AlgoMantra, b. 2005

entomoragas==insecta++?

2009-01-19T01:02:00.000-08:00

Genre: insekta

Album: PinkNoiz

Artist: dj fadereu

05: culicidan orgy (5.2 MB mp3): a composition for (and apparently by) a glass jar full of mosquitoes harmonizing, before they proceed to do other things.
Listen:

06: astronomer cicada(1.7MB mp3): lonely astronomer braves a storm while doing spherical trigonometry.
Listen:

Picture: Unknown Source

insekta: post-tribal trance music

2009-01-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

Tracks 03 and 04 of the PinkNoiz project are now ready for download.

These are dedicated to that little cockroach who once danced on my teacup in the tiny hotel room, because only he realized that my atonal harmonica shrieks were actually the compositions of the future Mozart of insekta, a wholly new musical genre that aims at, as it's intended audience - only insects.

Perhaps that is what we have become underneath the veneer of human faces.

03: Stigmergence-II (mirror mix) : A single morchang recording looking at it's own reflection in the mirror of time can sound like a prayer to the dragonfly who recently paid me a warm visit.

04: Cockroach Mutiny: A superorganism revolts against it's human oppressors.

Picture: "The Insect God" by Edwin Young.

[LINK TO ARCHIVE PLAYER]: The embed is not working for some reason.

PinkNoiz, track02: "Amy & the Cephalopod's Lemma"

2008-12-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

Here is the second track of my ongoing production of the PinkNoiz album - "Amy & the Cephalopod's Lemma". The song is inspired by the mystery surrounding the "bloop", an undersea sound recorded in 1997 by a hydrophone array.

This song is dedicated to my friend Amy Schexnayder, who is very fond of numbers and mathematics as I am. I wondered how a conversation between a giant space-faring cephalopod and Amy would unfold, considering that cephalopod has way more tentacular digits to count with. The result is this track. Merry Christmas, Amy!

I'm not going to reveal the instruments or transforms I used to create this one.

The image is a self-portrait by my other-brother Matti Pohjonen.

[Download (9.7MB mp3)] or visit the Archive.org page to embed the song in your blog like this:

Pink Noiz, track01: "Stigmergence"

2008-12-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

"Stigmergence", the first single release from the accidental music album Pink Noiz by DJ Fadereu.

Notes: I played the morchang (Rajasthani jaw harp) and algoza (twin flutes) separately, before mixing them by channeling the randomness inherent within nature and a useful tool for audio mixing called Sox, on my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

3.2 MB MP3 [Download]

You may embed the song player used above in your blog post by using the code given here.

The Mathematics of 'Circle Limit III'

2008-11-17T02:53:00.000-08:00

M.C.Escher's series Circle Limit I-IV series was inspired by his friendship with the great geometer H.M.S. Coxeter, and Escher's Wikipedia biography mentions this explicitly:

Around 1956, Escher explored the concept of representing infinity on a two-dimensional plane. Discussions with Canadian mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter inspired Escher's interest in hyperbolic tessellations, which are regular tilings of the hyperbolic plane. Escher's works Circle Limit I–IV demonstrate this concept. In 1995, Coxeter verified that Escher had achieved mathematical perfection in his etchings in a published paper. Coxeter wrote, "Escher got it absolutely right to the millimeter."

The paper in question by Coxeter is here, and demonstrates that Escher was a research mathematician in his own right:

Abstract. In M. C. Escher’s circular woodcuts, replicas of a fish (or cross, or angel, or devil), diminishing in size as they recede from the centre, fit together so as to fill and cover a disc. Circle Limits I, II, and IV are based on Poincare's circular model of the hyperbolic plane, whose lines appear as arcs of circles orthogonal to the circular boundary (representing the points at infinity). Suit-able sets of such arcs decompose the disc into a theoretically infinite number of similar “triangles,” representing congruent triangles filling the hyperbolic plane. Escher replaced these triangles by recognizable shapes. Circle Limit III is likewise based on circular arcs, but in this case, instead of being orthogonal to the boundary circle, they meet it at equal angles of almost precisely 80◦.(Instead of a straight line of the hyperbolic plane, each arc represents one of the two branches of an “equidistant curve.”) Consequently, his construction required an even more impressive display of his intuitive feeling for geometric perfection. The present article analyzes the structure, using the elements of trigonometry and the arithmetic of the biquadratic field, subjects of which he steadfastly claimed to be entirely ignorant.

Here's a paper by Douglas Dunham(pdf) that generalizes the fishy model a little further.

Ragas for ETLFs: Music for Aliens

2008-11-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

Music composed for extra-terrestrial life-forms is certainly much harder to come by than music composed BY certain earth-dwelling aliens themselves.

