There is an interesting discussion over at metafilter about the possibility of plant intelligence.
Through this post on MetaFilter Music I discovered the tale of Reverend Robert Shields, which seems too perfectly allegorical to have actually happened. Here is an interview with the man and his NYT Obituary.
He kept a written log of his life broken up into five minute intervals. He claimed his diary was complete, that every minute over the course of 20 years was carefully accounted for by thousands of words a day, a task that the interviewer characterized as having taken over his life. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile, the only similar effort I’m aware of, broke up the day in to comparatively slipshod 15 minute chunks. I suppose you have to limit the temporal specificity of your log to avoid falling in to an recursive loop of logging one’s logging…
Reminds me of a very short story by Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science.
Why does it freak us out to see simulations of humans that fall just short of the real deal? When it’s stylized, just a collection of parts that attempt no more than to signify personhood, we’re fine. But when its real enough that we’re briefly fooled, that we feel the tug to fawn over or lust after, we’re repulsed.
The KLF were two British chaps who exposed the mass sphexishness of the music world, fired machine gun blanks at award show audiences, made and set alight a million quid, and wrote a wonderful book to help you follow in their footsteps.
Went to HacDC and became a charter member tonight. Looks like a pretty groovy group and a very nice space with the requisite piles of technological ephemera.
I’m pitching the idea of developing an electronic goban, which I’ve described on the HacDC wiki.
So there isn’t much I can do on the VU meter project until I get a hold of an oscilloscope. The next logical step would be to design the envelope follower that the comparator will receive input from, but doing this “blind” would be difficult. In the mean time I thought I’d check that the relay I’m using can actually switch as fast as I need it to (without burning up) and get a feeling for what rapidly flashed incandescent bulbs look like.
This is Patterson Office Tower (POT) on The University of Kentucky campus. It’s home to a small cafe/mezzanine, an obscure mathematics library, and the offices of all the professors and bureaucrats who don’t fit in the endearingly inefficient buildings elsewhere on campus. If, as civil engineers like to say, architecture is the art of wasting space, it’s oft-scorned brutalist style seems to be a good example of what would happen if we eschewed the discipline altogether.
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