The End of Cyberspace

Moleskine art

A fellow Moleskine enthusiast points me to a fabulous Moleksine art project-- the beautiful Alchemy Notebook, an imagined medieval notebook. Kind of a visual hybrid of Calvino's Invisible Cities and Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Many great pages, and some very ingenious pop-ups, but for my own historical reasons I like the solar corona best.

via flickr

Twitter baby

Maybe I shouldn't have worried so much about how my use of Twitter could be more meaningful, in light of this:

corey menscher built the ‘kickbee’ while attending the itp program at new york university this fall. the device is designed to record kicking movements from a pregnant woman’s baby. once a kicking is sensed, the device will send a signal to its onboard electronics, which will in turn transmit the signal to a computer via bluetooth. the computer then logs the information on the online social messaging service twitter. this send a message out to followers letting them all know that the baby kicked.

Of course, you might argue that a kick is a lot more meaningful than anything I could post.

Menscher elaborates:

As an expectant father, I am once-removed from the physical knowledge my wife has of our baby and its development. With the Kickbee, I wanted to create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby's movements. It can also aid in tracking the frequency of fetal movements, which is an important way to monitor the health of the developing child.

The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit small but detectable voltages when triggered by movement underneath. An Arduino Mini microcontroller transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth. (a SparkFun BlueSMIRF v2 module that communicates serially with a Macbook Pro)

The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.

links for 2008-12-16

• Mixed Realities: An International Networked Art Exhibition and Symposium
  "Mixed Reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects can co-exist and interact in real-time.

  "Mixed Realities is an exhibition and symposium that explores the convergence—through cyberspace—of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks....

  "Five works were commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. specifically for the Mixed Realities exhibition. Collectively, they combine sensor, video, sound, streaming, webcam, projection, processing, world wide web, and 3-D technologies to produce immersive, interactive and participatory performances and installations. They allow audiences to experience real and fictional places simultaneously in Imaging Beijing and The Vitruvian World; debate the value of virtual labor and currency in No Matter; communicate physical data from multiple sources through Remote; and question mediated communication itself in Caterwaul."

  
  
  (tags: art endofcyberspace media secondlife exhibition mixed_reality virtualworlds)
  
  

Games without frontiers

[From the Red Herring blog, 2005]

1.

I was about ten when I saw my first video game. As a kid obsessed with science fiction, astronomy, and computers, Nolan Bushnell's Pong seemed like the coolest object this side of a telescope clock drive. Growing up, I would spend more hours (and quarters) playing video games than I like to think about: the worlds of Defender and Xevious came be to as familiar to me as my backyard, but a lot more exciting.

Like most kids of my generation, I thought of video games as an alternative reality. Not only were the games other worlds: arcades were inevitably dark, slightly space-agey places populated entirely by teenagers.

Of course, games have come a long way since then. In technical terms, video games are more complex, realistic, open-ended, and intense than in my boyhood, but they're fundamentally conservative technologies. Despite all the changes around the edges—the better graphics, the spectacular violence, the five hundred-button controllers that you have to learn to use in utero—they're still worlds in boxes, ultrasophisticated versions of arcade games or personal computers of old. Playstation and Xbox are incremental improvements over Galaxian and Pac Man: granted, they're very big increments, but my 10 year-old self would have no trouble grokking a Playstation.

links for 2008-12-01

• Tyranny of the moment
  "[S]low time is a main scarce resource in the information age. Parents, readers, pensioners, wage workers, executives, unionists and politicians have a common cause here."
  (tags: culture books mobility cellphones)
• Ethics and Information Technology, 9:4 (December 2007)
  Special issue on "Information, Silence and Sanctuary."
  (tags: overload zeroing culture Internet design)
• David Levy, "No time to think," Ethics and Information Technology 9:4 (December 2007), 237-249.
  This paper argues that the accelerating pace of life is reducing the time for thoughtful reflection, and in particular for contemplative scholarship, within the academy. It notes that the loss of time to think is occurring at exactly the moment when scholars, educators, and students have gained access to digital tools of great value to scholarship. It goes on to explore how and why both of these facts might be true, what it says about the nature of scholarship, and what might be done to address this state of affairs.
  (tags: overload zeroing culture academia)
• TXT: Overconnected and struggling to find a work-life balance in the digital age
  (tags: overload Internet)
• The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine
  "DAVID LEVY, A PROFESSOR in the University of Washington's School of Information, believes he may have witnessed the first-ever interruption-by-e-mail. It happened back in the '70s, when he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a think tank at the forefront of today's computing world."
  (tags: Internet culture overload zeroing)
• E-serenity, now! | csmonitor.com
  "The information age, it seems, is data-contaminated. And it's not just the volume of information that's worrisome; it's the lack of context in which it's delivered.

  "At least that is the argument of a new and growing group of people some call "information environmentalists." Their aim: to reclaim quiet mental space from the chirping persistence of cellphones, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, niche cable channels, and a virtual landscape littered with news, entertainment, and sales pitches."

  
  
  (tags: Internet culture zeroing overload)