Gadget News

We like being able to do fancy things with our phones. All the fancy apps and games we get to download just make us giddy. There are a lot of useful apps out there, such [...]

167 words | permalink | No comments | digg this

Original post by Scott

Read entire article

If you like to talk on your phone in the car, you must have also heard at least one warning from friends or family about the dangers involved. If you donÂ’t have a car phone [...]

136 words | permalink | No comments | digg this

Original post by Scott

Read entire article

 
A timely visualization by Information is Beautiful‘s David McCandless and friends, Horoscoped applies word-cloud analysis to daily astrology forecasts. Programmer Thomas Winningham wrote a Python script to scrape 22,000 horoscopes archived by Yahoo’s astrology channel, Shine. To the resulting data dump, McCandless and crew applied the off-the-shelf world-cloud generator Tag Crowd, breaking down both the most-used words in the corpus and the words most frequently used in each sign. Then, with the help of designer Matt Hancock, MCandless made an elegant chart of the whole thing.

Given the peculiar mandate of the horoscope, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the word clouds of the zodiac don’t vary much from sign to sign, with a general reliance on words like “ready,” “feel,” and “better.” Unique words for each sign from the top 50 most commonly-used words, however, do seem to hint at the traditional characteristics of each sign: Capricorn’s favorites are willing, instead; Virgo’s are totally, perfect). Best of all, McCandless built out of the highest-frequency words a brilliant horoscope engineered to apply perfectly well to any sign for any day of the year. It begins as follows: “Ready? Sure? Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot.” I won’t give away the whole thing, though; do click through.

What all this says about astrology is hard to discern. The clusters of each sign’s uniquely-frequent words in McCandless’ analysis do have a certain uncanny charisma. It’s the charisma of apophenia, of course—the attractive illusion of pattern in essentially random clustering things of all kinds—and astrology as a whole is a confabulation built on such powerfully suggestive phenomena. Given the recent brouhaha over the supposedly mistaken structure of the zodiac system in Western astrology (an urban legend that crops up every few years), McCandless’ “Horoscoped” serves as a reminder of the brew of pseudoscience and willful suspension of disbelief that the institution of the daily horoscope—an invention of the modern daily newspaper—depends on.

Of course, we knew that already; as Theodor Adorno observed in the early fifties, a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” But we should be cautious with our disregard; semi-erudition is rife even on the highbrow end of Internet culture. Info visualization is one area in which we risk falling prey to semi-erudition; correlation can look very beautiful. It’s worth pointing out that, unlike the mostly-anonymous authors of daily horoscopes, McCandless does a very thorough job of exposing his data and his inventive, inspired methods to scrutiny.

Original post by Matthew Battles

Read entire article

This little film promotes the what one wants to call the reboot of Feiyue, the Chinese sneaker favored by martial artists since the 1920s. In 2006, a French company bought rights to the brand, retooling the kicks for a Western market by essentially engineering out everything that appealed to Shaolin monks—lack of padding in the soles, flexibility in the uppers—in favor of fashion-forward stylings and the supportive, heavy build Westerners expect in their footwear.

The conceit elaborated in this video is fun—a Western hacker-type in bare-bulb basement light gluing up his hover shoes from a kit. But there’s an interesting subtext here, too. China, after all, is where Western kicks go to be reborn in a thousand pirated variations in nameless factories by numbed minions without any interest in the product over which they’re soullessly laboring. Or that anyway is the image, the standard-issue story of footwear-technology transfer in a flat world. Reverse the polarity of that story and you get… something like this. It’s sort of like one of those George Clooney or Matt Damon movies in which an American action hero gets tortured by nefarious terror-bent dudes in Jeri curls. When the reality is somehow quite the opposite. —via Core77

Original post by Matthew Battles

Read entire article

Romain Tardy, aka Aalto, worked up an impressive video-projection installation for the Prague art collective Lunchmeat, the making of which this video covers in loving material detail. With the help of a no-nonsense team of stage carpenters, he transforms the flaky materials of plywood and polystyrene into a kaleidoscopic, rectilinear cloud of visual sensations. There’s some kind of extrusion taking place here—whether it’s the “real wold” into the virtual or vice versa probably doesn’t matter at this point. —via Bruce Sterling’s globalicious art-curatorial mojo at Beyond the Beyond

Original post by Matthew Battles

Read entire article

Photo by Mark Chappell

I remember a New Yorker cartoon from a few years ago in which a female praying mantises was wooing a potential mate. “After we have sex,” she tells him, “but before I eat you, I want you to help me move some furniture.” Mantids are famously post-coitally cannibalistic; another well-known mate-eating arthropod, the female black widow spider, doesn’t indulge so frequently. But the risk of being eaten, unsurprisingly, is a real turn-off for male black widows. (small, dun-colored, and lacking a dangerous bite, these guys already get no respect.) Then what’s a mate-seeking female black widow to do? Chad Johnson, a behavorial ecologist at Arizona State University, noticed that the females frequently left uneaten food hanging in their webs. Johnson was puzzled by the seemingly wanton excess—until he observed that males seemed to mate more frequently with females whose larders were full. When convinced that the female in question wasn’t hungry, Johnson reasoned, a male is more likely to risk a rendezvous.
 
The ecological implications go beyond our cringing amusement with the sexual mores of simpler species. It’s a classic piece of folk ecology that animal predators, unlike humans, don’t kill wastefully or wantonly. Ecologists tend to accept this wisdom as a rule, reasoning that the risk and energy costs of predation mandate a parsimonious approach. But as Johnson and his coauthors argue in a forthcoming article in the journal Ethology, what looks like the black widow’s careless housekeeping is actually a cagey way to attract a mate, offsetting wasteful predation by securing the chance to pass genes on to the next generation. And perhaps in return, that beleaguered male will get the chance to move the sofa closer to the window. —via New Scientist

Original post by Matthew Battles

Read entire article

Enda O’Donoghue is an Irish-born artist working in Germany; a former computer programmer and web designer, he has explored the technium through a variety of media. His most recent work consists of found digital snapshots reproduced in oils, rigorously breaking down the pixels, moire patterns, and artifacts that cloud the image; as the making-of video shows, the painting process itself has the quality of a confoundingly slow upload.

The project is reminiscent of the work of Andy Denzler, whose painting reproduce the glitchy noise of poorly-handled digital image files. But O’Donoghue seems to be taking aim at another aspect of so much online imagery: its literal blurring of the private and the public. At his web site, O’Donoghue explains that he meticulously tracks down the makers of his found images and secures their permission—not only to make sure that no one objects to his use of the images, but as part of the artistic project, treating even throwaway images as enduring creative works. In so doing, O’Donoghue is showing more respect than most of us do even to our own images. Snapping photos of ourselves in mirrors and windows, we mix intense self-regard and amour-propre with the ephemeral, nebulous quality of digital photography. We’re staring so hard at ourselves that we’re starting to see right through to the other side. —thanks for the tip, David Black

Original post by Matthew Battles

Read entire article