MachineMachine (formerly 'The Huge Entity')

Link: Dancing About Architecture

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:30:00 -0700

I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”[1] Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently. At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or…

Link: Ant mega-colony takes over world

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:10:00 -0700

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together. Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica. These introduced Argentine…

AskMefi: Behind the Mask - Michael Jackson's rarest recording?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:40:00 -0700

Michael Jackson penned and recorded lots of songs, many of which remain unreleased. Perhaps the most infamous, and rarest recording, is his version of Behind the Mask. Legend has it that upon hearing Yellow Magic Orchestra's original track, somewhen around 1979, Quincy Jones fell in love with the track, and he and Michael worked together on their own version. Jackson wrote new lyrics for it - adding to those of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Chris Mosdell - and eventually recorded it during his Off The Wall sessions. For unknown reasons the track…

Link: Take two video games and call me in the morning

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:22:00 -0700

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.” It is also believed that timing is crucial – our brains appear to be more susceptible to change early in our developmental lives. Thus, a world with vastly different technology driven demands, opportunities and challenges, is surely going to lead to brain changes: the brain of our children will be different from those of the generations who rode their bikes, jumped rope, and played sports in the backyard, rather than throwing a football…

/text blog: The Movement of The Middle

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:05:00 -0700

Words, bread, and wine are between us, beings or relations. We appear to exchange them between us though we are connected at the same table or with the same language. They are breast-fed by the same mother. Parasitic exchange, crossed between the logical and the material, can now be explained… Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?[...]

Mediations, relations - one can make believe one is lost in this fractal cascade……

Video: Origins of the Moonwalk

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:04:00 -0700

Link: three frames

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:01:00 -0700

Three frames is all you need

Link: Fifty Books for Our Times

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:43:00 -0700

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help…

Video: Rejected - Best Oscar Award Winner Movie

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:30:00 -0700

Video: I'm losing my command

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:45:00 -0700

Link: Music is Math is Beauty

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:05:00 -0700

Glenn Marshall is an Irish computer video artist and musician whose recent work has focused on audio visualization programed in the Processing language. Generally the program is left to its own devices, though his work-for-hire has more intentional design, as in his video for the Peter Gabriel song "The Nest that Sailed the Sky." Marshall has also been hired to create video for Guinness for Sky TV and the Rugby Six Nations Tournament, and a looping animation for Hermes of Paris. Marshall discusses his works with some detail on his blog. (More videos inside)

Link: Michael Jackson's patented "Smooth Criminal" leaning shoes

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:38:00 -0700

Patent number 5255452, filed in 1992, shows how Michael Jackson and his dancers could lean at 45-degree angles during live performances of the song "Smooth Criminal". 1. A system for engaging shoes with a hitch mans to permit a person standing on a stage surface to lean forwardly beyond his or her center of gravity, comprising: at least one shoe having a heel with a first engagement means, said first engagement means comprising a recess formed in a heel of said shoe covered with a heel slot plane located at a bottom region of said heel, said heel slot plate…

Link: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:32:00 -0700

Boston University neuroscientist Patrick McNamara has an interesting evolutionary theory of dreaming. McNamara’s theory draws from the well-known “handicapping principle” in evolutionary biology, where some organisms have been observed to display behavioral traits or physical characteristics that seem ostensibly to disadvantage them but in fact simply reflect their genetic value. The classic example of this is “stotting” behavior in healthy young gazelles, where these animals jump up and down in front of a predatory leopard rather than—what would seem to be a smarter move—immediately running away. Stotting is a “costly signal,” but it works, because the leopards take this stotting…

Video: Michael Jackson - The Way You Make Me Feel (long version)

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:25:00 -0700

Video: Michael Jackson - Don't stop till you get enough

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:21:00 -0700

Twitter: Long live Michael Jackson

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:01:00 -0700

therourke: Long live Michael Jackson

Link: What Skepticism Reveals about Science

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:26:00 -0700

“The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no.” No cubed. The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled to the clicker culture of mass media where attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, at the movies, on the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist,…

Link: Jamie Livingston's Polaroid of the Day

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:24:00 -0700

A collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131 There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from.

Link: Exploring Empathic Space: Correlates of Perspective Transformation Ability and Biases in Spatial Attention

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:42:00 -0700

Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world, including our own bodies, would contribute significantly to our ability to empathize. "Our language is full of spatial metaphors, particularly when we attempt to explain or understand how other people think or feel. We often talk about putting ourselves in others' shoes, seeing something from someone else's point of view, or figuratively looking over someone's shoulder," Sohee Park, report co-author and professor of psychology, said. "Although future work is needed…

Link: Michel Serres's Milieux

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:38:00 -0700

Mediation means that which stands, comes or moves between things otherwise separated or opposed. Serres’s work has never ceased to meditate upon mediation in every possible sense: as arbitration; moderation; mediocrity; passage; communication; combination; exchange; translation; transformation; substitution; surrogacy. Serres is fond of representing himself as a cross-over, an intermediary between worlds: a ‘middler’, to awaken from its sleep for a second a sixteenth-century word. More than a compendium or encyclopaedia of such forms, his work can be regarded as a kind of self-inventing machine for mediating between mediations.