For this assignment, we were to read two readings and comment on three passages from them. The readings were:
I want to make sure that the time I spend reading other people’s ideas is well spent. How do I make sure of this? Well, the one thing that I have, and that no one can take away from me, is AGENCY. If I do not act on new ideas that enter my mind, I deny my own humanity. The purpose of being human is to act, to make small changes in our collective history of the Earth.
What is ACTION? It can be something simple that you never show someone else. Draw a doodly picture, hum a made up song. But the most powerful actions are those that communicate ideas to other human beings, with the potential to change the way someone thinks.
It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.
Nobody’s perfect. It’s not that they don’t want to be, but everybody has flaws. Flaws that, if pointed out, can help to improve the desired areas and create a better experience for everybody. What better way to hear about the things that could be improved than from the people that you interact with. That is what Get Satisfaction is all about.
I’m not sure about you, but I spend much of my day in front of a computer. For most of the day I like to listen to music. When I can find new music, I get extra inspired. That is why I was so excited when I first heard about muxtape. Hopefully you aren’t just hearing about it for the first time right now and you have some experience with it. In short, it is the revival of the mixtape. As burning CD’s almost seems to be becoming a thing of the past, muxtape is a platform for people to be inspired by a limited selection of songs in a particular order.
Sometimes things are moving so fast that it is hard to keep up to all of the change. We are rapidly finding new ways to do things and not always considering the consequences. This animated short makes a great commentary on humans’ interaction with their environments and how they inflict change on the things around them. It was nominated for an academy award in 2003 and is a great 8 mins.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
[Video after the jump]
One of the biggest problems with intellectual thought is that it more often than not stays within intellectual circles. Alan Watts, has been attempting to change that by using the internet, producing podcasts, audio files, and videos. Yesterday, I came across a set of animations that were produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of South Park) that narrate Watts’ recordings. The video’s have a light a whimsical feel, and most certainly take the discussion out from the intellectual circles and into the hands of everyone else.
Video’s are after the jump.
As a science, creating robotics that are self aware is a field that is on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. Hod Lipson has a great TED talk in which he introduces two robotic experiments that touch on self awareness and evolution. One is a four legged machine that becomes self aware and teaches itself to walk. It is a fascinating and somewhat scary thought that we can create machines that have an understanding of a goal and not only have the means to reach the goal, but have the means to teach themselves to reach the goal.
Every day, the millions of people that are connected to the internet confess their feelings and emotions to an unknown audience. It provides a forum where you can feel as though you are talking to no one yet speak your emotions like you could be heard by everyone. In 2006, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar created We Feel Fine, an interactive exploration of peoples feelings through blog posts. The application filters the plethora of information that is posted on blogs and shows you real time posts that relate to a specified emotion. It then gives different methods to visually search and sort through that information.
Yesterday I came across twistori(by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs). Drawing on the same idea as We Feel Fine, twistori searches twitter posts and filters them by the emotion written in the post. The interface is pretty, and it is interesting to watch what people are saying for a while, but I find that the project lacks meaning. I maybe shouldn’t say that, I guess what I mean, is that I would like more meaning out of it.
The price of rice is rising, and this is bad news for near half of the world’s population who depend on it for their daily fill. Earlier this year, a wave of pests and disease swept across Vietnam’s rice fields, decimating crops and causing several rice producing countries to limit their export in order to secure their domestic stock. The world seems to teetering on the brink of a global food crisis, in times where population explosion demands more than ever from the agricultural industrial machine.
And an industry it is. In the 1960’s, the US-funded “Green Revolution” brought monocultural practices to Asia and Latin America, introducing farming practices that focus on a few, chemical fertilizer-reliant crops, optimized for yield, not nutritional value or suitability to local conditions. Monoculture production promised to do for food production what the Model T had done for auto production, and at first glance it worked, the soil boosted by oil-based fertilizer.
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