goatee

i am not a crook

° 02.12.22.su | Santa is Real

I caught a "Santa is Real" sticker today in Central Square. Nora clued me into the latest phenomenon after reading an article in the Weekly Dig and seeing the graffiti herself.

...But the most fascinating thing about the 'Santa Is Real' tagger is that the individual is not some 20-something skater/writer drinking and tagging late at night, but a 40-year-old married mom with a 10-year-old daughter.... So what made this Girl Scout leader, conceptual artist and commercial photographer reacquaint herself with the fine art of vandalism that had been a mainstay of her earlier days in Boston? "I have always been a Santa fan, and being a reluctant atheist, I never had a god to pray to, to ask for help and what not, unless Bowie and Iggy count. One day while shipping a big piece of art to a far away museum, my driver and I almost got in a crash, and all I kept saying was, 'Santa is real,' over and over again. 'Santa is real, Santa is real', like a mantra. I was so worried that the art was going to break, and I vowed that the next time that piece of art showed, it was going to be with the words 'Santa is real.' Then when the piece came home, I installed the 'Santa Is Real' red letters on my wall and it hit me: I need to get back into tagging."

I was disappointed with the the red text on black sticker I saw today, hopefully I'll also see some of the stencils.

° 02.12.22.su | Panoramic Photography

One of the most exciting things about digital photography is what one can do with images. I don't have a medium format Hasselblad for landscape photos. But I can take many photographs with my 3 mega-pixel digital camera and stitch them together into a high resolution image that is equable to a medium format photograph. Imagine what one can do with the new breed of 10 mega-pixel cameras!

I ran over to Mass Ave in my slippers a few nights ago to snap some photographs as material for my experiments with Helmut Dersch's panorama tools. It's 1/10 of the size of the actual photo. I've been using Helmut's barrel distortion correction plug-in in Gimp/Photoshop for years. With the full complement of tools, one can perfectly stitch together multi-row mosaics from nearly any type of lens to the common panoramic projections; it can even correct for differences in color and brightness if you can't lock your camera's exposure as you pan across the field of view. It's also fast and free software! Unfortunately, there has been some patent mongering by proprietary interests and the tools that make it easier to use don't work that well on Linux yet, but I hope that will change.

° 02.12.19.th | On Zines and Blogs

There's a lot of hype about blogs, about how they will revolutionize publishing. A maxim of new media is that some things never change but nothing is ever the same. People have been "self-publishing" for centuries and the same was bound to happen on the Web. Remember, the very first Web application written by Tim Berners-Lee was a browser and an editor. The world forgot the editing part and rushed onward with the Mosaic, Netscape, and IE browsers, but the potential was always there; the world is finally catching up.

However, that second-wind of enthusiasm would've arrived regardless of any individual blogger's hot air. I liken the "leadership style" of some self proclaimed "prominent bloggers" to be that of someone running in a stampede, climbing over the shoulders of others, elbowing the ribs of contenders, trampling under-foot enemies and getting out front while yelling, "look at me, I'm leading, look at me!"

The punk community has been self-publishing for decades with a scope and character of content that blogging has inevitably followed. There were zines with poetry, rants, journals, travelogues, photographs, pithy quotes, and nothing but reviews of other zines, zines about making zines, and tirades about the sorry state of the zine community. The medium was paper, and the latency was months, but it was much the same. Of course, the new medium is digital, the latency is seconds, and there are features of its architecture and culture that have profound effects. Like I said, some things never change, but nothing is ever the same.

With all of that in mind, I noted an entry from ten years ago in Cometbus #29 that makes for prescient reading, just substitute "blog" for "zine" in this excerpt:

21. On Zines

All of sudden, fanzines are getting a lot of attention. It is an interesting situation. "Zines" are all the rage. Stores are carrying them, people are buying them, mainstream magazines are talking about them. Hey, even the Utne Reader (which has the nerve to herald itself as "The Best of the Alternative Press") finally recognized our existence in a small article. It's like the "Fanzine Revolution" is some big new revelation, but how could everyone not notice it until now? ...

° 02.12.18.we | W3C Design Contest

People will always moan on about design aesthetics; aesthetics are fairly subjective — fortunately usability is testable. But, when I noted the WthRemix challenge to redesign the W3C site, I figured the results could be interesting, until I read:

The design must use tableless XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS. JavaScript, GIF, JPG and PNG images may also be used. Server scripts, databases, and plug-in based media are not permitted. Designs containing animated GIFs and Flash are acceptable, but will face tough scrutiny.

JavaScript: bringer of nasty pop-ups and security holes you can drive trucks through?!? GIF: an encumbered format for which PNG is a great alternative? Flash: surely you jest?! I have JavaScript turned off (only permitted on 4 specified sites), haven't produced a GIF in over a year, and the only site I enable flash for is howstuffworks.com . There's enough self-congratulatory/masturbatory design demos out there, I don't see why folks feel compelled to wank over a site that is standards conformant, doesn't introduce privacy or security nasties, accessible, and readable on both my PC and PDA. The real challenge would be to meet the same requirements currently satisfied and better them.

