[Some totally badass 3D-printed art. -egg]

Take a look at Joshua Harker’s Quixotic Headdress — you can easily lose yourself in the depth and complexity of his meandering, organic works. Harker is one of the most-recognized artists to pioneer digital sculpture and three-dimensional printing.

In the ’80s he created surrealist automatism drawings inspired by the loose, spontaneous twists and shapes of great artists like Miro, Dali and Picasso. But how could he turn his 2D drawings into 3D works? He knew he needed to build his expertise in CAD and prototyping, so he became a commercial sculptor and designer of toys and special effects, developing everything from motorcycles to medical equipment.

via 3D Printing: Art or Technology? An Interview with Joshua Harker.

Backyard lighting is as much about decoration as it is about safety, allowing you to enjoy your artificial oasis at night without the risk of accidentally stepping on a hidden rake. But why run lights to every corner of your yard when you can just mount a decorative Japanese lantern to a quadruped and simply have it follow you around all night?

That’s the genius behind Alvaro Cassinelli’s latest creation. As guests arrive for a nighttime garden party you could—in theory, at least—assign one of these glowing creepers to follow each person around as they mingle. The lantern bots are also equipped with infrared rangefinders so they won’t accidentally bump into someone, or wander into a koi pond.

via Robotic Garden Lamps Can Follow Your Guests Around the Party.

Centuries after Shakespeare wrote about King Lear’s symptoms, there’s still no perfect way to care for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In the Netherlands, however, a radical idea is being tested: Self-contained “villages” where people with dementia shop, cook, and live together—safely.

via An Amazing Village Designed Just For People With Dementia.

[Spoiler: they didn’t go away because they don’t work. The available evidence suggests that they work almost eerily well. They went away because they were legislated out of existence. I don’t think that can last, long-term. -egg]

WHETHER THE REVIVED INTRADE or Predictious succeeds may depend on how their legal issues resolve. But there is also the unsettling possibility that they will fail because the product they deliver—accurate predictions about the future—is not a product people actually want. For all its promise, Intrade never expanded its user base far beyond the niche world of gamblers and hobbyists, and its employee head count never rose above double digits.

via Death at the Summit: How the Feds Killed a Market Oracle.

Eve Online: The Most Thrilling Boring Game in the Universe
The massive engineering challenge of building a fusion reactor
Some strange history of the very alien Asmat people in New Guinea

Few games have such a conflicting outward image. Eve Online is famously exciting, but also notoriously dull. Eve Online will lure in players with its stories of spying, trust and betrayal, but even long-time players will say that most people tune out before they even get past the tutorial. Eve Online is the most fun you’ll ever have in a game. Eve Online will put you into a coma.

via Eve: The most thrilling boring game in the universe | Polygon.

No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on iter will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. iter, in Latin, means “the way.”

via Raffi Khatchadourian: Can an Audacious Plan to Create a New Energy Resource Help Save the Planet? : The New Yorker.

Michael made a scouting trip there during a mid-May break in filming. Only in the mid-1950s had a few Dutch missionaries and government officials begun pacifying the Asmat, but even by 1961 many had never seen a Westerner, and inter-village warfare and headhunting remained common. “Now this is wild and somehow more remote country than what I have ever seen before,” Michael wrote. In many ways, the Asmat world at the time was a mirror image of every taboo of the West. In some areas, men had sex with each other. They occasionally shared wives. In bonding rituals, they sometimes drank one another’s urine. They killed their neighbors, and they hunted human heads and ate human flesh.

via What Really Happened to Michael Rockefeller | History | Smithsonian.

[Slightly facile but interesting. -egg]

While I am far from a Luddite who fetishizes a life without tech, we need to consider the consequences of this latest batch of apps and tools that remind us to contact significant others, boost our willpower, provide us with moral guidance, and encourage us to be civil. Taken together, we’re observing the emergence of tech that doesn’t just augment our intellect and lives — but is now beginning to automate and outsource our humanity.

