It has been said that “the true voice of [Hunter S.] Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist … one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.” That ugliness served its literary and journalistic purpose, no doubt. As for the purpose it served in his private life, in the realm of getting nitty-gritty, mundane things done, that’s a whole other question. Not much is known about this clip other than it features a NSFW voicemail that the gonzo journalist left for his local AV guy in Woody Creek, Colorado. The poor man.…
There are good and bad online instructional platforms for everything: some language courses work better than others and some approaches to teaching music are more effective than others.
This is just as true for computer programming, where, like everything else, an abundance of free courses and tutorials from MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard and Stanford offer interactive tools for learning web development and computer programming. You can find a long list of free comp sci courses from these great universities here.
One new site that is getting particularly good reviews is Codecademy, a free online learning system for learning everything from HTML Basics to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tutorials to design projects of their own choosing. It’s also easy to track your progress.
What sets Codecademy apart from other programming tutorials is that all student work can be completed within a web browser. No software downloading or installing is required. Responding to criticism that the site didn’t initially offer enough courses, Codecademy has added numerous courses in 2012 and launched a Course Creator program. This is a boon for users interested in learning how to teach. Codecademy does not put user-created courses through an approval process and gives course creators a link that they can distribute as they wish. Codecademy does, however, screen the courses and selects which to feature on its own site.
Enrollees in its Code Year program receive a programming lesson in their email inbox every Monday, starting with the fundamentals of JavaScript and then moving on to HTML and CSS. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up at the beginning of the year (including the White House and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg). If you were one the enrollees, it’s still not too late to keep that New Year’s resolution.
The “Politehnica” University of Timisoara, Romania, an engineering school established in 1920, takes its motto from Ferdinand I: “It’s not the walls that make a school, but the spirit living inside.” While the walls of “Politehnica” are as stately as anyone could ask for, what’s inside, according to the short documentary above, is also pretty spiffy—the spirit of computing history, Romanian style. With a score that sounds a little like an outtake from Logan’s Run, this video gives us a tour of the university’s Museum of Information Technology and Communications, opened November 16, 2001.
We meet a number of ancient machines, many of which were responsible for designing buildings and hydroelectric dams and some of which still function. There’s the Mecipt 1, a massive 1961 mainframe system covered in dials, switches, and routing systems and looking somewhat more industrial than the machines built by Fairchild and IBM at the same time. Next comes Mecipt 2 in 1963, which was in operation for sixteen years and did much of the building design. The microcomputers TIMS and MS-100 resemble the original business machines made in the sixties by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Data General Corp. Overall, the short doc takes us through the experimental course of Romanian computing from 1961 to 1989. The reader who brought this to our attention points out that there’s little material out there on Romanian computer engineering. This short doc offers a rare look at a very little-known and fascinating history.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Yesterday saw the launch of what you’ll surely find the most intriguing use of Syria’s domain name extension yet, especially if you follow the visual arts. It serves the punning site Art.sy, to which you’ll soon point your browser whenever you want to discover new imagery that appeals to your aesthetic sensibility. Thus holds the theory, in any case, behind this service created by the Art Genome Project. It aims to become to visual art what Pandora has become to music: a virtual mind that can take your tastes, turn right back around to recommend works that please those tastes, and — in the best of all possible outcomes, little by little — broaden those tastes as well. Tell Art.sy what has recently captivated you in the museums, and it will dig through pieces from Washington’s National Gallery, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the British Museum, and elsewhere, trying its best to find something else that will do the same. In total, Art.sy hosts “17,000+ artworks by 3,000+ artists” from “300+ of the world’s leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to São Paulo.”
Melena Ryzik in TheNew York Times describes Art.sy’s elaborate system of code-based aesthetic classification as developed by “a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied,” in which “some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” …) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography,” while others “are highly subjective, even quirky.” Ryzik lists the possible codes for a Picasso as including “Cubism,” “abstract painting,” “Spain,” “France” and “love,” and those for a Jackson Pollock as “abstract art,” “New York School,” “splattered/dripped,” “repetition” and “process-oriented.” Here we have yet another reason to maintain a high artistic awareness in our high-tech time. Still, I can’t help but recall the wise counsel Stephen Fry offered in an interview we featured back in August: a truly life-enriching recommendation engine wouldn’t give you the same art you’ve always enjoyed; it would give you the exact opposite.
You can learn more about the ins-and-outs of Art.sy here.
It took five years and five models, but Amazon has finally released a new generation of the Kindle — the Kindle Paperwhite — that delivers the goods. The problem with the previous models boiled down to this. The screens were fairly muddy. The contrast, poor. The words didn’t pop off of the page. If you ever tried reading a Kindle indoors, especially in lower light conditions, you know what I mean.