Feel no shame, fellow pirates, as you download this free music CD from the rock stars of the internet. The tracks were apparently arranged on this album by Carl Sagan, and feature an astonishing variety:

102 Greeting From The Secretary General Of The UN
103 Greetings In 55 Languages
104 UN Greetings & Whale Greetings
105 The Sounds Of Earth
106 J. S. Bach -- Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 In F, First Movement
107 Java, court gamelan -- Kinds Of Flowers
108 Senegal, percussion -- Tchenhoukoumen
109 Zaire -- Pygmy Girls' Initiation Song
110 Australian Aborigine songs -- Morning Star And Devil Bird
111 Mexico -- El Cascabel (performed by Lorenzo Barcelata)
112 Chuck Berry -- Johnny B. Goode
113 Papua New Guinea -- Men's House Song
114 Japan, shakuhachi -- Cranes In Their Nest (performed by Coro Yamaguchi)
115 J. S. Bach -- Gavotte En Rondeaux, from the Partitia No. 3 In E Minor For Violin
116 Mozart -- The Magic Flute_ Queen Of The Night Aria, No. 14
201 Georgia, chorus -- Tchakrulo
202 Peru -- Panpipes And Drum Song
203 Louis Armstrong & His Hot Seven -- Melancholy Blues
204 Azerbaijan Bagpipes -- Ugam
205 Stravinsky -- Rite Of Spring, Sacrificial Dance
206 J. S. Bach -- The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude And Fugue In C, No. 1
207 Beethoven -- Symphony No. 5 In C Minor, First Movement
208 Bulgaria -- Izlel Je Delyo Hagdutin (sung by Valya Balkanska)
209 United States -- Navajo Night Chant
210 Holborne -- Fairie Round, from Paueans, Gaillards, Almains, And Other Short Aeirs
211 Solomon Islands -- Melanesian Panpipes
212 Peru -- Wedding Song
213 China, Ch'in -- Flowing Streams (performed by Kuan P'ing-hu)
214 India, Raga -- Jaat Kahan Ho (sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar)
215 Blind Willie Johnson -- Dark Was The Night
216 Beethoven -- String Quartet No. 13 In B Flat, Opus 130, Cavatina

The Sunya Machina - Part III

2008-11-07T18:18:00.000-08:00

The central theme in this series of notes (previously:Part I & Part II) is that the beginning of the number line (0,1,2,3) is a machine. It is shown as a generator that spits out the rest of the numbers until infinity. I have used the metaphor of cellular automatons and finite state machines, from my limited knowledge. As I learn more everyday, I will try and describe the developments here.

The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic states very simply that:

Every integer n ≥ 2 either is a prime or can be expressed as a product of primes. The factorization into primes is unique except for the order of the factors.
- from Elementary Number Theory with Applications 2e, Thomas Koshy

Such a factorization of any number is called the 'canonical decomposition' of the number, for instance 2520 = 2^3 x 3^2 x 5 x 7 where (2,3,5,7) are primes that make up 2520's internal structure. So perhaps large integers are not unlike organic molecules, made up of simpler components arranged in unique compositions, which gives them their particular properties. Such as, 2520 has a trailing zero because two of it's prime factors are 2 and 5 (2x5=10). The very existence of composite numbers appears to be just a classification tool, since prime numbers are the bricks that make up ALL numbers, big and small. How are molecules held together? By nuclear forces.

So shouldn't there be a bridge that links number theory to particle physics?

In this regard, eminent Japanese scientist Akio Sugamoto (he has co-written several papers with Nobel Laureate Makoto Kobayashi) submitted a paper on 24 Oct, 2008 titled "Factorization of number into prime numbers viewed as decay of particle into elementary particles conserving energy":

In number theory, how a number factorizes into prime numbers is a key issue, while in particle physics how a particle decays into elementary particles is also a key issue. These two key issues are intimately related, if we identify the energy E(n) of a particle labeled by a positive integer n = 1, 2, 3, . . . is proportional to ln(n). Then, factorization of a number into prime numbers can be viewed as the energy conservation law.

While I'm slowly becoming conversant in number theory, the mathematics Sugamoto-san uses in the paper is beyond me at this stage, and I'll leave it to better mathematics geeks. However, it does re-assert my idea that the generation of the number line is connected to physical systems and the mathematical models we have created to understand them.

The Dreaming Sea - Part III: "The Cellaphopod & the Mobtar"

2008-11-02T19:40:00.000-08:00

The Hindu idea of avatar is connected with collective action, and has become emblematic of the way people are cooperating across borders. An avatar is perhaps not a single person, but a configuration of people, a mob acting together in unison, perhaps towards a common goal. Lets call it a Mob-tar.

At this moment millions of people are hooked onto the Internet, gazing into their liquid crystal displays; people at bus stops, in the trains, peering into their fluid mobile phone gooey (GUI) menus. The global telecommunication system is not a sea, but it feels like one because of this - the digital screen is a porthole; beyond the porthole we can see liquid, and some kind of lucid dream unfolding. It's a sea that is almost like a cephalopod with millions of pods (iPods are Steve Jobs' tentacles, people). It's a cell-a-phopod out there!

