[Oh, this is just bloody gorgeous. -egg]
Created by mixed media artist Anila Quayyum Agha, this elaborately carved cube with an embedded light source projects a dazzling pattern of shadows onto the surrounding gallery walls. Titled Intersections, the installation is made from large panels of laser-cut wood meant to emulate the geometrical patters found in Islamic sacred spaces. Agha shares:
via Intersections: An Ornately Carved Wood Cube Projects Shadows onto Gallery Walls | Colossal.
[Pitchfork is very, very impressed with the new Sun Kil Moon album. I definitely like what I’ve heard so far (which isn’t much). -egg]
Over the years I’ve looked at a number of books on hunting, fishing, and foraging, but this turns out to be my favorite. The first sentence: “We live in an edible world.”
There is good info on things like aging game birds, gutting and skinning a deer, even how to get started hunting. Or how to net herring — an annual ritual in NorCal. For the boatless, this can be practiced from shore with a cast net, 5-gallon bucket, and hip boots. Onto harvesting clams, rock crabs, rock fish. How to kill eels with salt (almost impossible otherwise), manzanita cider, madrone bark tea. Making sausage from wild boar, eating squirrels, (there’s a bluegrass song, “Why Would Anyone Eat Beef When They Can Have squirrel?”), and recipes for everything.
In less than a month, my new book – “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” – will be published. This is the product of ten years worth of research into how social media has inflected American teen life. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ve seen me talk about these issues over the years. Well, this book is an attempt to synthesize all of that work into one tangible artifact.
Now I have a favor…. please consider pre-ordering a copy (or two <grin>). Pre-sales and first week sales really matter in terms of getting people’s attention. And I’m really hoping to get people’s attention with this book. I’ve written it to be publicly accessible in the hopes that parents, educators, journalists, and policy makers will read it and reconsider their attitude towards technology and teen practices. The book covers everything from addiction, bullying, and online safety to privacy, inequality, and the digital natives debate.
If you have the financial wherewithal to buy a copy, I’d be super grateful. If you don’t, I *totally* understand. Either way, I’d be super super super appreciative if you could help me get the word out about the book. I’m really hoping that this book will alter the public dialogue about teen use of social media.
via danah boyd | apophenia » blatant groveling: please buy my book.
[A little too theory-heavy for my taste, but some interesting ideas, and the piece sounds pretty good. -egg]
After completing her informal education in Berlin’s underground club scene, artist and musician Holly Herndon relocated to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA at Mills College’s esteemed music program. Now continuing her studies in computer-based music at Stanford, Herndon has an inquisitive approach to technology, finding common threads among often-divided disciplines and communities: electronic music, academia, the tech sector, and contemporary art. As a result, her work is not easily categorized, whether she’s composing music for brass ensembles or working on robotic sculptures with artist Conrad Shawcross, touring festivals in Europe or making dance music with heavily processed recordings of the human voice. This week, she released a 12″ entitled Chorus on RVNG Intl.
via Rhizome | Continuous Partial Listening: Holly Herndon in Conversation.
The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users’ most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.
How a 40-year-old IT consultant became nod, one of Silk Road’s highest volume heroin dealers, who turned informant and then fugitive.
The Daily Dot – The final confessions of a Silk Road kingpin.
[Love Monsanto or hate them, this is pretty interesting. Note: the use of the word “organic” in the headline is completely misleading; they mean “non-GMO.” -egg]
But here’s the twist: The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren’t genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn’t mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark’s division is drawing on Monsanto’s accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor.
via Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie – Wired Science.
I just finished Cat Valente’s _Deathless_. One of the best books I’ve ever read. If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, you owe it to yourself to read this as soon as possible. Valente isn’t Gaiman — she’s something rare and beautiful and unique — but his work is the closest point of reference I can offer. They’re both working in the realm of fairy tale as literature, fairy tale as high art. In this case it’s a Russian folk tale (warning! Spoilers on the Wikipedia article about the folk tale), woven together with the gritty history of the Siege of Leningrad. _Deathless_ is powerful and mythic and moving, and I give it my very highest recommendation. -Egg
