Unplugged, one of my favorite blogs, has been doing their “Best of” thing for the past couple of weeks (who hasn’t?) and they recently re-posted their awesome post called “Taking a Peek: DJs Living Rooms.“
They posted a couple of great photos of various (mostly German) DJs’ living rooms to see how they are able to integrate their inevitably sprawling records and wires. (Anyone who has any kind of electronics fetish and some sense of habitational aesthetics knows how difficult it is to hide wires and other things.)
My favorite is below. You can check the rest out in the hyperlink for the post above.
Just a quick post on this NY Times Bits Blog post about “hybrid chips.” As some of you may know, most computer chips are silicon-based but as the post linked above reports, we may be moving towards hybrid chips that combine materials that are incompatible molecularly. How can we do that you ask? Well, the incompatibility of molecules is exactly what generates energy. Electricity for one relies on electrons being a little loose and flying off the handle.
Now the engineers who are working on this are not making on predictions about these chips being any faster than what we have but they are important for two reasons: (1) they will be smaller (2) they will be greener.
Yes, nanocomputing….coming soon to a Best Buy near you.
My boy Steve from I Smell Like Money (see blog roll on right) is helping to put together the East Coast launch for up-and-coming clothing line apliiq. Key things to keep in mind. It’s free and there are giveaways, so WTFN (why the F not)?
Details:
When: Jan 2. 10pm-4am
Where: Public Assembly, 70 North 6th Street, Brooknam.
Who: Francis and the Lights, Theophilus London, Friends with Benefits and Superdunny.
Also, keep in mind, the clothes are dope so check them out.
So Donna Haraway, the amazing author of the famed essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”(1985) which for people who have any interest in social/cultural or literary theory know, can basically sit back and relax as her theoretical formulations fromm 20 years ago have visible proof. (For those who are unfamiliar with Haraway and her work, please check out the hyperlinks above.) The basic thread of her argument has to do with reconfiguring human ontology. In other words, she wants to reconsider what “being human” is scientifically, culturally and of course technologically. And thus she brings out the image of the cyborg (cybernetic organism) which is of course the hybridization of machine with organism. (She even cites the film Robocop, not to be confused with the great Kanye West song “Robocop.“) The point for Haraway is that this notion of an essential humanness of human being is a myth that has been deployed for various dangerous political purposes (e.g., ideas of human civilization as European for colonialism; ideas of human as default male for sexism, ideas of human as normatively heterosexual; etc.). Moreover, she argues that scientifically, it is inaccurate. (Don’t mess with her. She may be speaking in “high theory” talk but she’s a PhD in Biology–from Yale no less.)
Gizmodo tells me that a victim of the bombings in London in 2005 has been fitted with a prosthetic arm that goes beyond our “normal” understanding of prosthesis. In this case, she has been fitted with an arm that is fused with her own skin and bones. I don’t know much about the science behind it but it is quite amazing to think about. I would even suggest, following Marshall McLuhan, that all technological media are “prosthetics” in one way or another. But even Peter Stuyvesant, the early Dutch settler of New Amsterdam (New York) had a wooden leg. (Sidebar: Please listen to the classic Pharcyde song “Ya Mama” for some funny but inappopriate peg leg jokes.) However, these prior forms of prosthesis along with other more modern types could not truly herald Haraway’s “cyborg” because of the lack of hybridity. Machine and organism though contiguous were not continuous.
Sadly, the 20th century has been the most violent of all human centuries and it may be that these will have to be utilized with increasing frequency. And that’s wack.
The British magazine The New Statesmen’s CultureTech blog has just hinted me to Kosmix, which is a BROWSE engine as opposed to a SEARCH engine. Here’s how NS describes it:
The challenges facing anyone attempting to take on the champ are seemingly insurmountable. The problem is that you’re not just fighting a brilliant search engine – you’re trying to reprogram the muscle memory of billions of browsers. For many users Google isn’t even a conscious choice, it’s a reflex.
A good job then that new entrant Kosmix isn’t actually a search engine, according to its founders it’s a browse engine. Having just secured $20 million of new funding,
the site has opened up to the public for the first time in what’s charmingly called a ‘beta-ish’ launch. The home page gives you a clear indication of what to expect when you use it to search – sorry – browse.
Strictly in terms of business, I think Kosmix is off to a good start. We all know that fighting the Google on its own terms is a near impossibility. Now I’m not quite sure whether Kosmix in its functionality, that is to say, in its use will actually be much different than what Google has done in terms of its homepage feature which it calls iGoogle. For all intents and purposes, it seems as if Kosmix is nothing more than a customizable homepage with one additional feature which is a kind of organized BuzzFeed.
The blog post from CultureTech makes note of this criticism but I think it may be something useful to continue to develop something like a customizable homepage for Web 2.0 users because the Internet will be the operating platform for more and more applications. (By this I mean we will soon have most applications be web apps a la Google Docs.) And by all means, many are already onto this and will do so.
I love the Internet.
Lifehacker notes that you can now send texts through GChat. This is major!