Cephalopods communicate with their environment in a very different manner than human beings. They have the ability to morph into various shapes and colours, they have the ability to physically simulate something else - like a rock or entirely different creature. There's a brilliant column by Jaron Lanier called "What cephalopods can teach us about language", in which he describes something called 'postsymbolic communication':

Suppose we had the ability to morph at will: What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to "say" new things to one another?For instance, instead of saying, "I'm hungry; let's go crab hunting," you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt. I call this postsymbolic communication. Some people think that the ability to morph would just give you a new dictionary mapping to the same old set of ideas, with avatars in place of words, while others, including me, think there would be fundamental differences.

While Lanier is a visionary in his own right, this gem of an idea above would be better explored outside the context of 'virtual reality' and avatars in arenas like Second Life. Instead, lets us imagine the descent of mob-tars in the context of locative media and satellite imagery.

The fact that now we can see human configurations on such a large scale from a bird's viewpoint, or from the Moon even, begins to convert the Earth itself into a cephalopod, watching itself via digital media. It's a feedback loop that allows us to re-configure ourselves as a mobtar. The new linguistic context here is collective expression, millions of people arranging themselves as human pixels arranged on a screen. If executed as it was in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony, it appears as an expression of totalistic governance, and perfect order. But when it is the people themselves who self-organize this shared meaning, it becomes an example of emergence, an example of mobtaric behaviour.

The cellphone is the new astrolabe, but instead of telling a single user where he is, it can be used to tell all users (the mobtar) where everybody is located. The mobtar can see how it's doing by watching it's own satellite imagery on the cellphone screens. The mobtar can morph! This heralds the arrival of a new language of mobtars, as language zooms out from the scale of your desk, to that of the entire planet.

Of course, the question is not whatthe mobtar is going to say, but what the mobtar is going to do to be able to say it.

The Dreaming Sea- Part II

2008-11-01T22:20:00.000-07:00

One of the great spectacles of the modern world is it's simultaneity, or the way certain events seem to happen in a synchronized manner. The great invention of terrorism today is 'serial bombings', where a number of small bombs go off in multiple locations - almost together, as if a conductor were performing a symphony, like an orchestra. It is not entirely accidental that serialism has a rich history in Western classical music.

Simultaneity was difficult to observe for the ancients, because there was no system of communication that could move information faster than a human being, or perhaps a pigeon. If mathematicians in Ancient Greece and the Indus Valley's Vedic civilisation discovered a prime factorization algorithm simultaneously, the fact of this independent discovery would not be known until today. The ancients had no way of observing patterns on a global scale, but we do - and the Economic Crisis of 2008 is one such event.

We are not surprised by the fact that financial markets are falling, as it were, but by the fact that the same thing is happening, at the same time, all over the planet. Also, as observers of these phenomenon through our media technologies, we as a specie are instrumental in generating these events of a global nature. We provide the feedback loop for these events, and generate more events which are simultaneous, distributed and everywhere. This is the true coming of the smart mob - the smart planet.

There is a new problem that we have that the ancients did not have. Their problem was too little information from remote lands, our problem is too much information from remote and near lands. We are forced to ignore certain events just so that we can remain sane, to the extent that, we start believing that those events DID NOT OCCUR AT ALL. There were 64 organized bomb explosions in 6 states of India over the last 6 months, but Indian media are far more interested in the fall of Wall Street, and the U.S. Presidential election. The Indian media wants to make sure that no one forgets the fall of Wall Street. This is important and necessary for the human psyche, to maintain a continuity in it's own narrative (the serialism of the narrative?), and pretend as if certain things did not happen at all. We even choose hidden meanings from real events, and reconstruct those events in our head. We use reality (remixed) to manufacture dreams, and inject them back into the socium. A global event assumes a more stronger reality than something that's happening down the street.

Some call it a meltdown, a crisis or crash....but those who float on a raft in the dreaming sea, they know....they've seen it coming before. It's called a tsunami.

The Dreaming Sea - Part I

2008-10-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream about the French composer Erik Satie.

Only now that I downloaded some of his music, and am listening to it entranced, that the words I needed to write this note are beginning to emerge from my fingers dancing to Gnossienne N3. The note would help clarify my thoughts about how data travels through nature, and re-emerges as forces and events of global scope, such as the financial crash that everyone is talking about.

Awake, we are struck by the magnifique spectacle of our own being, the Narcissus hypnotised by his own mirror-image, but it is only when we are asleep, that we enter the Reticulum, the memetic screaming chaos of every little stimuli that impinges on the subconscious, a churning howl of thoughts and echoes, we log into the dreaming sea, we dip a tentacle into the global mind.

Before the dawn of the internet, there were other entities (and still are) that had the capability to connect consciousness on a planetary scale, that were the internet of the pre-industrial, pre-telegraphic, pre-electric age. I speak of routers that stand before our very eyes, omnipresent and accessible yet remote, serving the same image to the wretched mass of humanity thrown across the globe like pollen in the wind. These astrosocial nodes - the Sun and the Moon, the ghostly constellations - provide the common ground that geographically separated populations use to accumulate their knowledge about the world, a layer of knowledge that is both timeless and urgent.

Of course, it is very wise to say that the financial crash was coming after it has already begun. Any rational idiot can do that. But for many of us, the financial crisis of 2008 was the culmination of a yet inarticulable (or not yet confessed) intuition, anticipation, premonition - the dream becoming manifest, the nightmare all too real.

