Category: Found

The business of business

Midsommar-trad-slapljus

Sony releases two new ebook readers, which I’m unnaturally enthusiastic about (if you live in the Americas – where the streets flow with milk and honey – I’d appreciate one of these) and in the article over at New York times one of the publishers is brooding about the (reduced!) costs of doing business in the digital age.

Their plan is to wait with digital copies of books so that fans can spend money on buying the hardcover version first. See, because the strategy to delay DVD sales until the cinema screenings have milked the marked has really worked out swell for the movie industry. How come these people still have a job to go to? They must have heard of OCR and rabid fans typing up new books, right?

In response to the $9.99 list price, some publishers are thinking about postponing the release of the digital versions of their most popular books, lengthening the period in which only the higher-priced hardcover versions are available. This is similar to the approach taken by Hollywood studios, which allow DVD sales and rentals only after a film has left theaters.

→ New York Times, Brad Stone: Sony to Cut E-Book Prices and Offer New Readers

To help budding entrepreneurs avoid these traps, I also identified the three key elements that go into a successful business plan: a logical statement of a problem and its solution; a battery of cold, hard evidence; and candor about the risks, gaps and other assumptions that might be proved wrong.

→ Wall Street Journal, John W. Mullins: Why business plans don’t deliver

Pasting is the new writing. DNA wants to be free!

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In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.

→ Locus online, Cory Doctorow: Cheap facts and plausible premise

“We make this look really simple,” Tobias said. “For us to get here is not so simple. But how long it takes us isn’t the issue because once you’ve figured out how to make something simple, a 15-year-old kid can replicate it… That’s why we’re being so careful about [the details].”

→ Threat Level, Kim Zetter: Electronic High-Security Locks Easily Defeated at DefCon [ Previously ]

Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

→ SPTNK.org

kossor_med_flugor

One team of scientists is looking to modify the bacteria in our mouths, so that instead of developing plaque, they’re eating away at it and recalcifying our teeth. An inter-institutional collaboration called SynBERC is creating “tumor-killing bacteria” that hunt and destroy tumor cells based on biological markers. However, it’s tricky to work on these sorts of things right now, because there are so many societal hangups around introducing organisms into people.

→ SEED Magazine, Greg Boustead: The biohacking hobbyist

She’s got a DNA “thermocycler” bought on eBay for $59, and an incubator made by combining a styrofoam box with a heating device meant for an iguana cage. A few months ago, she talked about her hobby on DIY Bio, a Web site frequented by biohackers, and her work was noted in New Scientist magazine.

→ Wall Street Journal, Jeanne Whalen: In attics and closets, “biohackers” discover their inner Frankenstein

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Mr. Gene’s online codon usage optimization software allows you to design, analyze and order your gene online. Gene synthesis at your fingertips. Due to high automatisation and by acquiring excess capacities from OEM gene manufactures around the world, Mr. Gene can offer the best prices on the market.

→ MrGene.com

It is an overwhelming task. “The human genome,” Rienhoff says, “is still a wilderness.” Despite all the well-publicized advances of the past two decades, precious little is known about the genetic variants that cause even the most common maladies, to say nothing of the rare, sometimes one-of-a-kind diseases that afflict children like Beatrice. As a result, up to 40 percent of special-needs kids will never receive a precise diagnosis. “It’s agonizing to have a child with a degenerative disease and not even be able to figure out what it is or what’s causing it or what the course of it will be,”

→ WIRED, Brendan I. Koerner: DIY DNA: One Father’s Attempt to Hack His Daughter’s Genetic Code

This Vegan Life: Suck it, porkie!

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It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

→ American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian diets

One should always be wary of talking of “the last remaining form of discrimination.” If we have learnt anything from the liberation movements, we should have learnt how difficult it is to be aware of latent prejudice in our attitudes to particular groups until this prejudice is forcefully pointed out.

→ Peter Singer: All animals are equal

You reviewed Rattling the Cage in the Yale Law Journal, and while you were critical of Wise’s argument that the law should recognize chimpanzees and other great apes as legal persons, your tone was respectful, and you took his argument seriously. That has encouraged me to attempt to persuade you that—for I am an ethicist, not a lawyer—there is a sound ethical case for changing the status of animals

→ Slate: Animal rights – Debate between Peter Singer & Richard Posner

iTard

The past five years I’ve had portable audio players with me much of the time. Filled with audiobooks, podcasts and lectures there is hardly a minute where I can’t be found with earplugs. I’ve grown so accustomed to having them in that I sometimes wear them without anything playing. It’s not as if I experience phantom pains if I don’t wear them, but I hardly register their presence anymore, and the second I’m not reading I’ll start listening to Science in the city or Arts and Ideas or any of the other 40 odd podcasts I’m subscribing to.

