Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
-
Human uniqueness and the denial of death
[Geneticist Danny Brower] explained that with full self-awareness and inter-subjectivity would also come awareness of death and mortality. Thus, far from being useful, the resulting overwhelming fear would be a dead-end evolutionary barrier, curbing activities and cognitive functions necessary for survival and reproductive fitness. […] In his view, the only way these properties could become positively selected was if they emerged simultaneously with neural mechanisms for denying mortality.
[…]
If this logic is correct, many warm-blooded species may have previously achieved complete self-awareness and inter-subjectivity, but then failed to survive because of the extremely negative immediate consequences. Perhaps we should be looking for the mechanisms (or loss of mechanisms) that allow us to delude ourselves and others about reality, even while realizing that both we and others are capable of such delusions and false beliefs.We humans are an odd lot.
From Nature’s Correspondance section, “Human uniqueness and the denial of death”, August 5, 2009. doi:10.1038/460684c;
-
The Xerox Star 8010 OS (1981)
The Xerox Star 8010 OS, an early GUI from 1981. I wish my desktop looked a bit more like this today. More interface awesomeness from this system on the DigiBarn Computer Museum site.
(Via)
-
LED Spraycan
I hate to steal links from the Make blog multiple times in a single day, but this is another one that’s hard to pass up. French product/industrial designer Aïssa Logerot created an LED-tipped fake spray can for doing a bit of light (photo) graffiti. Even better, the battery can be recharged by shaking the can. Genius.
(Via)
-
TI-83+ signing key brute forced
Big news for high school hacker nerds everywhere who want to give their graphing calculator’s Z80 processor a better workout than just crunching algebra problems. Also a very good reminder that yesterday’s strong encryption now takes only a small bit of time to crack (in this case, one user with a dual-core Athlon about 75 days to break RSA-512). No, you can’t hide secrets from the future.
Back when I was a young’un, we didn’t have to get around signing keys to run Z80 assembly, just needed to build a serial port interface and a copy of ZShell…
(Also via Make)
-
Touchable Holography
“Touchable Holography”, a hardware demo by researchers from the University of Tokyo at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference. This mostly builds on the work they presented last year involving their “Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display” (PDF), a device that shoots out directional ultrasound to simulate haptic pressure, like the impact rain has when it hits your skin. I don’t think this current display counts as holography exactly (the image is made with a refracting mirror, just like Sega’s 1991 arcade game Time Traveler!), but being able to reinforce the illusion with the sensation of touch is a cool idea. Hopefully they can expand it to use more than one of their ultrasound boards so they can simulate a feeling that’s more than one-dimensional. Also good to see that researchers are using the inexpensive, off-the-shelf Wiimotes for projects like this.
(Via Make)
-
The Virgin Spring: Like Leaves in a Storm
“You see how the smoke trembles up in the roof holes? As if whimpering and afraid? Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm because of what they know, and what they don’t know.” — from Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring
-
Death Has Long Been a Savvy Financial Move in the
Death has long been a savvy financial move in the visual arts: it guarantees that the supply of new works has come to an end, conferring scarcity value upon the existing oeuvre. For an artist it is better to die old, however. Death can reduce the value of young artists by taking them from the market before immortality is assured. From “Of Death and Profit”, New York Times Editorial Notebook, August 19, 2009.
-
The Women of Leisure Suit Larry
From The Women of Leisure Suit Larry. I don’t think I could sum it up any better than the post’s author: “there is a seriously ugly and amazing coffee table art book dying to be made out of this”. Hopefully such a coffee table book would include a portion dedicated to the even-more-awkward non-Sierra attempts at smut like Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender.
(Via Offworld)
-
Rhonda 3D Drawing / Sketching App
(video no longer available)
Rhonda. It’s a nifty 3D drawing/sketching app that’s been making the rounds for a few years, and now the video of its creator sketching with it has finally been posted on the web. Even better: it’s been ported to openFrameworks and is being actively maintained on a number of platforms.
-
The So Called Mother of All Demos the
The so-called “Mother of All Demos”, the technology presentation given by Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, which introduced to the world a number of useful developments: hypertext, the computer mouse, timesharing, email, video conferencing… And this was a bit over forty years ago, just before the ARPANET went online. Pretty amazing times.
The videos are available in more digestible chunks over on Stanford’s MouseSite.