For some of us, it is a release of blocked up streaming data that cannot be released from the dreamworld into the socium upon its arrival at the spout, because the socium has rules of conduct and discourse. In the dreamworld, on the other hand, memories, fears, prophecies and thoughts run amock with the nuclear force of imagination, like a million souls of the departed stuck in some black hole centrifuge. The cryptological protocol that protects the Reticulum is strangely distributed, such as a certain piece of music that can take you back, awake, back into the spaces where you heard it first, puncturing a worm-like hole into the heart of social protocol and time. Like a pin-hole camera takes you to a world beyond the aperture, inverted and fuzzy.

When awake, we are perhaps propelled by the unseen but active force of this memetic centrifuge, churning like a gyroscope within our being, leading us over the daily algorithms, and towards new things. It is the centrifugal force of this dreaming sea, that launches us into new spaces and dynamics, makes us interact with new physical agents, and causes new events in the world.

The rolling of every stone, the carrying of every Neanderthal manuport, and the crashing of every clock gone awry - is a direct result of these vectors that rise from the fuming, dreaming sea.

{Words <> Weather}

2008-10-11T19:37:00.000-07:00

Some curious posts have been cropping up regarding how automated computer trading had a major role to play in the ongoing economic catastrophe. I first learnt of it from Paul's excellent post.Today, on Wired - they've explored the connections and comparisons between financial forecast models and climate forecast models. This one comment was hilarious:

....The issue is that economic models aren't based on any underlying physically observed facts. They're based on people's feelings," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We're not having a climate crisis because there's a lack of confidence in water vapor."

Further down in the article they quote Emanuel Derman, "a physicist turned financial-engineer", who says something which I found questionable to say the least:

When you put out a weather forecast, the weather doesn't read your forecast and get affected by it.

I think Mr. Derman could have qualified that further.

Words and the weather are interconnected in a very obvious feedback loop, like all things in nature. When you write something, you are physically altering the future, you are physically interacting with the reality around the printed page, around your own body, written words also have a chemical and physical reality estranged from their semantic content; spoken words interact thermodynamically with the atmosphere around us.

The weather may not 'understand' your forecast, but that does not mean it is not affected by it.

New Stonehenge Theory

2008-10-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

As one reads the global news, the world seems to be getting so close to the alien world created in Anathem by Neal Stephenson. For instance, the day is not far when Englishmen will flock to Stonehenge and start worshipping the obelisks. A new theory claims:

Archaeologists Timothy Darvill of Bournemouth University and Geoff Wainwright, President of the Society of Antiquaries, claimed to have found evidence that Stonehenge was once a center of healing. In an excavation conducted at the site, a large number of human remains were found that display signs of physical injury or disease. Study of the teeth from the skeletons indicates that about half of them were from outside the area.

A large number of bluestone or spotted Preseli dolerite chips found during the excavation led the researchers to conclude the stones were venerated for their healing properties. It is believed that about 80 of such bluestone blocks were transported from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales to the Salisbury plains. The inner circle of bluestones are the earliest stone structures found in this site. Later bluestones were encircled by the imposing sandstone monoliths of sarsen stones. "It could be that people were flaking off pieces of bluestone, in order to create little bits to take away... as lucky amulets," said Professor Darvill.

Smart Glow: Light As Your Data Carrier

2008-10-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

This is a very poetic 21st century idea, and it's not at all difficult to implement even for a DIY hobbyist. What will be expensive is speed here. If you want really fast bandwidth, your light sensors will have to be those with microsecond, even less, response time to optical stimulus, and the everyday LDR will not suffice. Especially for slow homebrew projects, though, it would be so hypnotic to simply watch it in action. At fast transfer rates, you'd never notice what's going on.

In any case, a completely original idea:

"Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires," said BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little. "This could be done with an LED-based communications network that also provides light - all over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference. Ultimately, the system is expected to be applicable from existing illumination devices, like swapping light bulbs for LEDs."

Boston University researches will focus on developing computer networking applications, notably the solid state optical technology that will form the network's backbone.

"This is a unique opportunity to create a transcendent technology that not only enables energy efficient lighting, but also creates the next generation of secure wireless communications," Little added. "As we switch from incandescent and compact florescent lighting to LEDs in the coming years, we can simultaneously build a faster and more secure communications infrastructure at a modest cost along with new and unexpected applications."

