Loosely Assembled

Leon Botha talks about identity, vibrations, and formlessness.

I came across this guy researching Die Antwoord

This video actually has very little to do with geography, but I do find it interesting that there are specific places, micro regions, where longevity is dramatically higher than the global average. In this TED Talk, National Geographic writer Dan Buettner discusses some interesting common denominators of these long lived, healthy and happy clusters of humans.

There isn’t actually anything very surprising in terms of specific details, but where I see the value of these findings being transformative is in various scenarios such as urban planning, architecture, community development, families, tradition making, suburbia 2.0, retirement, economic development, health care reform, and more.

China is building handfuls of cities from scratch, I wonder how many, if any, of these common denominators have a chance at being intentionally incorporated. When new cities are being designed, is there a “creative brief”?

(via open culture blog)

The most ambitious and engaged graffiti so far. It almost needs a new term coined just to differentiate it from everything else.

(Via @lucatoledo .)

Jim Stogdill writes very well about a compelling theme in his article entitled Skinner Box? There’s an App for That. I would have to sum it up as being about the nature of distraction in today’s networked world, and our role in its continuation.

There are a few tantalizing snippets that I just have to share hoping to lure you into reading the whole thing, if you can focus long enough.

• A self licking ice cream cone of the mind
• We’re pre-implant so I plug into the Skinner Borg with fingers and eyes
• The very technology that makes our collective integration possible also distracts us from advancing it

(Via @timoreilly.)

This cool video of Jeff Williams cruising around the space station brings up the obvious but perhaps underappreciated fact that in space, you don’t really need floors.

(Via
YouTube
- In This Orbital Outpost…We Are the Experiment
.)

(Via Bike Portland.)

‘Tis hard to say which is a more compelling, or more primary, interpretation of the notion of “Robots Mimicking Humans Mimicking Robots”, the reversible Palingram or the infinitely extended Möbius loop.

They both tell a different story about our fascination with, and relationship to, simulated humanity, machine intelligence, creator and creation. As a proposed next step, I’d personally like to see another robot manning the remote controls of this robot, perhaps creating some kind of command based feedback loop, susceptible to minute changes, enabling a kind of machine evolution of culture.

Enjoy

How have people organized information over the centuries, and millennia? Are we predisposed toward more ‘linear’ or more ‘digital’ forms? How long have we been trying to cope with the problem of information overload? Are hierarchical trees a fundamental paradigm rooted in our own reproduction? How many times has the internet already been invented? How can we reinvent it again? How can we get enough distance from it to see it clearly?

In the 1890s and 1900s Paul Otlet designed and built a network where organized data could be explored, via “links” and a “web”.

via information architect and writer Alex Wright during a particularly good SALT lecture.