GENOMICON

Prince Philip

The man’s a god. Literally.

Back in the… mists of uncharted time, a cargo-cult formed around him in Vanuatu.

“In 1974 the British Royal family paid a visit to the then New Hebridies. While in the capital, Port Vila, Prince Philip is said to have handed a man from Tanna a symbolic white pig, and in doing so, stumbled into the ancient prophecy. Local man Thom Sia, who acts as English translator for the village elders, said his people were waiting patiently for Prince Philip’s return.” – from

Now obviously this is fantastic news to the Brits, to whom he is a national treasure. I mean the poor old Royal Family are basically pet people… they don’t really serve any particular purpose except to… open things. Stand about being ceremonial, and on their best behaviour – but (as anyone in Europe can tell you) it’s far more fitting with the national character to be on their very worst behaviour – that’s what we really want from a monarch… always have, and Prince Philip is a star. The hilarity of shocked embarrassment is deeply embedded in the national zeitgeist – always has been.

What ever Prince Philip does, he should do more of it – just so long has he never has any actual power… because we brits have had proper monarchy, and we didn’t really get on with it. This photo for example sends a bit of a chill up my spine

And technically…

… there was a thing in on TV here in New Zealand a couple of nights ago (and be aware, that as New Zealanders, we are not “citizens”, but “loyal subjects”)… where prince whatsisname… the new one, was helping fly a rescue helicopter back in England. The commentator said that after a period of training he could fly his own helicopter.

Errr… Excusez-moi? “My own helicopter?” Have you seen what it says on the side of these machines? Know what the “R” in RAF stands for? THEY’RE ALL MY FUCKING HELICOPTERS!!!

No – that would not do. Still National-Treasure

“He’s off the map” says Eddie… only he’s not, he’s on it (and bringing us neatly back to Do-Re-Mi)

The incredibly strange thing that is The Prince Philip Meme-plex has found it’s way from 20th Century stone-age cargo-cult, into more 21st Century form of homage – a mashup-map… of all the embarrassing things he’s said around the world. Not quite as impressive a cargo-cult, granted… and not (though it’s tempting to think so) History Repeating as Farce – partly because it was farce to start with, and there’s nowhere to go – except sideways… so sideways it goes. There’s life in the old god yet.

Still… Dieu et mon Droit, eh? eh?

This is cool

Ocean of Light: Surface at Kinetica 2010 from squidsoup on Vimeo.

Cube of intereactive LED stars.

Now… check out the diagonal / diamond patterns at around .45…

… then check out this guy:

He rings loads of bells in the “bad science” warning list, but god-damn he’s convincing. He’s probably the best of these that I’ve ever seen – in the same vein as John Dee – a species of memetic addiction

Where people notice a pattern, then go deeper and deeper and deeper, thinking that they’re getting to closer to some eternal truth, but really they’re just in a recursive set of patterns – and there is no bottom… just infinite detail. Marko Rodin has been smart enough to contain the recursion by turning the whole thing into a mobius-like toriod… but it’s still just recursion.

I’m pretty sure what is happening here is that he has discovered patterns that are inherent in “base” numbering systems – with the focus on base 10. Really, the patterns are like the ones you see in dots on the ceiling… or the lights in the video (@ .45) above. They don’t “mean” anything. They’re just patterns.

He’s good though – very forceful – in one of these videos he’s like ALL the characters at the end of Apocalypse Now rolled into one (you can’t go into space… with fractions)… and hell, he might be right… it’s just that he does ring a lot of the bad-science warning-bells…

There are hell of a lot of Rodin Coils on youtube though. Brilliant. I love this stuff

(from)

“The experimental four-dimensional GCode interpreter is now five-dimensional. Four dimensions are so three weeks ago… It has an extra DDA variable that is the feedrate. ” – blog.reprap.org

Cool. I have no idea what that means*.

I think it’s incredibly interesting how this is being developed COMPLETELY in public. I first came across repraps on the 23rd of March 2008 – just over a year ago – and I remember it well (ish) because I’m one of a massive segment of humanity, who now keeps public diaries (although mine was at least semi-fictional)

Has it come a long way since then?

Yes and no. The original video (from 2007) talked about it as an academic research project with a 3% chance of “success”… I think progress towards being able to create all its own parts has been fairly slow – but as an idea, it has exploded – it’s famous, and it’s gone from being an academic project to something that now probably can’t (or at least won’t) be stopped. It’s taken on a life of its own – and not always in the ways that the core team had planned – but that is the nature of the beast. It’s a success. Arrrgggh.

So that’s the benefit of its development being entirely public I suppose – although the physical replicator is still finding its feet (and it will be years before it does I think), a higher-order replicator: the reprap meme, is growing and dynamic, and providing the energy that is needed to create the physical object.

I think there’s possibly some natty little formula (which probably doesn’t work) in there somewhere: “In the Attention Economy the interest generated by the ongoing Making-Of story, can sometimes provide the energy needed for the creation of the final object”.

