The Extremely Personal Computer: The Digital Future of Mental Health - Gabriella Rosen Kellerman - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/the-extremely-personal-computer-the-digital-future-of-mental-health/263183/
(via Instapaper)
The Plot Against Occupy | Culture News | Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-plot-against-occupy-20120926
(via Instapaper)
My current body of work was drawn from an investigation into the cultural/scientific/historical context in which the cyanotype was born. Popularized by scientists, and botanists in particular, the cyanotype is intrinsically tied into the scientific recording boom of the late 19th and early 20th century. These are the times of the curiosity cabinet, the prints of Anna Atkins and a rush of explorers/scientists to colonial lands only to bring back specimens from foreign ecosystems. [.. ] The cyanotype is a process of documenting. The resultant image is a kind of scientific stand-in for the actual object in question. It is the trace of the original. In this way, like cyanotype’s use for building blue prints in more recent centuries, my work is formed as the re-presentation of something real; it is somehow not quite the object itself.”Tasha has published photos of numerous installations on her Tumblr, definitely worth a look. (via empty kingdom)
We work hard to make our OP-1 users happy with free OS updates and added functionality. But sometimes we fail. As some have noted, the shipping cost of the OP-1 accessories is very high. This is because we can't find a good delivery service for small items. Meanwhile, we have decided to put all CAD files of the parts in our library section for you to download. The files are provided in both STEP and STL format. Just download the files and 3D print as many as you want. Next fail is the OP-1 manual update. We are almost there...we promise it will be ready sometime next week. Thank you all for your patience, we promise to work even harder in the future to make you happy.
Global Bass (a.k.a transnational bass or sometimes tropical bass) is probably most familiar to the world via the work of UK MC of Sri Lankan descent M.I.A.
and her sometime collaborator, US DJ and producer Diplo who on tracks like "Bucky Done Gun"
created a wildly successful sonic collage of digital dancehall styles from around the world, topped off with an anti-globalization rhetoric that celebrated
the dancehall pleasures of subaltern populations around the world. While commercially and artistically successful, MIA and Diplo have also been intensely
criticized for the cultural theft of styles
which do not belong to them, and for a vacuous political rhetoric which ultimately goes no further
than a feelgood sentiment of opposition which fits neatly into the marketplace for all things alternative and independent.
Beneath that story however is a thriving scene or rather group of networked scenes which is both global and bassed in very interesting and ever evolving
ways. At its core, global bass is two different things: first, the local production of electronic/digital dance musics around the world that are
i...
We're a spinout from University College London Computer Science and we've developed a new data transfer application for smartphones (and more) called Chirp.
This is our thing - a technology inspired by birdsong and the principles of biomimicry.
We think it's pretty exciting since the app has great potential, although it's just the tip of the iceberg. Our plans include teaching the machines to sing.
See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are.
What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There's nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It's a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it's transformed my idea of what it's like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I've thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain.
"If you were there," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, "you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air." The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your spaceboots.
Read the rest of Robert Krulwich's post — and check out some spectacular photos of the things — at NPR
[Video Link] Salon: Among "abortionists," Akin said in a floor speech in 2008, "you find that along with the culture death go all kinds of other lawbreaking: the not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who aren't actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things." Later in the video Akin also accuses death culture doctors of killing imaginary unicorns.
The ETH Zurich quadcopter folks have added to their already impressive collection of videos of cooperative, autonomous quadcopters doing exciting things (previously) with this video of the adorable little gizmos throwing and catching balls together.
To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball up. Notice in the video that the quadrocopters are then pulled forcefully inward by the tension in the elastic net, and must rapidly stabilize in order to avoid a collision. Once recovered, the quadrotors cooperatively position the net below the ball in order to catch it.
Because they are coupled to each other by the net, the quadrocopters experience complex forces that push the vehicles to the limits of their dynamic capabilities
"Why aren't my kids hyper after binging on sugar?" asked Gillian Mayman at Mind the Science Gap, a blog featuring the work of various Master of Public Health students from the University of Michigan.
The punchline: "A review of 12 separate research studies found that there was no evidence that eating sugar makes kids hyper."
The post is great, but greatest of all? The animated GIFs used to illustrate it. (via @Boraz)
