randomwalks/dj

Best Practices News: The new Google Talk Privacy Policy includes a link to the older version, marked up to show what has changed. Quite honestly, the very best practice would be one that allowed you to opt-out of a service — meaning that they would erase your personal data — if you didn't like the changes that had been made. (via sew)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on February 13, 2006 08:19 PM

Researchers did MRIs of 5 subjects watching Superbowl ads and found that the best ones stimulate the brain’s empathy and reward centers. (via c'ist)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on February 13, 2006 08:19 PM

Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative. "As Christians, our faith in Jesus Christ compels us to love our neighbors and to be stewards of God's creation. The good news is that with God's help, we can stop global warming, for our kids, our world and for the Lord." The Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., in a television spot that links images of drought, starvation and Hurricane Katrina to global warming. (via jc)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on February 13, 2006 08:18 PM

Last night’s Grammy gift baskets were reportedly worth $65,000 and, naturally, bestowed upon only the most deserving, bedraggled souls (Madonna, Kelly Clarkson, Mariah Carey, etc). The funny thing is, we don’t actually know what the swag entailed: We were just given a list of 53 brands (flacks don’t have time for details when there’s so much, uh, flacking to be done!) that were somehow in the basket, including such crucial names as Nasal Comfort, Valhalla Shooting Club, and K-Y... (GAWKER)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed, on February 13, 2006 07:50 PM

Originally posted by blackbeltjones from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on February 13, 2006 07:49 PM

side B detail 2



3rd person i met in beacon: you heard about the bodies they found in the creek?

me: the creek behind my apartment?

3rd person i met in beacon: and this weekend they robbed the gas station.

me: whaaat?

3rd person i met in beacon: you need to read the newspaper.

don't know whether it's obvious, but the broderie perse on the purple side (A) below is stuffed (the polyester flowers)

Originally from serenalarogers, on February 13, 2006 07:43 PM

The MacBook Pro ships sometime this month. And with its release comes the usual spate of “But Dell laptops are cheaper” arguments. Dan Frakes compares comparably-equipped laptops and finds those arguments don’t hold much water.

Originally from Macworld, on February 13, 2006 07:41 PM

Harrison Ford just hacked your bank account with an iPod; the trailer [via] 

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on February 13, 2006 07:41 PM

"A goldfish gets its bowl drained of its water, then the water gets replaced by Mountain Dew and the goldfish dies. The Mountain Dew is then drained and replaced with water. The goldfish is still dead, but is ressurected with a 9 volt battery." Wha?

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on February 13, 2006 04:01 PM

I did some skiing last week up in Vermont and took some videos with my phone on the slopes. The quality isn't great, but hopefully you'll get the gist.

A short clip of me skiing through the trees:

Riding the chair lift:

And one of me skiing behind Meg:

The motion in the last one reminds me of Quake...like I'm chasing after her with a railgun or something.

Originally from kottke.org, on February 13, 2006 04:01 PM

Check it out folks, someone posted this anonymously to the SourceForge forums -- a re-render of Google Earth building data, but with texture maps!

(click for full-size image)

Originally from OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs, on February 13, 2006 01:42 PM

Making custom photoshop brushes has become habit forming....

Originally posted by pa from invisibleman, on February 13, 2006 01:05 PM

Living in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the biggest issues hanging over our community is the specter of Bruce Ratner's planned "Atlantic Yards" development. By dangling the prospect of a glitzy new Frank Gehry-designed stadium (to...

Originally posted by keegan from invisibleman, on February 13, 2006 01:05 PM

A Hong Kong media researcher and blogger has criticized Western media coverage of Yahoo's role in the Li Zhi case.

Originally from Macworld, on February 13, 2006 10:59 AM

(via), Julie Mehretu - Psychogeographic paintings:

The twelve paintings in Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, curated by Douglas Fogle and originated at the Walker Art Center in 2003, are densely layered works that describe a futuristic environment capturing the sense of our time in history.
(…)
Mehretu’s works draw from those traditions yet her image of the urban environment depicts a post modern city. Her paintings are built from the juxtaposition of different styles of marking, each with their own character, identity and history. These dense compilations of marks create overlaps and transparencies. The resulting layered compositions exude an energy that is consistent with contemporary society. She depicts a world that is in constant motion, a world that draws from the past as it looks toward the future.

Check this one: Julie Mehretu, “Excerpt (Suprematist Evasion),” 2003, ink and acrylic on canvas, 32 x 54”.

Why do I blog this? I like these representation of (data? artifacts? vehicles? city?) flows. Wouldn’t it be a nice metaphor for a physical representation of what we used to call cyberspace, a la hertzian tales? I like this concept of “invisible topographies” (see here or here).

Originally posted by Nicolas from pasta and vinegar, on February 13, 2006 10:59 AM

Reading about urban development reminded me of this:

"You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death."

- Said by the character of Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Who was not, as the song goes, a little bit country.

Originally from massless, on February 13, 2006 09:31 AM

Looky here! Half-Life is going to become a 'series':

Valve Software has revealed to GameSpot that Aftermath, the upcoming expansion pack to the award-winning 2004 shooter Half-Life 2, has been renamed "Half-Life 2: Episode One." When asked whether the name change is indicative of a change in direction for the Half-Life 2 franchise, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi replied, "episodic." When asked the follow-up question of whether the new name meant that beginning of a regular flow of content, Lombardi replied, "yes."

(Verbose, isn't he?)