° 02.12.11.we | Barbara Kruger

On Monday I went to see Barbara Kruger give a lecture; she's well known for her pithy statements cast with bold typography set on red over monochrome photographs. She immediately began her slide show, then began taking questions with little said otherwise. I noted that when I see her work I wonder who authored the statements: does she feel a tension between a responsibility for attribution and the aesthetic of the design? She answered that she includes attribution when she can, if not in the piece then in its supporting materials, but even her own statements are composites of the larger culture for which it is difficult to claim exclusive ownership. Someone else asked her if she ever was caught up with an irresistible urge to use purple? Kruger responded that red simply tends to stop the eye, there's no other meaning and when she started she had no knowledge of Soviet "agitprop." Good questions. Of course, some art student types asked her about postmodernism and she was appropriately dismissive of such nonsensical terms. Fortunately, someone else asked the third question I had in my mind, what did she think of stencil/graffiti art such as that of Shepard Fairey?

"Shepard who?"

"The RISD student who does the 'OBEY' public art graffiti."

"Oh, I see that stuff all over L.A."

I found it amusing that the woman I considered to be the mother of this sort of art wasn't aware of a present practitioner, but I found her response appropriate none-the-less.

° 02.12.10.tu | Blogosphere Cheating

Many blogs include "back links" to those that linked to them, automatically. This is now being exploited because many spammers are sending their spiders to crawl over blogs while indicating they've arrived from some cruddy site with a gimmick to sell. The blog then shows to its readers that its referrers include these spam sites. Google sees links to these spam sites from reputable blogs and weaves them deeper into its Web, yuck!

With this entry I too am cheating because within it I have a sequence of nearly 800 links taken from Myelin's Ecosystem. This and other systems look both at who has the most links, and who does the most linking. (I'm not displaying those links via CSS's "display: none" but you can see them as I found them on Myelin.) If the ecosystem see these links, well then, I'm a very prolific linker! We'll see what happens to the various blogging ecosystems.

I'm happy to suspend this experiment if it actually inconveniences anyone, and in some ways I wonder if this is even really cheating? I've always purposefully avoided including links to sites I don't regularly read and this experiment is no different. (And I've always suspected those sites that do include the couple hundred or so blogs they regularly read — yea right — to be doing little more than name dropping on a massive scale.) I'm not going to show up in the referrer logs of any of those 800 sites; the only traffic I will drive to any site is Myelin, which I'm clearly discussing! My cynical self accusation is that my experiment is so crass it transcends my normal bounds of good taste.

[Update 02.12.11: As is the way with experiements, I haven't affected Myelin yet, but popdex, a site I previously was unaware of, now lists this entry as a referrer to webgraphics.]

[Update 02.12.17: Owner of Myelin notices this experiment!]

° 02.12.07.sa | Google is Dumb

A recent technology pundit argued that email mailboxes are past their prime and alluded to Google's simple interface and killer searching as an exemplar of functionality. This is a slighter version of a misunderstanding of Google that I experienced earlier in the week. At this month's atheist discussion group we were discussing the likelihood of "super-human" machine intelligence:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." - Vinge: The Singularity

Someone argued that given how cool and accurate Google is with respect to its searches, it's not difficult to conceive of it getting more and more intelligent. I responded that Google is dumb. While Google is fantastic, its brilliance is not derived from machine learning, natural language parsing, or any other artificial intelligences; it's simply reflecting the intelligence found in human networks. The fact that we build communities from our links is the information that Google mines for its Page Ranking. It's not intelligent, it's merely a form of "collaborative filter" between humans.

If Google were to be useful in sorting and organizing email, it would have to see how others stored these emails, responded to them, and ranked them. I don't see this happening in the general case, though in the particular case of spam Vipul's Razor software uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to exchange lists of emails considered to be spam (by humans!) for easy filtering.

° 02.12.02.mo | You Are What People Cite

Last month's You Are What You Read was intended to be the first of three small essays on how selecting from a broad field of options determines representation and perception. Last month, I focused on how those with a limited reading list might have an internally consistent world-view, but one that was still lacking. Now I want to turn from what we read, but how others cite us.

When I first began to think about political philosophy I was strongly attracted to the libertarian philosophy of individual freedom, self-determination, and skepticism of external governance. These are still central maxims of my philosophy but I would not longer consider myself a libertarian.

Why? Because the movement is reckless with respect to its intellectual and moral responsibilities. Wonderfully simple and elegant principles of personal freedom and free markets avoid issues of short term market irrationality, bias, and monopoly. How does one mitigate against deceit and irrationalities? Why is market/corporate governance always better than civil governance? And how does a statement of absolute rights encourage their exercise? Most libertarians will not engage on these issues. Instead, they plead that a well functioning market it better than government. But as I learned from Lessig, markets do govern, and I've found that can do so maliciously and coercively. And you still have to ask the question of how do we enable them to function well?

The libertarian philosophy often serves as an excuse for the selfish and a support to the exploitative: speaking highly of freedom while undermining the ability to exercise it. When I see a libertarian pundit from a well funded think-tank attacking some liberal program, I often agree with much of what he is saying. However, I also think, "at least the liberals give a damn" and I ask why don't I see these folks criticizing the drug war, corporate welfare, or the military-industrial complex? Beware of beautiful philosophies of principle that are selectively cited in practice.

goatee

i am not a crook

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