"The Internet of Things" by Rob van Kranenburg

2008-10-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

This is probably the most important techno-political essay I have read all year (snip):

.....a Skype phone. It belongs to Alexei Blinov. Alexei is one of the lead developers of Hive Networks. He is very angry with this object and the likes of it. What we have here,he says, is an object, a piece of hardware that in itself holds quite some computational power and potentialities, yet has been deliberately crippled and handicapped to perform only one trick, search for wireless, connect and Skype. Are we going back to the days where phones were directly connected together in pairs and users had separate “telephones wired to the various places he might wish to reach?”.
Apart from issues of durability, sustainability and climate change that the manufacturing and dissolving of these anomalies of devices raise, far more important is the nefarious relationship it entails and scripts between people and things. The Skype phone very literally is ‘der eigene Frage als Gestalt’, as such it is a false thing, an object that deliberately obscures its potentialities instead of highlighting them or show enabling qualities. It is this thinking through waste that fuels the anger of open hardware developers and has inspired descentro.org and MetaReciclagem to rethink the connectivity chain in terms of functionalities, not devices.44 Otherwise we will be flooded by devices that embody a functionality (voice communication) that is a voice over IP (Voip) application in a device (personal computer/laptop) that uses telephone cables or wireless connectivity to communicate in the first place.

VIA : Bruce Sterling's blog

Someone Please Tell William Gibson...

2008-10-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

....that our work Cellphabet is pretty much what he's describing while talking about his novel Spook Country:

Jill: Is there anyone practicing the kind of locative art you describe in the book?

Gibson: I made that particular kind of locative art up, but in making it up, I think it can be done. Something that I had to change at the very last minute, before the actual book was going to press... Someone read the bound galleys and said, "This locative art is very cool, but you know, you wouldn't be able to do it indoors. There's no GPS indoors; it can't go through walls." I said, "Uh-oh."

Happily, my informant explained that if you wanted to do it inside, you would have to triangulate on the three nearest cell phone towers. It would be possible to build a program that would do this; you'd actually be able to bring your locative art into the gallery. In the final version of the text, that actually helps considerably to explain why all those artists are so dependent on Bobby Chombo for something that they really should be able to do themselves — he can get your art into the gallery. Otherwise, you'd have to have it in the flowerbed outside the Marmont.

But other than that, I think that what I described is kind of doable. You could buy all the parts on eBay and put it together. But I've never seen anything like that described in real life. If you google "locative art," you get a gazillion hits, and a lot of it is very, very conceptual. It's sort of postmodern mapping. I have to say, it's kind of over my head, most of the locative art stuff. I just didn't get it. [Laughs] My idea of locative art would be the locative art that people in Juxtapoz magazine would do. It would be lowbrow: deliberately, self-consciously lowbrow with a capital L.

Reversible Destiny Lofts & Gilgamesh for Apes

2008-09-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

This has to be the most revolutionary idea in urban housing yet - the home as an arena of adventure sports. The next logical step would be to move to the jungle and make friends with chimpanzees, leopards and crocodiles, which I think is the sensible thing to do.

In the words of Pink Tentacle:

To NY-based architect-poets and “reversible destiny” philosophers Arakawa & Gins, comfort deserves only a limited role in the home. In their vision, a home that keeps its inhabitants young and healthy should provide perpetual challenges. A tentative relationship with your environment, they argue, is key to “reversing the downhill course of human life.”

Designed to stimulate the senses and force inhabitants to use balance, physical strength and imagination, the lofts feature uneven floors, oddly positioned power switches and outlets, walls and surfaces painted a dizzying array of colors, a tiny exit to the balcony, a transparent shower room, irregularly shaped curtainless windows, and more.

GILGAMESH FOR APES

Human beings have to realign their relationship to nature in a very profound way if we're to survive. My favorite living philosopher, Wilfried Hou Je Bek has published yet another shattering pamphlet to outline the possibilities open to us in this new century - PrimatePoetics is here! As if the CrystalPunk Manifesto wasn't enough proof of his genius and audacity (audacity for you, babes, since he makes perfect sense to me), PrimatePoetics redefines what it means to be civilized, and the sequel pamphlet to it is called Gilgamesh for Apes, which is exactly what it is.

Normally, civilisation is thought of as a plane, a surface, a vista. However, it really is a feeling you get in rare bubbles of the psychogeographic landscape, the smile of a stranger, for instance. The question is - does the smile mean the same to her as it means to you? When you stop being strangers, you discover to your horror that, the stranger's smile was an indication of potent hostility! After reading Hou Je Bek's claim I am convinced that we will never be civilized until Great Apes stand amongst us, and walk with us in office suits, with neckties, holding their laptops, demanding new and improved coffee machines.

Not only will famous philosophers of the future derive their grooming style from chimpanzees (Slavoj Zizek is way ahead on this curve), they WILL BE.....highly venerable chimpanzees.

The Sunya Machina - Part II

2008-09-22T00:39:00.000-07:00

One does not need more than the number 3 to represent and manipulate the entirety of mathematics. One possible way that the existence of the numbers (0.1.2.3) can be justified is described in our introductory note. Another way is to hold up three fingers of any hand, and now ask yourself - "How many things do I see?" The correct answer is not 3, it is 4 - three fingers and the hand.

Even zero needs at least one symbol to be represented as zero, and the numbers (0,1,2,3) are four in number. When we examine the number 4, however, one realizes that from this point onwards, the river of numbers is a mere continuation of the idea that is self-contained in (0,1,2,3). From 4 begins a mechanical repetition unto infinity, and especially tiresome is the arbitrary selection of ten digits as the looping point of this decimal alphabet. As the Ulam Spiral shows, perhaps the distribution of prime numbers is not as mysterious as it seems. Lets us stop at 3 then, and observe the universe that is arranged before us. There is a tail that emerges from Om's behind. Om is the shape of Ganesha, lord of numbers - Om is therefore a heuristic diagram of the Sunya machina.

