings demolition. March 12, 2012

As part of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) an enormous outdoor installation of fish was constructed using discarded plastic bottles on Botafogo beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. June 21, 2012

For her Tissue Series, artist Lisa Nilsson constructs anatomical cross sections of the human body using rolled pieces of Japanese mulberry paper, a technique known as quilling or paper filigree. Each piece takes several weeks to assemble and begins with an actual photograph of a lateral or mid-sagittal cross section to which she begins pinning small rolls of paper. February 1, 2012