Author Archives: jonathan

Son of Strelka, Son of God

Dan Warren posted into the Something Awful forums an audio book he said he had been working on for four years. “Son of Strelka, Son of God as narrated by Barack Obama.” (torrent, the entire 32 minutes aren’t animated yet) He took Obama’s audio book, “Dreams of My Father,” and re-edited it so that Obama tells the story of the a demigod and the creation of the world. It’s truly the most inspired presidential hack since St Ronald of Hollywood and Nancy Reagan addressed America about the joys of crack.

via Slate

So Long Shuttle…

So today was the last shuttle mission. I remember my mom waking me up early that April morning and asking me if I wanted to watch real spaceship launch. Of course I did. We went into the living room, and sat in front of that old black and white television we had, and watched it live on channel 12. I may have had the first of my die cast space shuttles with me as we watched it. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my 5 year old life. I was a huge space geek then, and remained so up until sometime in high school I guess. We bought that day’s issue of the Southern Illinoisan, and I kept that folded yellowed displayed on my bedroom bookshelf for years. The front page had a large four color crew photo under the headline. That was unusual, as color printing wouldn’t become common for maybe ten more years. There was another story on the front page. It was about the latest developments in the Atlanta child murders.

Two days later, I watched the spacecraft that launched like rocket, land like an airplane.

Seven years later, after attending Space Camp, I witnessed the launch of STS-26, the first flight after the Challenger disaster. We were a few miles away, on shore of some inlet at Kennedy. My friend Billy got the passes by writing our congressman. We watched the launch through binoculars, and was looking directly over the top of the orbiter, just like on television. Over loud speakers, we heard the countdown, watched the boosters ignite, and then shuttle rise from its plume of steam and fire. Seconds later, we were hit with a wall of intense heat and noise. I didn’t expect that. We tracked the craft as it moved higher and further away until it disappeared behind a cloud. Behind the cloud, the SRBs separated, and the shuttle emerged, it was only barely pinpoint of light.

Then it rained. Apparently, a common, yet relatively unknown, but obvious, side effect of shuttle launches. Mix liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and what do you get?

And now the shuttle is gone. Of course the shuttle was oversold. It never launched every week. It never carried enough payload. It tried to be all things to all people, and of course never completely satisfied anyone. Yet, it was an honest to god spaceship.

The designs for the shuttle replacement Orion / MPCVSpaceX’s Dragon, and Boeing / Bigelow’s CST-100 all are just capsules that seem like 1950s technology. While I don’t doubt they’re more practical, they seem disheartening. We’ve come a long way from the days of the “National Areospace Plane” (I always found it a bit weird that the artist depictions always made it look like Air Force One.)

Two Roads to Courage

Tyler Riewer‘s friends gave him this inspired gift. The outside reads: “Sack up — Life is a daring adventure or nothing.” Inside is a bottle of bourbon and a set of brass knuckles.

Inspiring. It’s the kind of gift you’d expect from Tyler Durden. As Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) in Dr Strangelove said, “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”

Personalized Receipts

London based design studio Berg, teamed with Dentsu London to consider receipts as applications. From their description:

We’ve added semi-useful info-visualisation of the foods ordered based on “what the till knows” – sparklines, trends – and low-tech personalisation of information that might be useful to regulars. Customers can select events or news stories they are interested in by ticking a check box.

We think the humble receipt could be something like a paper “app” and be valuable in small and playful ways.

Continue reading →

The Most Remote Places on Earth

New Scientist links to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre’s Global Urbanisation and Accessibility Map – part of the World Bank’s 2009 World Development Report. The maps is made by plotting the estimated travel time to a “major” city. They conclude that only 10% of the world is more than 48 hours from a city. Primarily the most remote places are the poles, southern Venezuela, and central Tibet. Even the Sahara is comparatively more accessible.

via Telstar Logistics

Pandora’s Vox

From Carmen Hermosillo’s (aka humdog) 1994 essay Pandora’s Vox

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

Seventeen years later, it’s still the same, but in one sense it’s worse. Before it was just selling ads based on traffic. Now we’re processing the text of your posts for sentiment. Processing your social connections to determine whether your or one of your friends are more of an “influencer.” We’re trying to peer into meaning. Typically the concerns about text-mining / social-network-analysis / big-data revolve around privacy, which I believe mostly clouds the issue.

Continue reading →

Otomata

Created by Batuhan Bozkurt, Otomata is a cellular automata music sequencer.
The sequencer consists of a two dimensional grid. Each row and column correspond to a musical note, with the first row and first column representing the same note, the and so forth. By clicking on cell, the user places a cursor at that location which travels in one of the four directions. When the cursor hits the end of the row or column, the associated musical note plays, and the cursor reverses direction. Cursors can also change direction if they collide with each other.

I made two songs Otomata. The above pictured song is boring but symmetric. I like a later song I made more because it features a reoccurring motif while the cellular automata “improvises” over the top.

Otomata reminds me two other projects. The grid of moving squares reminds me of a Monome. I love the abstractness of the Monome interface, but I have no way to really justify purchasing one of these, but they look awesome.

The other thing Otomata recalls is Stephan Wolfram’s A New Kind of Music. (This “new kind of music” is apparently crappy 1980s MIDI, but I digress.) As you might have guessed, Stevie set his cellular automata rules up trigger MIDI events, giving equally predictable atrocious results.

Big Man Japan

I recently watched “Big Man Japan“, the Japanese mockumentary about a Japanese superhero that grows to immense proportions when shocked with electricity. He’s the sixth generation Japanese Apache Chief. The film follows the the big man in his normal life. We see his crappy house. (He can’t hold a normal job, he’s always on call for a monster attack.) We see him deal with his estranged wife and his disinterested daughter. We watch him negotiate with his agent on corporate sponsorship deals; and catch reactions to his battles from person on the street interviews.

Throughout the entire film is the undercurrent of lost glory. The big man’s grandfather, “Number Four,” protected Japan during the 40s. There were shinto ceremonies prior embiggening, and much more pomp and circumstance, but now – like the current big man himself – they are in considerably less glorious.

The film starts out very slow, but once it picks up after the first fight, it starts to move at a nice pace, and gets progressively funnier. It’s netflix streamable, so there’s no reason why shouldn’t watch it now. DO IT NOW!

Dennis the Menace


Dennis the Menace is 60 years old. Both of them. By a twist of fate, two men on opposite sides of the Atlantic both had an idea for a young boy named Dennis and his dog getting in trouble with adults.

I had no idea that there was a British Dennis the Menace until I read the BBC article.

Just looking at the characters, you get two very different impressions of the them. The American smiling while riding his dog Ruff. He looks happy. Sure, he’s “Dennis the Menace,” but you get the (correct) impression that while he may cause more than his fair share of problems, it’s because he’s too naive, ambitious, clumsy for his ideas. He doesn’t want to cause problems, they’re just unfortunate and unforeseen (to him) side effects.

The British Dennis is also smiling, as is his dog Gnasher, but it’s unsettling. He looks like the kind of kid that would torture rats with hacksaw, and pull the wings of flies, before he feeds them to his dog in preparation for a fight. It’s not just this picture, it’s almost all of them. Of course, there’s no episode where the British Dennis mortally wounds a stray cat with an M80, but even watching an episode of the recent cartoon, left me with the impression that Dennis would eventually graduate to yob, and then later to full fledged football hooligan.