vertiginous

bits and bites about the technologies and haptics of reading and writing

[8-bitfiction]

[emergentfutures]

Genome Editing Rewrites the Future of Dairy Cattle | MIT Technology Review

[vertigious]

Can genome-editing technology revive the idea of genetically modified livestock?

[vertigious]

Rewriting through Google Ads: Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff’s American Psycho

http://electricliterature.com/rewriting-through-google-ads-mimi-cabell-and-jason-huffs-american-psycho/

[stillloontonne]

[visual-poetry]

»burned books project« by michael mandiberg

[via]

[theverge]

(Saving…) Share: The Icon No One Agrees On - BOLD by Pixelapse

[theparisreview]

In the late seventeenth century, long before the age of Sherwin Williams and Pantone, a Dutch artist known as A. Boogert compiled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, an eight-hundred-page compendium of paint and color.

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

[newyorker]

Can an Algorithm Solve Twitter’s Credibility Problem?

Adrian Chen on why Tweetcred, a new tool designed to “assess credibility of content on Twitter,” falls short of its promise: http://nyr.kr/Swl7Le

Illustration by Roman Muradov.

[continuo-docs]

Michael Clough – For Alvin Lucier (1969), zine, published by miniMA, UK, April 2014

A graphic emulation of the cumulative effect of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room by British musician, photographer and zine publisher Michael Clough. Another visual interpretation of the same piece was Mary Lucier’s own photo series I posted a while back.

Via

[algopop]

Twitter Bot with Python Tutorial 

This is probably the easiest twitter bot tutorial I’ve come across. Its a long way from making the bot autonomous and continually running, but its a good and easy start. Its all part of the website’s #botweek which has some other interesting articles and thoughts on bots. (thx PVK)

[theatlantic]

Life Before (and After) Page Numbers

Print media evolved into its present forms. 

In, say, 1469, there were no page numbers. This obvious and now necessary part of the book’s user interface simply did not exist. 

The earliest extant example of sequential numbering in a book (this time of ‘leaves’ rather than pages, per se) is the document you see at the top of this page, Sermo in festo praesentationis beatissimae Mariae virginis, which was printed in Cologne in 1470. The practice didn’t become standard, the wonderful I Love Typography tells us, for another half century. 

The page number is particularly interesting, I think, because it is a pointer, a kind of metadata that breaks apart a work into constituent parts. The existence of page numbers creates a set of miniature sub-publications to which someone can refer.

Read more. [Image: Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf]

[vertigious]

Page numbers as meta data

[prostheticknowledge]

"Dot" "Dot" "Dot" ...

1) Go to Google Translate.

2) Put in a row of full stops ……………………………………………………

3) Select Japanese (as the output language).

4) Click “Listen”.

[theatlantic]

Can a Twitter Bot Capture Chicago’s Essence?

When established in 1833, the Town of Chicago incorporated fewer than 200 people into its new borders. Within seven years—the city’s first decennial U.S. census—more than 4,000 people lived there; after another 10 almost 30,000 people did.

The city kept growing, both in size and population. In 1880, half a million people lived within its borders. In 1890, that number had doubled. At the turn of the century, 1.6 million people called themselves Chicagoans, and the city was the fifth largest in the world.

Something happened on the land we call Chicago that had happened nowhere else before. In the span of a lifetime, the city went from nascence to dominance—and since then, people have been trying to figure out what that new place is and what it can be.

A new Twitter account does the job rather stirringly. Created by Luke Seeman, a designer and developer at Chicago magazine, @whatschicago retweets tweets that begin with the phrase “Chicago is.”

Read more. [Image: Bryce Edwards / Flickr]

[vertigious]

“Chicago is...” by a twitterbot

[newyorker]

[vertigious]

“Where is Earth’s biggest bookstore?”

“Cyberspace,” Bezos replied.

In the era of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, a book costs as much as a sandwich. Is that a good thing? George Packer reports: http://nyr.kr/1kwb0Rs

Construction by Ian Wright.

[ibmblr]

Anyone who’s searched the Internet knows that computers can have a tough time understanding the meaning of our words. Now IBM Watson is bridging the gap between language arts and computer science. It acts like a built-in human interpreter for computers, translating the meaning of our words into the right 1’s and 0’s. And the more Watson reads, the more fluent it gets.

[needsmoreresearch]

Copies of L’Ami du Peuple stained with Marat’s blood.

[wittyusernamed]

Hm. Wasn’t he the leader of the Girondin (sp?). And his throat was slit while he was in a oatmeal bath for his dry skin? I can’t quite recall

[needsmoreresearch]

Marat was a journalist and political figure, particularly engaged with the sansculottes, who clashed intensely with the Girondins.  They put him on trial; he was acquitted; ultimately the Girondins were losing their popular support in Paris and several Girondin deputies were arrested.

Marat was murdered by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin supporter from Caen.  He was indeed in his bath—his health had been failing for a long time, including skin problems that medicinal baths helped.

[prostheticknowledge]

CAPTCHA Tweet

Turns twitter messages into CAPTCHA-like image, which can then be posted onto your timeline:

CAPTCHA Tweet* is an application which users can post tweets in a CAPTCHA form with. Since computers can hardly read it, humans can communicate behind their sight. CAPTCHA has originally been developed to distinguish computers from humans. It asks the user to type text from a distorted image. This is easy for a human but difficult for a computer. It sorts out computers by requiring them to complete a task which only humans can. CAPTCHA Tweet uses it as cryptography for secret communication between humans based on the fact that it is not legible to computers’ eyes. This work is an extension of our exploration of computer vision. We see CAPTCHA as a symbol of the relationship between human vision and computer vision and the intervention of computers in human life. CAPTCHA Tweet attempts to re-present this implication of CAPTCHA to the public sphere by applying it to the social network communication.

Put together by Shinseungback Kimyonghun, you can try this out for yourself here

[vertigious]

CAPTCHA Tweet