Instead of mundane increments, we now have patterns that emerge from the pure duality of difference, repetition and conceptual enclosure. To understand why primes emerge and and where they are prone to occur, it now becomes necessary to understand division and multiplication within the philosophical framework of the Sunya Machina. Since I am no more than a thumb-twiddling vedic crystalpunk, you might want to know what all this means from the mouth of a real mathematician like Dorian Goldfeld, who writes in an essay called Beyond the Last Theorem:

But there is another way of looking at a circle. Consider a clock, an antique twenty-four-hour model with a single hand that swings around the dial once a day, pointing first to “high midnight,” then to 1:00 A.M. and so on. The clock has no idea what day it is; as far as it is concerned,3:05 P.M. today is indistinguishable from 3:05 P.M. tomorrow, or next week or on any date you might imagine. In mathematical terms each point on the circular dial sets up an equivalence class comprising all the moments in the past, present and future at which the hand points precisely to that point. Schematically, the clock dial takes a time line marked with equally spaced integers (the midnight points),twists it into a shape like a Slinky, and then collapses the Slinky into a circle.

What the circle does for the one-dimensional flow of time, it can also do for the infinite one-dimensional space of the real number line. In that case the circle becomes a set of equivalence classes of pure numbers. Formally, for any number x, the equivalence class is defined to be the set of all numbers of the form x + nc, in which c is the circumference of the circle and n is any positive or negative whole number.

At first glance the two descriptions of a circle—one in terms of algebra, the other in terms of equivalence classes—could hardly be more different. But they are indeed equivalent, linked by the Pythagorean theorem and some elementary geometry.

The Yakuza Papers(1973)

2008-09-21T20:45:00.001-07:00

The torrent download of Yakuza Papers is finally complete and I've been enjoying it thoroughly. They say this series of films is the Godfather of Japanese cinema. Brutal, fast and intricate.....it's about the post-war Japanese underworld:

During the post-War rationing, the yakuza controlled the black market much in line with traditional tekiya operations. At the same time, they also moved into controlling major sea ports as well as the entertainment industry. The biggest yakuza umbrella group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, emerged in the Kansai region, which had a large entertainment industry in the city of Osaka as well as a major sea port in Kobe. American occupation forces fought against them in vain and conceded defeat in 1950. Yakuza also adapted to a more western style, including wearing clothing reminiscent of US gangsters, and began to use firearms. At this point, tekiya and bakuto no longer confined themselves to their traditional activities and expanded into any venture they found profitable. At the same time gurentai began to adopt traditional roles of tekiya and bakuto. They also began to feud among themselves, jockeying for power and prestige.

In the 1960s, Yoshio Kodama, an ex-nationalist, began to negotiate treaties with various groups, first with the Yamaguchi-gumi of Kazuo Taoka and Tōsei-kai of Hisayuki Machii and eventually with the Inagawa-kai. Fights between individual gangs, however, are ongoing.

However, the history of the yakuza is not as simple as Bombay's "bhai" (the don/big brother) and the American spaghetti mobsters. It is almost as old as Japan itself:

Despite their notoriety in modern Japan, the precise origin of the Yakuza is still somewhat the subject of debate. The first historical interpretation of their derivation is from the hatamoto-yakko or Kabuki-mono of the 17th century Genroku Era,[2] who were derivative classes of the low-rank hatamoto, which resembled a quarter of the shogun.[3]

Other theories, suggested by the Yakuza members themselves claim their origins are from the machi-yokko, who policed villages by protecting them from the hatamoto-yakko that tried to steal from them, despite their being outmatched by the Hatamoto-yakko in training and strength. Despite their shortcomings, the machi-yakko were regarded as folk heroes similar to those in the stories of Robin Hood, with some groups being made the feature of plays and dramas.[4][5] The derivation from the hatamoto-yakko or Kabuki-mono known for their adoption of strange hair styles and outrageous dress manner refers to a relevant era of the Genroku Period in which kabuki plays, and onnagata were prominent.

The Towers of Brahma

2008-09-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

...or, what you might know as Towers of Hanoi, a game as legendary as Tetris and Pong, has a nice myth behind it:

There is a legend about a Vietnamese or Indian temple which contains a large room with three time-worn posts in it surrounded by 64 golden disks. The priests of Brahma, acting out the command of an ancient prophecy, have been moving these disks, in accordance with the rules of the puzzle. The puzzle is therefore also known as the Tower of Brahma puzzle. According to the legend, when the last move of the puzzle is completed, the world will end. It is not clear whether Lucas invented this legend or was inspired by it. The Tower of Hanoi is a problem often used to teach beginning programming, in particular, as an example of a simple recursive algorithm.

