Link Latte #13

The week… it came it went. They come they go.

I’ve been mainly pottering about with cameras, and sleep-deprivation induced insanity. It’s been a bad week… If the last week was a television, it would be black and white – tuned between channels, with the sound cutting in and out. Fade to black. Flicker to life. Eat something… try to do emails… Black again. It comes and goes.

Still… ok-ish now. The main thing that happened was that I went to that #publicACTA thing… which I will go on about in another post, but now… here’s a scatter-gun side-swipe at the Second Gutenberg shift, 10th of April, Year of Our Lord, Two thousand and ten.

1) Furious buzzy flying thing

“This looks cool”, quoth DIYdrones.

Oh no it doesn’t. It looks scary and chasey. It looks like it would try to shoot you in the eyes with laser-beams and get tangled up in your hair. No good will come of this. Mark my words

2) The World is My Tamagotchi

If it is what I think it is… I don’t really know because while I can kindof read Spanish a bit, I can’t understand it when it’s spoken.

I quite like the idea of Tamagotchification though – anthropomorphising things so people take more care of them… there was that pedometer thing recently… a little LED plant, which withers if you don’t exercise it (you). I’ve often thought that if I could organise my personal finances… or life generally, with the care and devotion that I play video games then I’d be a lot better off than I am now.

3) Hatstands

I like brain machines because you can use them to take over the world… and failing that, the offer a much better way of controlling remote-controlled things, and are good if you are (as I am) too lazy to even use a mouse.

But

“Despite the device’s rather humorous appearance, it’s very serious mission is to assist scientists at research institutes and help companies develop their neuro-marketing strategies”

err… the fucking what? “neuro-marketing strategies”? WTF is a neuro-marketing strategy?… because I can’t imagine it being anything other than manipulative and invasive.

How the fuck did your greed, or the “importance” of your product get to be so great that it warrants a “neuro-marketing strategy”?

Please. Fuck off before one of us dies.

4) Imaginary robots

Worth it for the photo alone, but not alas (like so much of this tech revolution) actually real. Yet.

I’m kindof enamoured of the concept that “in the future, every tree will have its own gardner” though… and there’s an echo of Huey Duey and Louie from Silent Running here as well so… ok.

It’s from a Mexican guy doing a project on Urban Parasites.

Exhibit two is this beauty

Which are imaginary robots (I’m fairly sure they haven’t been built yet) that live in a Spanish bank who’s job it is to solve the problem formerly solved by (how you say?) “signs”… replacing them with actual-reality versions of the MS Office Paper Clip.

Incredibly over-engineered over-kill and doomed to go from futuristic to retro in less than a decade. The only way these things will last more than 3 years is if their retro-chic kicks in fast enough.

But you know… nice one. Job creation innit. Getting rid of the signs and replacing it with something that needs an IT department to support.

5) DIY Tube Driven Headphone Amp

(via)

I keep telling my mate Adi he should make these. I’d buy one… basically things that take a digital signal and make it sound warmer… and if you’re really going to get it right, some sort of “Aural Exciter” (if I’ve got that right) technology that creates ultra-sonic harmonics that only dogs can hear, of the high notes.

Something to turn the square-waves back into proper sine-waves, and to introduce harmonics that digitisation doesn’t bother to save.

And they look retro and cool, and they glow in the dark. Much like Adi himself in fact.

6) Lucky Dip Video

(via)

I have no idea what this woman is talking about because the sound on my computer no longer works (I’ll get a new one today. No really, I will)

But anyway, she looks beautiful and heroic – a bit like a latter-day French Revolution propaganda poster/painting… so here she is.

I know a bit about French Revolutionary art now, on account of having seen a documentary about it the other day, and I’d have to say that the architect above is a lot better looking than any of the ones that David (Daa-veed to you) managed to paint…

… although perhaps that comparison is a little unfair on account of that actually being a painting of a bloke rather than “a lady”, and doubly unfair on the bloke, because he’s painted sans-todger… which I gather was the fashion at the time.

They also tended to go in for wack-oid haircuts in those days, and although the architect above doesn’t have one of those exactly… it does sortof hint in that direction – which is probably why I think she looks like a French Revolution propaganda poster.

I think people in general are getting to be better looking though.

6) Great vengeance and furious anger

So now it seems that Richard Dawkins intends to arrest the Pope when he visits England.

LOL… but what (I hear you cry) does this have to do with… you know, “The 2nd Gutenberg Shift and stuff”?

I’ll tell you what – the 2nd Gutenberg Shift isn’t really then 2nd Gutenberg Shift… it’s all the same shift.

The revolution that started 500 odd years ago, has just been accelerated by the internet. The trends and tendencies that found a type of coalescence in the Protestant Revolution are the same trends and tendencies encouraged by the web. The Protestant Revolution is still going on.

So ignoring for the moment, that Arresting the Pope is what Henry the Eighth probably would have wanted…

… it just so happens that when he covered up the child-rapes that happened under his watch… in deference to the “youth of the (38 year old) offender” (rather than the 11-13 year old victims)…

… it just so happens that at the time, Ratzinger was the head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith“, otherwise known as The Inquisition

You know – the people who burned to death Book Printers. The people who gagged Galileo by showing him the instruments that he would be tortured with. The people who boiled to death a student named Pomponio Algerio.

It’s taken this long… 300 and something years… for it to come full circle. For a rotten-to-the-core institution to be exposed – because that’s something The Internet is really good at. Exposure.

That’s the knife-edge hidden under the waffly, disorganised uselessness of slactitivism. Your secrets are safe with us :)

Anyway, there’s a further irony in that pedophilia is to the Internet what witchcraft (rather than heresy) was to the printing press… a crime beyond comprehension – which acts like a (useful) political poison – just to be accused is terminally damaging, politicians are incapable of anything approaching a level-headed reaction for fear of being tarred with the same brush… and it sells the hell out of newspapers.

eg: a wikipedia rival trying to use child-porn to attack wikipedia. It’s pathetic. And it’s the same (pathetic) justification that The English used to kill Joan of Arc.

It’s the same revolution. It’s still happening.

Still, enough about that.

7) Barmy Concept #1232178

Now I hate concepts as much as the next man, but this one’s a corker – it’s a rubik’s cube with a generator in it… but it’s also Braille! So you can trick blind people into generating energy for you!

Genius.

8) Robotics Platform

I think this is interesting because it’s basically a Roomba with the vacuum cleaner taken out of it. And we’re still not entirely sure what to do with it, so we’re crowd-sourcing the innovation… in the hope that someone else will figure it out.

I’m not sure that anyone has yet have they? I mean there are a million videos on youtube with cats riding on Roombas… and those Swedish guys used one to index the stuff they’d left on the floor… people play football with them… but… but…

… as I’ve said before, there seems to be this incredible amount of creative energy pushing us in a direction that doesn’t appear to have a lot of practical applications. I think we’re doing it to recreate Sci Fi – and ultimately, to recreate ourselves. But we’ve got a long way to go… and if we did manage to recreate ourselves, would we even like ourselves? Not according to Sci Fi.

10) Oh crap, someone’s made one of these

Ok – they haven’t made it, they’ve designed it – but it’s the Festo people – the same ones who made those amazing dolphin bots, and the big jellyfish things, and tripod rep-rappers etc, so they probably will.