With the Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon has made a pretty big leap ahead. They’ve made improvements to the font contrast and screen resolution, which definitely enhance the reading experience. They’ve also added a touchscreen to the e‑ink model. But the big stride forward is the built-in light that illuminates the screen. The screen is sidelit, not backlit (à la the iPad). The point of the light isn’t to make the screen glow like a computer screen. It’s to make the screen stay white, like the page of a book, under varying light conditions. If you move from brighter to dimmer lighting conditions, you nudge up the brightness so that the page continues to look white. And then you stop there.
It all works quite well, until you start reading with the Paperwhite in pretty dim light conditions. Then you’ll need to dial up the light until the screen actually glows, and that’s when you’ll start to see some imperfections in the design. As David Pogue mentioned in his New York Times review, the Paperwhite has some hotspots (areas of uneven lighting) along the bottom of the screen, which detract minorly from the reading experience.
The last thing Amazon got right is the price. The entry model starts at $119, which means that Amazon is basically selling the e‑reader at cost, and then making money on book sales. But that doesn’t mean that you need to spend very much. You can always download texts from our collection of 375 Free eBooks. Or, if you’re an Amazon Prime Member, you can borrow up to 180,000 books for free.
In a follow-up to its feature on Glitch Art, which we wrote up in August, PBS’s Off Book series has released this short video promoting indie video games. The video packs a lot of information into a very short time frame, so it’s worth watching twice. Overall, the takeaway here is that indie game designers can do innovative, quirky things the big guys–the so-called AAA games–can’t, since the indies can fund their own projects through entities like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It’s a persuasive message given the amazing variety of sound and vision on display; in seven and a half minutes, we get a glimpse of over two dozen indie games ranging from throwbacks to classic 8‑bit animation to gorgeous, painterly environments and landscapes.
The Off Book video breaks its subject into four basic categories, each one covered by different gaming journalists or game creators: Mechanics, Sound, Visuals, and Storytelling. The last category is particularly important since it really is an emotional engagement with a game’s characters and plotlines that pushes people through the game. At least I can say that’s always been the case for me. My fondest memories of the games I sat up all night with are those that pulled me into a world through, yes, fancy graphics and complex moves, but even more so through narrative: from the simple, repetitive tales of the Mega Man series to the globetrotting intrigues of Tomb Raider. For someone who remembers the first incarnations of both of those games, it’s exciting to see indie game designers drawing on nostalgia—in graphic presentation and in the small craft studio production teams—while also integrating contemporary sounds and ideas. Like many of their contemporaries in various indie music niches, indie game designers are pushing the medium forward by scaling back to basics and by drawing on the treasures of their past.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
When researchers at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson this summer, Domenico Vicinanza, a professional composer and particle physicist at DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) took the Higgs research data and turned it into a melody. He explained how he did it to PRI’s The World:
In order to take a subatomic particle like the Higgs Boson and convert it into a melody, to notes, what we do is basically take the data and associate with each one of the numeric values a single note on a score. Melody is following basically exactly the same behavior the scientific data is showing. So when the piano starts playing, you can hear some really really high pitched notes.… They are the signature of the Higgs Boson melody and they are corresponding to a peak in the scientific draft research has shown at CERN. The actual data points are only the one played by the piano at the beginning and then played by piano and marimba in the second repetition. So the marimba was playing the lower notes and the piano was playing the higher notes. So it sounds like a Cuban Habanera but this is classical insidence.… I thoroughly believe that science can offer musicians a wonderful way to look for interesting melodies, interesting harmonies, interesting sonic phenomena. They can be taken and be used by composers to create some real entertainment.
Back in 2009, Vicinanza originally caught our attention when he and the ‘Lost Sounds Orchestra’ gave a unique performance, playing ancient instruments live in Stockholm while the audience watched dancers perform some 7,000 miles away in Kuala Lumpur on an ultra-fast display screen. You can catch scenes from that performance right here.
Most of us have looked up our own addresses using Google Street View. But have you ever wished you could virtually dive right into the ocean, lake or river near your home?
It may not be long until you can. Google has taken its Street View model, complete with directional arrows and swipe-controlled scaling, and plunged into the watery universe.
In a collaboration with a major scientific study of the ocean, Street View now includes panoramic views of six of the world’s living coral reefs. These images, shot using a special camera, allow us to zoom in and see schools of fish and sea turtles make their way over the sea floor off the coast of Australia’s Heron Island. Check out the shape and texture of this ancient volcanic rock near Apo Island in the Philippines.
Scooting along is amazingly fun and the photographic clarity is incredible. Take a cool swim with a manta ray and an underwater photographer off the Great Barrier Reef. It really does feel like you’re there—only you’re not (and the Google watermarks bring you back to reality ).
Photos come courtesy of the Catlin Seaview Survey, an international study of the oceans. Researchers use a continual 360 degree panoramic camera to capture underwater images. In deeper trenches, they send the camera down on robots.
Scientists with the study say that some 95 percent of the ocean still hasn’t been seen by the human eye. Short of traveling to all these spots ourselves, this may be our best chance to bring that number down.
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