Post-Election Floundering

The right has been blowing-off steam during the last week and a half. I'm sure you guys have seen the clips of Romney, Ryan and Fox News. They're clearly ignoring the adage about continuing to dig the holes in which we put ourselves.

Here's some relevant audio from George HW Bush's Campaign Manager, Lee Atwater, recorded during the Reagan administration, talking about how to appeal to racists "abstractly". Warning: he uses the n-word, so this is NSFW. [Link.] [Via.]

Hooray for the Home Team

Among the states considering gay-marriage measures this fall, Washington represented the best hope for breaking a 30-plus-state losing streak at the ballot box.

52 to 48


+++

The vote puts Washington and Colorado to the left of the Netherlands on marijuana law, and makes them the nexus of a new social experiment with uncertain consequences.

55 to 45

Universal Computer Users

...what I mean are users who have the ability to achieve their goals regardless of the primary purpose of an application or device. Such users will find a way to their aspiration without an app or utility programmed specifically for it. The Universal user is not a super user, not half a hacker. It is not an exotic type of user.

An exerpt of a text by Olia Lialina. Linked as part of an ongoing discussion by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about the “The coming war on general computation”. Bruce Sterling on Beyond the Beyond sees "Turing-Completeness" in a bit more cynical light.

People are musing about ubiquitous computing a lot these days.

Portalesque Pastorale

"No One Could Have Predicted..."

The Pepsi Paradox

I listened to an "All in the Mind" radio program this week on how modern neuroscience views the unconscious. What I got out of the program was that much of what is traditionally attributed to the unconscious is actually preprocessing of your raw perceptions. The guest on the program explains that if you saw a raw video feed of what comes out of your eyeballs, it would look very poor quality, have a black hole in the middle, and would be upside down. Your visual cortex is doing a tremendous amount of processing. Other cognitive tasks, like social intuition, also involve a lot of manipulation of raw experience before we deal with them consciously.

The Pepsi Paradox refers to the fact that people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests much more than soft drink sales would suggest. This paradox launched the field of neuro-marketing.

[Link] to the "All in the Mind" program.
[Link] to a short Frontline article about neuro-marketing.
[Link] to a Negativland song about the Pepsi paradox.

Radicale

I'd recommend this calendar and contacts server. I installed it at work today. The simplicity of its installation, and its to-the-point documentation puts it head and shoulders above the other groupware packages I've vetted. [Link.]

Work is death in disguise

I really dug this article. I'm a sucker for sweeping statements and populist tub-thumping. [Link.] [Via.]

I'm a socialist to the extent that I believe it's society's moral imperative to sacrifice its largess to eliminate human suffering. But I've always been uncomfortable with the valourization of work in traditional socialism. It is more honest to be a miner rather than an investment banker, but spending your whole life doing either, I think, shows a dearth of imagination.

A Bestiary of Networks

I'm starting to use a very cool program called Graphviz to profile my code and visualize the references made between plans, sections and details in large sets of construction drawings. Graphviz contains several algorithms for laying out networks of nodes and edges. The most interesting ones simulate physical forces across the network (force-directed graphs, or spring models, as demonstrated in this d3.js demo).

Check out this gallery from the University of Florida and AT&T Research. It has twenty-five hundred force-directed graphs. [Link]

Below is a mesh of a helicopter:

And here it is as a spring model:

Turing’s Strange Seas of Thought

Alan Turing, Artificial Feminity, computation versus cognition, technology art criticism, and a new aesthetic.

A long Bruce Sterling speech that makes a worthwhile read.

I want to curate a big exhibition about these kinds of ideas.

Link.