So - games as a regular flow of content. We can see where this is going, can't we? Wahay!

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on February 13, 2006 09:30 AM

Watched Sebastian Telfair's movie "Through the Fire" twice last weekend, and strongly suggest any Blazers fan to watch it when...

Originally from Behind the Blazers Beat, on February 13, 2006 09:29 AM

david posted a photo:

Originally from david's Photos, on February 13, 2006 09:29 AM

news on the Much robbery

Originally posted by kick_out_the_internet_jams from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on February 13, 2006 09:28 AM

---

I like the gallery Foxy Production but it bugs me that they're giving the members of the collective Paper Rad solo shows. It's like saying "Collectives are cool! OK, now let's get back to the valorization of individual geniuses which is what we know and can sell."

The Paper Rad installation at Pace was amazing. They really rose to the occasion. It's better and stronger than anything we've seen from them individually. Their triangular box installation was minimal but the exterior "painted mural" image with Bart Simpson, and the wall-to-wall video projected on the inside of the box were maximal--it was a perfect balance, very thought out.

Jacob Ciocci's recent solo was good, but on the whole I'm more interested in his (and Paper Rad's) video than the physical work. The video *is* radical, but the objects strike me as standard outsider moves (dolls, thrift store items, accumulations of more detail than the eye can take in...)

Which is not to say I didn't find a lot of compelling things to look at in Ciocci's show. I guess the problem is you want so-called cutting edge work to show you things you haven't seen. The "boy's bedroom" with chock-a-block tchotchkes on the walls we've seen. It's a more psychedelic version of a piece like Ed Kienholz's The Beanery--a claustrophobic enclosed room full of "stuff." The video in Ciocci's bedroom was great; I wanted to move all the stuff out of the way so I could see it.

The video murals in the Pace show were something new. Imagine a giant Rauschenberg or Polke painting with all the layered elements *moving*, each independently of the other. The subject isn't some rarified art substance but the worst and silliest pop culture trash--cheesy animated GIFs downloaded off the internet merging and morphing with abstract Flash patterns and found photographs in a constantly changing allover field: dozens of moving and overlapping Hannah Hoch style collages bubbling in and outside your field of vision. Similar things are going on in Ciocci's physical work, but there's something about forcing it onto a rectangular, pixeled 2-D field that tightens it up, makes the familiar strategies seem unfamiliar. With the objects you are weighted down with all the history of those objects.

Also, it's possible that this collective actually works better...as a collective.

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on February 13, 2006 09:22 AM

"Fulltext Indexing is a method by which MySQL quantifies the relevance of textual entries to an input query. ... A MySQL database must index data as it is entered, whereas Google can simply update their index periodically, after a crawl takes place. As such, the MySQL indexer needs to be computationally fast, ideally, while not sacrificing result quality."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on February 13, 2006 09:21 AM

A nice summary of weird but normal activities of the brain, in A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. I haven't read Blink, but I'll bet a lot of it is based on these three assumptions:

1. The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant, by which we mean, if you tell someone to count how many jugglers appear in a movie, they will almost surely miss the enormous purple gorilla in the background.
2. The brain notices more than we think it does. When people are under hypnosis, or in some special circumstance they can remember and describe more about something that they can't under normal conditions. Although this odd fact has been much abused, as in Repressed Memory Therapy.
3. The brain is actively hiding the real world from us. Raph gives the example of people drawing the simplest, most iconic or habitual symbol of something rather than the thing itself. Books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, show you how to overcome this substitution (really good book! can teach anyone to draw well.)

Originally from Caterina.net, on February 13, 2006 09:20 AM

Originally from Lifeblog, on February 13, 2006 09:18 AM

A Professor of Interactive Media at UC Santa Barbara, George Legrady blurs the boundary between academic and studio practice by fusing technology with visual art. His Algorithmic Visualizations exhibit, at LA's Telic Arts Exchange through February 16, is a selection of three recent works that involve digital images generated using mathematical formulae. Legrady's virtuosity shines strongest in his site-specific activity. 'Making Visible the Invisible' was commissioned for the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library. The work translates Dewey decimal-based circulation stats on the non-fiction book collection into plasma screen displays of patterned color. That impulse to reflect the architecture's modular characteristics (the entire collection forms a continuous spiral) also emerges in 'Kinetic Flow,' a work designed 'to engage the kinetic experience of the downward movement on both escalator and staircase, one smooth, the other sequential,' in the Vermont/Santa Monica MetroRail Station. Smart, engaging and visually compelling, this one's not to be missed. - Peggy MacKinnon

http://www.telic.info

Originally from Rhizome.org Net Art News, on February 13, 2006 09:18 AM

kid51 writes "Perl Seminar NY's February monthly meeting features Lincoln Stein talking on 'Genome Databases and Visualization in Perl'. For this month only, we have a special location:"

Originally posted by brian_d_foy from use Perl, on February 13, 2006 09:17 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on February 13, 2006 09:06 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on February 13, 2006 09:06 AM

One-page full schedule for the NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on February 13, 2006 09:05 AM

Aibo Memories is a 3D Playable Sony Aibo for Mobile Phones . The direction stick on the mobile phone can be used to make Aibo stand, sit, lie down and jump up. Sony sadly decided to end its line of robot dogs in January 2006. Aibo Memories was created in memory of Aibo (1999-2006), by Tea Vui Huang.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on February 13, 2006 09:05 AM

Originally posted by vgoutsiders from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on February 13, 2006 09:05 AM