#peter mcmanus

[thedigitalhuman]

Taking over 30 years to complete, Ferdinand Cheval built Le Palais idéal, a massive pebble castle using materials he found on his mail route.

Building a castle is a monumental undertaking any way you look at it. But constructing an entire castle pebble by pebble, stone by stone, using only materials found while making your mail route? That’s absolutely inconceivable. Yet that is exactly what Ferdinand Cheval did, and more than 100 years later his pebble castle still stands, drawing tourists from around the world to Hauterives, France.

The entirely outlandish castle construction began when Cheval literally tripped on a bizarre-looking stone during his daily mail route. He took the stone home with him, sparking an idea that would consume him for the next three-plus decades.

When speaking of the project, Ferdinand Cheval recounted,

“I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause. In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well… I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn’t thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was… It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease.”

Stuff like this is why I wish radio budgets allowed for foreign travel. I want to wander the halls of this place.

Digital Human, Series 18, Episode 4: Devotion

[elizabethunseelie]

One unfortunate mistake costs a Ukrainian man the chance of a lifetime, with his unraveling mind becoming a public spectacle as his erratic behaviors make it to the outside world.

Digital Human, Series 18, Episode 4: Devotion

[thedigitalhuman]

God's Lonely Programmer

Terry Davis, a schizophrenic programmer, has spent 10 years building an operating system to talk to God.

Terry Davis asks God about war ("Servicemen competing") and death ("awful"), about dinosaurs ("Brontosaurs' feet hurt when stepped") and His favorite video game ("Donkey Kong"). God's favorite car is a "Beamer," and His favorite singer is Mick Jagger, though if He could sing He'd want to sound like Christopher Hall from Stabbing Westward. His favorite national anthem is Latvia's. His favorite band is, no surprise, The Beatles, but Rush and Triumph are pretty good, too. Classical music is poison. The best thing Bill Gates could do to save lives, God says, is work on earthquake prediction. The Eleventh Commandment is "Thou shall not litter." Terry Davis tells God everything seems bad. God replies: "Plant trees."

The words pour out on TempleOS.org, a torrent of verified random numbers, news links, YouTube videos, and scriptural exegesis. It's the dense work of a single, restless mind writing ceaselessly without an audience.

After two months of emails and phone conversations, I know more than when I began; specifically, I've accumulated more raw data, more facts about his life and experience. But I suspect I've only sketched a shadow. The full reality remains unreachable, an irreducible mystery.

Jesse Hick’s article is perhaps the best thing ever written about Terry and his work, you guys should absolutely check it out. And when Jesse finishes his follow up article, we will of course link our listeners right to it.

Digital Human, Series 18, Episode 4: Devotion

[thedigitalhuman]

Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven't yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants.

Stream or download the podcast here Digital Human: Series 18, Ep 1 - Animism

[thedigitalhuman]

A new survey of fears in the U.S. had technology at the top of the list.

When the personal computer first became ubiquitous in the 1980s, as Adrienne LaFrance wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year, some people found it so terrifying that the term “computerphobia” was coined.

“In the early days of the telephone, people wondered if the machines might be used to communicate with the dead. Today, it is the smartphone that has people jittery,” she wrote. “Humans often converge around massive technological shifts—around any change, really—with a flurry of anxieties.”

To see those anxieties quantified, take a look at the top five scariest items in the Survey of American Fears, released earlier this week by researchers at Chapman University. Three of them—cyberterrorism, corporate tracking of personal information, and government tracking of personal information—were technology-related.

For the survey, a random sample of around 1,500 adults ranked their fears of 88 different items on a scale of one (not afraid) to four (very afraid). The fears were divided into 10 different categories: crime, personal anxieties (like clowns or public speaking), judgment of others, environment, daily life (like romantic rejection or talking to strangers), technology, natural disasters, personal future, man-made disasters, and government—and when the study authors averaged out the fear scores across all the different categories, technology came in second place, right behind natural disasters.