If the legend were true, and if the priests were able to move disks at a rate of one per second, using the smallest number of moves, it would take them 2^64−1 seconds or roughly 600 billion years. There are many variations on this legend. For instance, in some tellings, the temple is a monastery and the priests are monks. The temple or monastery may be said to be in different parts of the world — including Hanoi, Vietnam, and may be associated with any religion. In some versions, other elements are introduced, such as the fact that the tower was created at the beginning of the world, or that the priests or monks may make only one move per day.

And Hanoimania is a website dedicated to the Hanoi and computers. There is even a Hanoi OS,"a bootable operating system for the x86 processor that solves the Hanoi puzzle as its primary task"..... apart from other obsessive oddities. It's a total WTF.

Xu Bing: A Book From The Sky

2008-09-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

Yoda v/s Facebook: Yoda wins!

2008-09-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

Heh, I knew this was coming, Facebook. You better mend your wayward ways. All your namez R B-long to US!!!

Snip from AltJapan:

In the wake of the dreaded Facebook Incident, which ended yesterday after they relented and allowed her to register, Hiroko Yoda writes about life as Yoda:

I'm a Japanese woman, and my last name really is Yoda. It's a common family name in Japan. "Yoda" the Jedi Master is actually pronounced with a long "o" in Japanese, which makes it different-sounding enough that the connection only becomes apparent when you write out my name in English letters instead of kanji characters. So even though I of course saw the films here in Japan, I never made a connection between the character Yoda and my own name.

But whenever I leave Japan, it's a different story. People think I changed my name because I'm a crazy Star Wars fan, or that I'm just kidding around. Even people who know I'm not making it up are always giving me Yoda trinkets and keychains and figures, so I had this little shrine to him going on for a while. Maybe because I'm female, or because I look foreign, people don't usually make a lot of comments directly to me. But Matt gets stuff all the time. Whenever he has to tell my name to an airline ticket agent or a hotel receptionist or something, it's totally common to get a response like "Ha-ha-ha! That's a good one, sir! Anyway, what's her real name?" Once he was even asked semi-seriously "Is her first name, then, 'Master'?" And then there was this latest incident with Facebook. I tried signing up like ten times, and it always rejected my name. Finally we figured out that a filter was blocking "Yoda" because it thought I was trying to register a fictional name! They finally let me sign up, but it took several days and a lot of emails.

Flexi by Techsouls

2008-09-05T00:17:00.000-07:00

Friend and fellow hacker Prayas just informed me about Flexi, a cheap Arduino clone made in India by a gang of urban tantrics who call themselves Techsouls:

Welcome to Techsouls. Techsouls is a free spirited movement in the field of Robotics and Physical Computing. We operate under two main divisions, Techsouls Education and Techsouls Research. Our Education division uses Robotics as a tool to incorporate a structured, hands-on and scientific education at schools and colleges. On the other hand, our Research and Development division is involved in cutting edge research in the field of Robotics and Physical Computing.

This makes me very happy. They can cut out the PR bullshit, but it's still a cool hack for under Rs.2000.

Hidden Behind The Leaves

2008-09-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

On my way to Japan in a few months, I have been going through samurai manuals of all manner and degree of bizarreness/wisdom. Here's a brilliant excerpt from Hagakure (Hidden Behind the Leaves) by Yamamoto Tsunetomo sensei, which clearly indicates that ancient ties bind Indian belief systems with the Japanese:

Recently, people who are called "clever" adorn themselves with superficial wisdom and only deceive others. For this reason they are inferior to dull-wilted folk. A dull- wilted person is direct. If one looks deeply into his heart with the above phrase, there will be no hidden places. It is a good examiner. One should be of the mind that, meeting this examiner, he will not be embarrassed.

The word gen means "illusion" or "apparition." In India, a man who uses conjury is called a genjutsushi ["a master of illusion technique"]. Everything in this world is but a marionette show. Thus we use the word gen.

To hate injustice and stand on righteousness is a difficult thing. Furthermore, to think that being righteous is the best one can do and to do one's utmost to be righteous will, on the contrary, brig many mistakes. The Way is in a higher place then righteousness. This is very difficult to discover, but it is the highest wisdom. When seen from this standpoint, things like righteousness are rather shallow. If one does not understand this on his own, it cannot be known. There is a method of getting to this Way, however, even if one cannot discover it by himself. This is found in consultation with others. Even a person who has not attained this Way sees others front the side. It is like the saying from the game of go: "He who sees from the side has eight eyes." The saying, "Thought by thought we see our own mistakes," also means that the highest Way is in discussion with others. Listening to the old stories and reading books are for the purpose of sloughing off one's own discrimination and attaching oneself to that of the ancients.

A certain swordsman in his declining years said the following:

In one's life. there are levels in the pursuit of study. In the lowest level, a person studies but nothing comes of it, and he feels that both he and others are unskillful. At this point he is worthless. In the middle level he is still useless but is aware of his own insufficiencies and can also see the insufficiencies of others. In a higher level he has pride concerning his own ability, rejoices in praise from others, and laments the lack of ability in his fellows. This man has worth. In the highest level a man has the look of knowing nothing.