But let’s take a concrete example. Instead of doing the professorial pontification thing we tech philosophers are sometimes wont to do, I talked to the makers of BroApp, a “clever relationship wingman” their words that sends “automated daily text messages” to your significant other. It offers the promise of “maximizing” romantic connection through “seamless relationship outsourcing.”

via Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

[Thoughtful essay by Ramez Naam. -egg]

Yes. Yes we can. The last year has brought with it the revelations of massive government-run domestic spying machineries in the US and UK. On the horizon is more technology that will make it even easier for governments to monitor and track everything that citizens do. Yet I’m convinced that, if we’re sufficiently motivated and sufficiently clever, the future can be one of more freedom rather than less.

via Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia? – Charlie’s Diary.

[Cool, simple art project. -egg]

Recently my grandmother found out I’m queer. Her response was to tell me that she disapproves of me living with my “friend” i.e. my girlfriend and that I should give up my vile queer ways and become a Christian Lol. She even sent me a bible.  Here are its remains, which I made into black-out poetry.

Poem 1: Bisexual from Leviticus 19:9— “Have sexual relations with her.  Have sexual relations with him.  Have sexual relations with both a woman and a man.  Have sexual relations with yourself. Vomit on everyone who does not respect you.”

Poem 2: Fisting from Judges 8:5— “water/ lap the water/ drink/go down to drink/your hands/go down/I give into your hands/go down/encouraged/down/on the seashore/the whole hand/your hand/inside/I get to the edge/and shout/grasping/crying out/Beth/Beth/Beth/Beth/Beth/God/I came”

Poem 3: A Letter to the Exiles from Jeremiah 28:13 — “Ze said: ‘Do not let lies name you, nor harm your heart. Gather. Raise the sword against them. They scorn and reproach, for they have not listened— again and again have not listened.’ “

Poem 4: Child from Ezekiel 16:22 — “Your father and your mother rubbed salt in. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough for you, for on the day you were born you were despised. Live! Grow.  I looked at you and saw you were enough.”

Poem 5: Father from Ezekiel 16:22 — “You never adored us. You became very angry. You took some out on us. Your sons and daughters were not enough? You slaughtered— in all your detestable practices— our youth.”

Poem 6: Misandry from Acts 27:41 — “Dangerous men should be broken.”

via Recently my grandmother found out I’m queer. Her… – Ankle-deep in the river..

If you have any interest in programming at all, or in how software could change the world, I *highly* recommend that you watch this intriguing 12-minute video about the language that Stephen Wolfram is debuting. The guy does not think small.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik

[I don’t listen to that much ska, but this is just a stunning piece of music journalism. Highly recommended. -egg]

When I got back home and was trying to write about Jah B., doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance. Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style mento, calypso? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.” Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear and body, or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth…

[…]

…if you listen to these songs or even listen to thirty seconds of each, you can hear the rhythm we’re talking about begin to change in flip-book fashion. You hear it persist, you hear it move from song to song, but you hear it changing. You hear the emphasis on the upbeat getting stronger, hear an essential garishness creep in, feel the tempo getting faster, everything sort of sliding forward in the measure. African drumming, calypso and mento and Cuban counterpoint, Rastafarian groundations, the sound systems, and something quintessential but indefinable that is Jamaican, all of these had readied the people, certain people, for this change, to receive this rhythm from the States and just crank it a little, then send it back. In those eight songs you can hear ska unfurl as another tendril out of the blues, the great mother root. It’s as tidy a demonstration as I know of the fact—deeper than ska, deeper than Rosco, deeper than the South—that black popular music in the twentieth century can’t be comprehended except as a phenomenon of what Bernard Bailyn calls the Atlantic world. In this case the old West Indian world, of which Tennessee lay at the northern fringe. It’s the shatter-zone of the slave diaspora. Circulating currents. We gave Jamaica blues. Jamaica gave us ska. Jamaica gave us dub, we gave back hip-hop. It’s been happening for four hundred years.

via ISSUE 83: That Chop on the Upbeat :: Oxford American – The Southern Magazine of Good Writing.