Stream or download the podcast here Digital Human: Series 18, Ep 1 - Animism

[thedigitalhuman]

Capturing the beauty and emotion of London’s young men

Photographer Rosie Matheson discusses her Boys series, which is shortly going on display

Rosie Matheson’s Boys series is, in this humble digihuman research monkey’s opinion, bloody gorgeous. The light is beautiful, and somehow in each shot she captures something with simmering intensity and yet an overriding intimacy and sensitivity throughout the whole series. She has an incredible talent for getting touching the heart of her subject in each shot. Beautiful example of why film is still such a beautiful, vital medium.

Digital Human, Series 17, Ep 2: The Analogue Human

[thedigitalhuman]

A shed the size of a town: what Britain’s giant distribution centres tell us about modern life

Designed to disappear into the landscape, Britain’s vast super-warehouses also reflect a world in which we expect online purchases to arrive as if by magic

Simple as they may look, distribution centres are sophisticated structures. The machinery that moves stuff around is constantly evolving. Their playing field-sized floors have to be exceptionally level, as small unevenness could cause the high fork-lift trucks they use to lean unacceptably at the top. Years of competition have made their structure as spare and economical as can be. Architects such as Chetwoods have to reconcile all this with the wishes of users (who might want something tailored to their needs) and of investors, who will want a structure to be adaptable to future users.It is tempting to say that these buildings make the internet visible, except that their visibility is strictly limited. Sometimes they get into the news when reporters, posing as warehouse workers, bring news of working conditions inside. You can get a glimmer on Google, for example from employee reviews of Primark’s warehouse, which sits like an acropolis on a raised earthwork in Northamptonshire: “they’re treating a people like nothing,” says one in imperfect English; “they beautiful lied on induction how much they cares about worker, don’t believe them.” The buildings, however, remain notably blank, giving almost no clue of their busy inner lives.

Some users and owners are dismissive of press inquiries to a degree unusual in big, public relations-conscious companies. Tesco refused a request to see inside their Dirft base, which was possibly not surprising, but also to answer simple questions, such as: what are its dimensions?

For the writer Carolyn Steel, whose book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Livesexamines the relationship of society to food, this secrecy is the antithesis of the more public processes by which food once progressed from field to market to kitchen to plate. “The exchange of food used to bring people together,” she says. “Now the process is designed to exclude the human”. But distribution centres manifest the world we have chosen and had chosen for us, in return for efficiency and convenience, in which a product appears in the home by ever more inscrutable magic.

Their scale and growth are a consequence of the fact that all that physicality and volume that the virtual world displaces has to go somewhere. It’s welcome that architects and developers should try to make something of them and to mitigate their impact with woods, ponds and indeed coloured bands. But, short of a dramatic restructuring of the economic, technical and social basis of the modern world, these uncompromising building types will only become more essential to our lives. The contrast between what was previously thought of as natural and urban landscape will only become more stark.

Digital Human: Series 10, Episode 1 - Sublime

[thedigitalhuman]

Whether You Fear or Embrace New Tech Depends on Where You’re From

The West could learn something from East Asia’s more harmonious worldview

East Asian technological innovations have long outpaced those in the West. Products that sound like recent or even future innovations to most Westerners have been available for decades in Asia, particularly in Japan. These include:

· A handheld device that enables customers to order food and drinks from their karaoke room.

· A button attached to the table that customers push to alert a waitress.

· A slew of vending machines that sell everything you can imagine: alcohol, ramen, underwear, umbrellas, rice, newspapers, cell phones.

· Love hotels where guests can check in discreetly without interacting with other human beings.

Tourists visiting Japan for the first time often feel compelled to take a photo of the ubiquitous high-tech washlet toilets. These fixtures are hardly new; they have been on the market since 1980 and have more than 80 percent market penetration. Years before the Internet of Things became a phenomenon in the West, Japanese people were using their mobile phones to run their baths remotely while in a cab. They were also using a single card on their phones to buy groceries from a store, get green tea from a vending machine, and pay the fare for trains and buses.

Evidence from cross-national academic research suggests that the speed of innovation adoption has historically been significantly faster in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan than in the U.S. Aside from various market conditions and economic factors, why have Japanese people historically been more comfortable than Westerners with the new and the strange?

Stream or download the podcast here Digital Human: Series 18, Ep 1 - Animism