A couple of years ago I killed my mp3 player with excessive volts. Later the same day I walked to the store and heard birds for the first time in a good while. Their chirping reminded me of the time I was wasting. Every minute I walked without headphones on was a minute I wasn’t learning stuff. I remember walking faster only to get back to some sort of content. Too broke to pay I bought an iPod on credit from the store I was working at the next day.

Of course this has nothing to do with actual learning. It’s not even a pursuit of trivia or satiation of a particular interest. It’s the idea that time ought not to be wasted and by learning stuff you become better – whatever “better” means – and becoming better is better than not becoming better.

In the end I find that much of what I listen to doesn’t stick; I’ve become a good reference for references, but don’t retain much information, nor any big picture stuff aquired through osmosis. The articles below deal with this and they are worthy of your attention if you can manage reading for longer than three minutes.

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klippa

He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,” he says, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.”

→ New York, Sam Anderson: In defense of distraction

His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

→ The Atlantic Online, Nicholas Carr: Is Google making us stupid?

The Internet, paradoxically, empowers both the individual and the state. On the one hand, it allows people who had no way to express themselves before, whether for political or economic reasons, an outlet to do so. The Net also makes it much easier to find out what people in other countries are thinking. On the other hand, it gives governments a better view into their citizens’ activities. There’s a danger that some people might mistake the apparent anonymity of the Net for true anonymity.

→ The Sun, Arnie Cooper: Computing the cost; Nicholas Carr on how the Internet is rewiring our brains

Writing. Reading. Outsourcing. Fucking on a train.

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

→ George Orwell: Why I write

The infrastructure of publishing constrains the thinking of writers. Obviously, all forms of art and design have some inherent constraints-but it seems to me that writers are especially misled by the apparent freedoms of language. Published language, in print, on paper, is not language per se: It’s an industrial artifact.

→ Interactions magazine, Bruce Sterling: Design Fiction

Nevermind, of course, that you can use ball-point pens to write whatever you want: a novel, a screenplay, epic poems, religious prophecy, architectural theory, ransom notes. You can draw astronomical diagrams, sketch impossible machines for your Tuesday night art class, or even work on new patent applications for a hydrogen-powered automobile – it doesn’t matter. You can draw penises on your coworker’s paycheck stub. It’s a note-taking technology.

→ BLDGBLOG.com, Geoff Manaugh: How the other half writes: In defense of Twitter

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odun_ramen

When you’re young, it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy, it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you travelled alone to Europe this summer you could surely do the same thing next year and the year after that. Of course, you don’t, though, and the next thing you know you’re an aging, unemployed elf, so desperate for love that you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic.

→ The New Yorker, David Sedaris: Lost loves and lost years

Honey has completed her first project for me: research on the person Esquire has chosen as the Sexiest Woman Alive. (See page 232.) I’ve been assigned to write a profile of this woman, and I really don’t want to have to slog through all the heavy-breathing fan Web sites about her. When I open Honey’s file, I have this reaction: America is fucked. There are charts. There are section headers. There is a well-organized breakdown of her pets, measurements, and favorite foods (e.g., swordfish). If all Bangalorians are like Honey, I pity Americans about to graduate college. They’re up against a hungry, polite, Excel-proficient Indian army. Put it this way: Honey ends her e-mails with “Right time for right action, starts now!”

→ Esquire, A. J. Jacobs: My outsourced life

Critics compare him to Kafka, but it is from Borges that Auster borrows his allegories (detective work, biographical research) and his favorite theme: the impossibility of ever really knowing anything. This is an unwise choice of material, because he is not enough of a thinker to convey the fun that makes intellectual exercise worthwhile after all. The gnostic correspondences between Chinese food and food for thought; dog spelled backwards is god—this is philosophical writing?

→ The Atlantic Monthly, B. R. Myers: An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose

The Pirate eBay and other scenarios.

I’ve been trying to get my head around 3D printing. In the futuristic sense of the word it’s the manufacture of a hot dog complete with relish and mustard. It’s such a transformative technology that I’d like to get in on the game somehow, not only read about it. This is an attempt to put stuff onto paper. Pardon the rambling.

Let’s divide the making of things into five mechanical categories, and see if something useful comes of it: Additive, subtractive, shaping, combining. (Molding might be the fifth, or perhaps it’s of the combination order where the object that is being created is the mold, which combined with steel or what–have–you causes the negative object. Ignore for now.)

The combination of things requires things to combine, the shaping of things requires a material that is malleable besides whatever other qualities you need, the subtractive production (milling, cutting, etc.) need a hunk of material that is bigger than your end result. The additive model allows you to work in multiple materials, at once combining things for whatever function you need them to fill. Today this mostly means a working ball bearing or a surgical knee replacement. This is the technical side of things.