Transparency of Process can be a powerful creative catalyst – even though it’s a diametric opposite of 20thC business intuition.

When I worked in the City in London in the 90s, much was made of the notion of “management of expectations” – and secrecy was the norm. The power of Transparency of Process on the other hand (if it’s well done), is to do with “management of surprises” – and openness is the norm. I’m not sure that one’s any easier than the other to be honest… it’s just that you get more energy from the latter.

* actually, I do know what that means. Kindof. I think.

This is a favourite subject of mine – designs or ideas from one medium jumping into another.

In this case someone has made a wooden tumbler lock – based on the mechanics (one supposes) of a metal one… and someone else has used this to first digitise it, then print out a 3D plastic one.

This turned up in salon.com a while back:

And needless to say (because it’s brilliant) went around the internet like a bullet – a meta meme.

Well it looks like this particular meme has fallen to earth in the shape of a 3D automaton.

(from : via)

All it needs now is to be made out of lego and it will have “arrived”.

Something that keeps jangling in the back of my mind (I was a wizard before I became a scientist) is this:

which is the cabalistic tree of life – a universal analogue, which (among other things) charts the progress of an “idea” through different spheres of “being” until it finally materialises in the physical realm.

And while I’m devoutly irreligious, and the word “spiritual” makes me feel like yawning and chucking stuff, I am interested in art – and hypernormal-stimuli, and reality maps etc. As Mae Jemison recently said : “Science provides an understanding of a universal experience, and arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.”

And I do so love my hypernormal stimuli.

So when I wrote the last post, I went looking for the clip where Jeremy Clarkson reviews a Tesla… I embedded it from Youtube… and…

… it had been deleted for “terms of use”

Fuck you people, you can fucking fuck off and go fucking fuck yourselves up the chuffers.

So… I think we need a P2P backup mechanism for saving videos (especially youtube videos) into the universal mind so fuckwits from “the past” can’t delete them.

I shall go exploring.

Ok, I know this just came of Reddit etc – but this is cool

Someone’s flipped the tables on youtubees and used youtube clips as mix material. And it’s fucking excellent.

It’s kindof like Rubik’s cubes are turning into this platform for people to show off how clever they are… and some are very clever indeed…

more

And there are 5 dimensional simulations, cube solving legobots, and innumerable videos of kids doing 60 cubes in 10 minutes, blindfolded etc…

It’s a bit like a Turing Test – except instead of a machine being clever enough to pass for a human, a human is clever enough to pass for a machine. The Geek-Turing-Inversion

Anyway, the latest incarnation is this:

Which being a child of the internet, has it’s entire construction history…

a video

And as is always the way, when I see something that makes me go “holy crap”, and I look for them on youtube, loads of other people have got there first and there’s already a whole subculture of people making variants

I think it’s really interesting that the “making” always seems to be as much of the “thing” as the actual physical artefact… and how often the plans are released into the wild wild web for free (in this case in the shape of .stl files)

Here’s Drew showing us how to mould pieces:

Not sure what this is. Looks like a really complicated doorknob. Instead of having keys, you have to solve a rubik’s cube to get into your house. How’s that for geek egotism? “Oh I don’t have a combination lock, I have an IQ test – I’m the only one who can pass it”.

Well, one can dream etc.

from http://www.puzzleforge.com, via make

Amazing.

You know what I’m sick of?

I’m sick of hearing people go on about this clip from Minority Report

being the future of Advertising, because it’s not.

Don’t you get it? You people are finished.

What this clip is, is an example of more and more and more and more advertising money being thrown at a more and more media-savvy, cynical and indifferent audience… we’re not going to be narrow-casted to like this because the only people we listen to are our friends. Our spending decisions are based upon feedback we get from our networks… our 2 degrees of separation.

Billboards with embedded retina-scanners that ID passers-by and hit a database for likely buying choices, which they then shout out loud to whoever happens to be near by ARE going to be made… because they were on Minority Report… and sooner or later, everything in a Sci Fi movie gets made. It’s part of the culture… there’s something in human nature that is hell-bent on fulfilling prophecy.

So these billboards will be made, but they’re not going to be used for advertising because they whole floor is going to be swept by crowd-sourced recommendations… and that is a party that “The Industry” is specifically and systemically not invited to.

Here’s an example of a DIY advert that someone has made for the little felt camera covers that she makes on Etsy.

Now that is effective advertising… why? Because it will get cited. It will get linked to. That is what it’s all about now.

Think of it as a giant Artificial-Intelligence experiment (because that is exactly what it is). If you don’t get linked to… (get this RIAA) if you can’t inspire people to evangelise about you by copying your memetic content… then you don’t get seen.

An unexpected seam of gold in the remix culture: Yet another way to take the piss out of the 80s, which was the worst decade in the whole of rock and roll history.

(from)

and

Being the first that I saw, apart from that one by A-Ha which has since been removed by Warner Music Group, who we should put out of business.

There’s a whole load of these – if you search for literal videos on google….

etc etc. Marvellous.