I just uploaded a new and much belated post
to my blog about the Mass Humanities Cyberspace and Civic-Space symposium at BC, which was a hell of a way to spend a weekend, and not only because I got to speak to Evgeny Morozov, but also because I got to hear from folks like Chris Csikszentmihályi and Jonathan Zittrain. Fun times were had by all.
Yes, the Facebook “real names” controversy is a little more nuanced than the above graphic. There’s a really good discussion here.
John Backstrom, graduate of Cornish College of the Arts (2010) creates haunting images of the fractal ghosts in his digital dreams, imperfect echoes of our collective cultural subconscious. He has a gallery of digitally altered images from films on his site, which he explains as
...distorted screenshots from major motion pictures, meant to destroy the recognizable, branded imagery of cinema and replace it with something that the viewer can interpret and decode with their own imagination.
Why did I reinstall the StumbleUpon plugin a few months ago? Well, procrastinating at the end of this recently ended semester + a really cool Firefox plugin = about 30 security/Eurasia-related links to sort through over break. I forget whether I got this from StumbleUpon or Evgeny Morozov’s Twitter feed (which is an excellent source of information on these topics in its own right), but I just finished reading this article on the FSB’s Internet monitoring apparatus and the tech companies that build it. There’s one application, the “Semantic Archive“, which seems like something a lot of the NLP/data mining people on this blog would like to know about. If you guys have any comments on this thing, please chime in, as I’m just a network monkey *scratches armpit*.
Gibson doesn’t need an introduction as an inarguably talented science fiction writer, but he does great stream-of-consciousness deconstructions of modern society, too. more >>
Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/LOC
Boston.com’s The Big Picture has a great photo series today of life in the Russian Empire, featuring the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). The series reveals a much more modern view of Russian life than I had expected, with its electric turbines, trains, and modern infrastructure. The traditional costume, however, reminds us where we are.
Because Gorskii used the three-color method of developing his film, the colors didn’t always line up. This series is also a great example of chromatic aberration.
[Boston.com] via [The Library of Congress]
A package arrived at my apartment yesterday. A simple brown cardboard box with mailing information and a return address to Kanagawa, Japan. It contained the most beautiful piece of machinery I’ve laid eyes on since I unboxed my Macbook Pro – the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AI-S: The Cream Machine. The King.
Fairly reliable rumors surfaced today about the specs on Nikon’s newest full-frame dSLR, the anticipated D4. These come in addition to the (accurate, now-confirmed) rumors about the D800, which popped up a few months ago.
Here’s a really fun map courtesy of neweurasia listing the various surveillance technologies in use by different authoritarian regimes. While this is great, I have no idea why the Chinese section of the map includes Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. They didn’t annex both countries without anyone noticing, right?
