Digging through my papers for a Found Art show Hollow Earth Radio is going to do, I found this poem that I turned into my Creative Writing class.
//empty the cup
void cup :: empty it ()
contents = 0;
This was written on a chalkboard in one the classrooms I was in at Humboldt State University.
My favorite part of it is that the contents = 0; line can be read two ways: that the contents of the cup are set to zero and/or that the contents equal Oj.
Hot Or Not is in the news again for canceling the dating services they were providing, because apparently it was becoming overcome with spam and false profiles.
I hadn’t thought about Hot or Not in a while, and was never really into it (except for skewing the results by voting ugly people 10’s and traditionally hot people 1’s).
I remember that I had posted something there before, but had no idea what picture I’d used.
Reminder to TIME BOTCHER: WE HAVE TO SET UP BOT OR NOT!
Wouldn’t it be great to have a website devoted to having people figure out whether social networking profiles are bots or nots? It could even extend to investigative reporting on the lonelygirl15’s of the internet.
What the hell do we still have a legislature for ? Why are laws still being literally “signed” ?
Police wiki lets you write the law
Brilliant.
I just heard about The Mechanical Turk from Joseph Sheedy, the EWI player in my band. From the wikipedia entry:
“The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the somewhat limited Mturk Requester site.
The name Mechanical Turk comes from “The Turk”, a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, but turned out not to really be an automaton at all: a chess master hid in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren’t yet suited for.
“
Check out the previous post I did with Jott. They are using a mixed Human/Machine method for transcribing voice messages into text.
A human is listening to this message and typing out what I say for my blog.
Click here to listen
Powered by Jott
Especially the spam emails I get:
You must watch these two videos back to back.
I ordered the book.
This is footage taken at the Zaynab mosque in Syria where thousands of bystanders witnessed the sealed shut doors to A Miracle happened in the Maqam of Sayeda Zeinab (A.S) in the Arba3en of Imam Hussein (A.S) in Syria (1428 hijri – 2007).. The Shrine was firmly closed and nobody inside, and suddenly a Light came from inside the Maqam and the internal Large Gate started to open spontaneously (by itself) all people there saw that, it was VERY CLEAR.. and the amazing thing is that the door was openning in the reverse side of what it would normally open in!!
When Jake and Josh and my group of friends used to have those mystical journeys – we would gather together, usually under the influence of alcohol, and surrender to the randomness of the cosmos. Often peculiar phenomenon would happen in this heightened state of suspended group disbelief. One time, in the chaos of one of these episodes, I remember writing down something to the effect of:
“The meaning of life is oh wow oh my god but then it turns out to be something stupid.”
This is what happened: Someone had called on a cellphone and in our stupor we thought it was God. The voice on the other end was all static-y and I swore I heard someone reciting the Qur’an. We were all mystified. We totally believed it in unity at that moment. Then David showed up at the door a little while and we found out it he had tried to call earlier but his phone was dying…
The quote means that you can have these totally valid amazing experiences of God or Unity or whatever and they are amazing and real, but that usually there tends to be a come down. And that come down takes the form of an explanation. Usually something that makes that experience invalid or
have a stupid cause. I still think I heard God in that phone though – with all my heart and soul.
Jeremy Puma has been writing about this, and so has Ran.
But we also notice regularities in our experience. Experience is persistent — our world tends to stay the same over time. Experience is shared — we tend to see the same things as the people around us. And experience is somewhat chosen — we tend to see what we’re looking for, or expecting.
Also this leads to some “weird” but totally rational predictions, like if you go monster-hunting without a camera, you’re more likely to see a monster. Or as I said in my August 31 post:
As soon as technology gets to the point where we can’t tell a real UFO film from a fake UFO film, it will become much easier to film real UFO’s, because those films will be easily dismissible and will no longer threaten consensus reality.
I didn’t know it, but these ideas were put into practice years ago by a researcher named Ken Batcheldor. Here’s a good summary of Batcheldor and psychokinetic experiments, and Rhisiart sends a first-hand account:
I worked with Ken as a visiting occasional member of his last sitter-group, before his death in 1988. This technique, which he’d developed methodically over 25 years, is the most reliable way I’ve ever encountered during a lifetime of interest in the subject, to persuade ‘para’normal events to manifest pretty nearly on request. I saw more, and more spectacular, ‘para’normal incidents in Ken’s sitter-group sessions than ever before or since.
The Principle can be stated concisely as “Ambiguity of perception promotes paranormal events.” The setup in Ken’s groups was designed to promote a continuous flow of small, more or less ordinary events, particularly movements of the table round which we sat, whose actual cause was deliberately organised to be as ambiguous as possible: it was always possible for the sitters to get a sudden wave of belief that a particular incident was a genuine psi-event. But it was also always possible to explain it away with a ‘normal’ explanation, should anyone feel the need. It was this get-out arrangement which seemed to facilitate the steady build up of ever more striking and ambiguous events in the session, until undoubtable, striking psi-incidents started to slip themselves into the event stream.”
Lots of things going on over at Hollow Earth Radio : new crop of dj’s and a lot of effort going into archiving found sound at our blog.
Tim Boucher reminded me of this sci-fi daydream I had of the future of radio. I think it’s not really about radio so much as what’s happening with the fact that we are now so saturated with independent media. Here’s the thought:
“In the future – there will be a comeback for radio, and it will become popular again in the underground. With the overwhelming bombardment of music on the internet, and the forced accessibility – young people will grow bored of having everything at their fingertips. Out of this, a buzz will go around about building your own radios / radio stations.
There will be a shift in the way people think about media distribution. One of the reasons the radio comeback will be interesting will be in the actual physical hunt to find it – as the majority of frequencies will be short range and inconsistent. Picture people roaming the streets with homemade cyberpunk radios seeking out weak signals in the forest. With the large catalog of music to select from on the internet, people will seek out a different thrill. The balance will shift and the importance will be heavy on mixing of genres and broadcast performance, locality, genuine human experience. Perhaps just in the unique experience of being in that geographical place and that time and possibly being the only one listening. And because commercial radio will become have so outdated as to have gone out of business, the citizen band will be extended and the only radio will be what we would now call ‘pirate.’”
As Tim Boucher says: “we need to create a new internet”.