FJARR_AB_conteiner

Some are predicting wholesale piracy, and once the technology becomes cheap enough eBay will surely be flooded by original copies just as The Pirate Bay will be flooded by CAD/CNC program instructions. The joke isn’t lost on anyone that the name of The Pirate Bay will rub off on the auction site once everyone with a RepRap or MakerBot gets up to speed with replicating materials. And why not?

If the remix and DIY approach will hold true for personal fabrication (fabbing) then you’ll be forced to shift gears from “is it what it says it is?” when you relate to objects, to “is it what I want?” Trending and social constructions will still exist because we’re social critters, but they will have to take something else into account (another quality or justification, however arbitrary) and branding of objects might become less relevant.

Michelangelo’s David has been 3D scanned by Stanford and they’re limiting access to the the model, but how long before it’ll be pirated? Once you have an accurate replica next to your garden gnome, does the original matter at all? (If being original is the bees knees, why so afraid of copies? If it’s only a matter of making money by selling the reproduction rights, the losing battle that the music, film and game industries has fought the past ten years is on the doorstep of museums and industrial designers.) Home fabbing is killing IKEA!

We’ll manufacture and use stuff as if it was real but with no sense of “real” left. It’s the post-scarcity of technocrats combined with a corruption of the traditional understanding of materials. It’s a change in volume and sheer numbers, if not in the way we approach things. Material nihilism maybe?

[flv:https://www.monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Bruce.flv https://www.monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Bruce.png 640 360]

Above is the latter part of the end keynote that Bruce Sterling gave at the ReBoot conference. [via Warren Ellis] It’s his take on where we’re heading ideologically and how we can find value in life. He does sound like a whiny old fart part of the time, and there’s little love for his audience, but it’s an articulate rant and I’m not one to scoff at someone who thinks about these things for a living.

Sterlings notion that we ought to get a proper bed and a proper chair make sense if what is left of the objects are our use of them and if the value they provide are somehow measurable by us in a non-arbitrary way. (“Being well rested” is a concept we understand. Extend this to more arbitrary objects and you’ll notice that we have few things that actually carry meanining in the sense that an object in and of itself carries meaning.)

Jamais Cascio referenced the speech with specific regard to how Sterlings ideas relate to 3D printing. Cascio draws parallells to what Postscript and LaserWriter did for desktop publishing in the mid 80’s. (Hollow, bold, underline, cursive Chicago, anyone?) The article is The Desktop Manufacturing Revolution and it’s a good overview of the technology and some of it’s implications.

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We should stop saying ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’ and start saying, ‘What’s going on?’. It’s a quote attributed to Marshall McLuhan by Liss Jeffrey and it’s a sensible suggestion.

While teaching future architects at Chalmers I was impressed by their approach to materials and created objects. It is as much a part of their problem as it’s a boon, but they all treated their models as incidental to the process of architecture. The objects didn’t hold any value except what they said of the overall project.

This is in line with how rapid prototyping has been used up to now, and also diametrically opposed to how many artists approach objects. Technically speaking, an artist can’t take a shit without creating an objet d’art, so we tend to guard whatever physical objects we produce. (Piece of art and piece of shit is interchangable in some peoples minds, but even for them it’s the piece that is important.)

But where an architect might view the printed 3D object as a stepping stone to a real object, fabbing offers a rejection of specificity of objects all together – i.e. a knife at your throat bears meaning on your life and well being, but it’s not really important what kind of knife it is. In this hyperbolic example you would do well to ask the McLuhan question: Is the thing at my throat sharp enough to harm me?

I’m being silly and perhaps these ideas don’t apply to all situations, so let’s focus on art and 3D printing. First of all, we’ll have the meta art: “Ooh, you’ve carved a small replica in wood of something that you randomly generated in your 3D printer to make a point about originality. Good for you!” It’s unavoidable and to a certain degree interesting for the debate and theory (I made my Virtual Photography series because I wanted to make a point about virtual worlds and photography) but it’s the next step that will be interesting: The abandon of material sacrament.

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Artist scientists, spefically mathematicians, have experimented with rapid prototyping and sculpture. They are in the odd position of celebrating the pure æsthetics of mathematical shapes and concepts. Carlo H. Séquin is a physicist who has collaborated with artists and sculptors who work with pure form. His article – Rapid prototyping: a 3d visualization tool takes on sculpture and mathematical forms – is the only artistic reference Wikipedia has on 3D printers, and it has very little to do with modern art. The area seems ripe for experimentation.

What I recently wrote about ARGs (Alternative Reality Games) seems applicable to 3D printers. You get an excuse and a means to remake the world in your own imagination or buy into someone elses, literally. Interpretation and allegory – traditionally the priviledge of priests and artists – is now a technological issue, not a metaphysical one: If you can print anything that money can buy you might as well print money. Fake money buying fake things in a fake world; Truly a map on a 1:1 scale if there ever was one.

