WHOLE LOTTA LIGHT

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#?*!

Google Web Lab at the London Science Museum. Five experiments that try to "bring the mysterious inner workings of the Internet to life".

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How ‘light’ sounds

A little experiment: I translated the sequence of numbers you see under the title into a musical pattern. 1 becomes a beat on the ride cymbal, 0 a pause. The whole procession is looped four times.  The sequence is the binary code for ‘light’.

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Click

Seoul based artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a screenshot every time they clicked in one day. 

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Therapy for computers

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Digital Attack Map

Live mapping of DDos attacks. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. Such attacks are used to for private, business and political reasons.  

digitalattackmap.com

youtube.com

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Rebuilding a 2000-year old computer – out of lego.

It's an analog computer, which means it can't execute programs. But the word "computer" used to be the name given to people who could do tedious math. In the 19th century there were rooms of people called "computers" who were skilled at arithmetic, supervised by a mathematician, who would create tables at great expense that navigators and sailors would use. But when we finally had mechanical devices that could do similar things, they got that name: computer.

But analog computers were still very useful up through the 1940s. World War II battleships would have a mechanical computer in their artillery, so that when you wanted to fire, you'd turn cranks to figure out how many times is this gun to be fired, how far is the other ship, what's the wind velocity, that sort of thing. And when you turned all the cranks, the gear ratios would tell you how to adjust your aim. So the Antikythera Mechanism, and my Lego version, are both just simple mechanical computers: you turn the crank at one speed and all the wheels move at a another speed, which you've calibrated to have a particular meaning -- in this case, predicting the cycles of astronomical bodies.

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Gorilla Glass: an unsung hero

You may have never heard of Gorilla Glass, but chances are that if you have a smartphone or tablet, you touch it on a daily basis. {…} Yet until now, it's only really come one way: flat. Paired with the rise of flexible display panels this is about to change. And curved smartphones and tablets are just the start. 

fastcodesign.com

corning.com

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Sound of Threads

This audiovisual experiment by Bertrand Lanthiez surely required a high level of commitment and painstaking programming. But the outcome is as simple as it is beautiful.

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Slowing down cicadas

The above audio is allegedly a two-track recording of crickets: one at normal speed, and one slowed-down, with the pitch also dropped. The slowed-down crickets sing like a heavenly boys choir. 

Now, there has been some dispute about wether or not the recording is fake. However, it inspired me to think: What would happen if you could slow down fiber optic signals? What if you could make the computer's on-and-off-blinking patterns visible? Would the signal turn out to be equally beautiful as the slowed-down insects? What if you could turn the light sequences into sound? How does an email sound like? Or a blog post? Or fraction-of-a-second-stock exchange?

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What is an internet exchange?

It's George's birthday and his grandfather wanted to send him a present over the internet. But somehow it got lost on the way, so they go looking for it. Very charming video that explains how internet exchanges work.

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So here's the Internet! Boxes like this. Yellow cable. Lots of blinking lights.

Job Witteman, Chief Executive Officer, AMS-IX 

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The problem isn’t really that we don’t know what the Internet looks like. It’s that what it looks like is so horribly ugly. {…} I wish the Internet looked like Matt Damon {…} It turns out, though, that it looks like a warehouse of space junk, and it sounds like an industrial-strength air-conditioning system. Beyond the screen, the Internet looks like everything else. It looks like money

Christine Smallwood

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Information Overkill

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If the Internet is a network of networks, does any ‘web-compatible’ network become part of the internet? Regardless of its technology or form? Can I create a network of my own, digital or not, connect it to the internet and thus make it become the internet? Can I physically become the Internet?

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Redundancy #2

Gregory Bateson applied redundancy to language. According to him there is language and there is paralanguage, the former containing the verbal expression, the words, the information, the former referring to secondary communication as in gestures, intonation, nonverbal language. In his writing on redundancy and coding he referred to redundancy as the meta-information that enables one to complete an incomplete message with more than random chance.  There's an analogy to be made with the digital space: If, say an email's content equals the language, then the metadata – the when and where, by whom, to whom, on which browser, at which time, etc. – can be considered paralanguage. No wonder, then, that security agencies are so keen on the metadata. If there is enough of it, the actual data itself loses its importance. If you know the who, when and where, the what can be constructed or even neglected. Context beats content.  This argument gains even more momentum with the fact that within the digital space a copy is not in any way distinguishable from its original. When content is multiplied effortlessly and without leaving a trace, it's context that matters. 

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Redundancy

• Redundancy (linguistics), language saying more than is necessary to convey a meaning.

• Redundancy (engineering) is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe.

• Redundancy (information theory) is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Informally, it is the amount of wasted "space" used to transmit certain data.

• Redundancy (design) unnecessary or superfluous part of a design  whose missing does not change or alter the effect of the rest of the design. 

wikipedia.com