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If it wasn’t for the inertia of societies the end of this process would find us in a copy of Second Life where we’re all pointing at colourful things and going “meh”. As it stands, this process of virtualising maybe isn’t about shifting the way we manufacture and appreciate things, but will help us remove the clutter – take away everything that isn’t interesting and special and super and reveal the social superstructure onto which the objects were fixed; That designer lamp you liked is only a Google Warehouse click away. (Much in line with what Sterling is suggesting, but not because of an appreciation of craftsmanship or purposeful living but because it’s meaningless in a literal sense.)

Besides the artisan or mundane stuff that we for one reason or another love, objects are deconstructed in a way we should recognise, that of Platonic idea and instance. (But here the idea of an idea isn’t a reductionist problem but the foundation for discussion, the new modernity as Nicolas Bourriaud put it in a recent lecture at Valand.) It’s as if the object becomes stretched out in two directions until you have the plastic, wood and metal in one hand, and an idea or social category in the other. Ceci n’est pas une pip and so on.

I might be lacking whatever gene it is that makes some of the bicycle people not as enthusiastic about my boom-bike as I am. I see it as an instance of a bike, an embodiment of features and designs and materials that under other cicumstanced would be a fancy Bianchi. So when I see the titanium rapid prototyping that Arcam offers I imagine that I could recreate my beater as it was built. The object is incidental, what we imbue it with is not.

You could argue that I am a vulgar person with no appreciation for workmanship. And you would be right.

You are a screw; A spirally inclined plane.

The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental Machines. These are his six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines. I believe this with all my heart. I do. And yet sometimes I seem to intuit the existence of a seventh Machine, hovering like a blasphemous ghost just beyond apprehension. There is something wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is.

→ William Shunn: Inclination.

Although we refer to the six simple machines there is really only three – the lever, the wheel & axle, and the inclined plane. The wedge, the pulley, and the screw are modifications of the first three.

→ Balmoral Science Department: Simple Machines.

A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. In general, they can be defined as the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force. A simple machine uses a single applied force to do work against a single load force

→ Wikipedia: Simple machine.

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Bloggers that read together, stay together.

What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.

→ KungFuGrippe.com, Merlin Mann: Better.

“There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the floor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.”

→ 43folders.com, Merlin Mann: Free Me.

Somebody somewhere got the raw end of the deal: they gave their work for my “work”. They supported me by toiling for hours in the creation of resources, and I copied their actions faithfully in pretense of doing the sense. It has an almost cargo-cult quality to it, with thousands of people everyday going through the motions of “work” in the belief that resources will rain from the sky. And they do, which is perhaps the most interesting thing about how western society ir organized.

→ Metafilter: Why work?

Surround yourself with people who are jealous of your time, disrespect your writing and undermine you at every turn. If possible, marry one and have kids.

→ Zed Lopez: How to Fail at Writing.

I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddam common courtesy to give him a reach-around. I’ll be watching you.

→ IMDB, memorable quotes: Full Metal Jacket.

Another word for euphemism.

Spritz cologne immediately above where the grilled cheese is made. This gives the cook a more aromatic and pleasant cooking experience.

→ From the Love Letters section of the Boston Globe: Allergic to “grilled cheese”

If you’re dead-set on deep-throating this guy, and he’s dead-set on being deep-throated, then the first step is for him to be a gentleman and cut it out with the facefucking.

→ Ask.Metafilter is as usual less prudish: His cock barely fits in my mouth; how can I give better head?

The tangy metallic is iron from the blood. Then there is the almond nutty context probably based on mucus. And the lightly salted melon. And the durian flavor from dead cells. Any of which can come to the fore based on diet and hormone progression.

→ Ask.Metafilter: Connoisseurs of Cunnilingus: What does it taste like to you?

Charlie crept into Terry and Penny’s first-floor bedroom and fired at them until his gun jammed. He handed the gun to Waid, who fixed the .22 and fired two more shots. They left the room, and then Charlie came back and cut Penny’s throat to make sure she was dead.

→ Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly: Why did a small-town girl have her family brutally murdered?

Sengamalam, one of the boys, told me that more than 2,000 soldiers had been involved in the round-up of our 22-strong unit, and had dumped the bodies of those who died in the open air. My mind swum with images of Ajanthi and Muralie, their bodies being scavenged by dogs.

→ The Telegraph: Life as a female Tamil Tiger guerilla relived by one of first female soldiers.

Today, my mom’s will was read to the rest of the family. I helped my mom write it a couple years ago, and I was to get funds to pay off school loans. She revised it and put in a note saying I was to get nothing because I was gay. The executor read it out loud. My mom was the only one who knew.

→ Fuck my life: user 2796619