[The details of the ukio-e pictured are here.]

The Sunya Machina - Part I

2008-05-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

The concept Sunya (zero) is a tantric machine. It sits at the root of arithmetic, a number that denotes paradox itself. Zero is the signature and symbol of something that does not exist and yet it could have or would have. Having zero mangoes means having no mangoes at all. And yet, despite the lack of mangoes, you do have something – a signifier of your lack.

In this way zero splits the continous flux of kala (time) into two channels – that which is, and that which isn't. It has now become customary to denote 'that which is' with the number '1' and that which isn't with '0'. Therefore, zero is a seed (and generator) – it necessitates the birth of 1. However, wherever there is difference (is/isn't), there must be a repetition. One is zero as seen from a Universe with one less dimension.

As soon as '1' takes birth, it usurps the not-being of '0' as a kind of 'being somewhere else' (in some other Universe) and sees it's own holographic reflection/repetition, giving rise to a duality instead of a union – the number 2.

Two is to be understood therefore as '1 more of that which we called 1 before' or 'both is and isn't are now here'. Even then, these three concepts above cannot by themselves describe all of existence – the superset of which they are merely subsets. That Superset, the Totality of Existence would consist of the following entities (and in brackets we have the symbols associated with each concept):

Totality of Existence (Kala) = That which isn't (0) + That which is (1) + That which is and isn't both(2) + The remaining cosmos (3).

The number 3 therefore denotes the final doubt of the Descriptor, the sign that even though he may have attempted to describe in exact terms universal phenomenon, there is something that will always be out of his grasp, because the Descriptor is a mere subset of that which is being described. Not only does the Sunya Machine obviate the next 3 terms, it generates all the numbers till infinity without the help of symbols like 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. How does it do that?

The number line of integers from 0,1,2,3....and onwards to infinity is a kind of cellular automaton. Euclid proved long ago in the fundamental theorem of arithmetic that every natural number greater than 1 can be written as a unique product of prime numbers. The original section of the number line (0,1,2,3) is a conceptual machine that 'generates' the rest of the numbers as an output. Merely two unique symbols (0 and 1) are sufficient to represent all the numbers in binary, and number systems with a base greater than 2 are justified by their practical circumstance.

Abhijit Bhattacharjee's “polar place value number system” is a system based on his conjecture (the Bhattacharjee Conjecture) that any kind of number, even fractional number – can be expressed as additions or subtractions of powers of three. He has provided an algorithm in Pascal to calculate these factors for any given number. If proven rigorously by a mathematician who knows the jargon that is valid in academia, this finding could stand as a more profound observation than Euclid's fundamental theorem. Euclid showed that all numbers can be produced by prime numbers, but Bhattacharjee is trying to show that all numbers can be produced by the numbers upto 3. This is a significant reduction/compression in the algorithmic complexity of the number system. Marvin Minsky has written in an email to Abhijit that more mathematicians should take note of his work. Meagre doubts that one might have will be clarified only by a careful study of his Pascal algorithm.

How to Grow a Spaceship - Part II

2008-05-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

[A previous article described an intended approach to 'grow spaceships' in a simulated set of artificial, monadological universes. Here, we continue that line of thought, although we should abandon using Processing as the coding platform for various reasons, and adopt something more powerful - like C.]

Suppose that your particular distribution of Linux was a planet like Earth, and it was crawling with little pieces of emergent code that wanted to escape the pull of its 'gravity'. In this case, 'gravity' would be the equivalent of the linguistic resistance the system posed as a whole for some random piece of code to make a TCP connection with another computer and replicate itself. Any piece of code that does succeed, could then be called a spaceship. By that definition, a spaceship is a |thought+entity| that escapes it's progenitor's desire to remain as a Unit, and by its very escape - converts that notion of Unity into a notion of Source. This is why a spaceship has been emblematic of progress in the second half of the twentieth century.

The remarkable thing about Thomas Kuhn's 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that it places the evolution of cosmic knowledge (a.k.a "the laws of physics") at the mercy of the same laws that govern the cosmos. This is fairly close to the intuitive notion of the anthropic principle in a sense. If the ideas above were to be framed in the form of a simple question, it would go like:

If the world is governed by the laws of physics, and the laws of physics to begin with, since that is the underlying foundation of all other scientific laws, then what governs the rate at which these laws (i.e, cosmic knowledge) will be revealed to us - the laws of physics themselves?

On the surface, this is a paradox - but it is not so. It places a greater question mark on the scientific method, which presents itself as a logical algorithm for the formulation of science, and an adequate, mechanical method of 'discovery'. On the contrary, the history of science is replete with accidents. Neither did the scientists choose the laws they were about to discover, nor did the laws have much cognition of the people they were going to pop in the heads of (did they?). Moreover, the ideas of invention, proof and discovery were so closely tied to linguistic heritage, that many ancient cultures' 'proofs' of what is considered modern knowledge may soon be considered acceptable.

The holographic principle is an aspect of modern thought that reflects these ancient beliefs. A crude explanation would be that: Let us say that the actual universe exists in a (N+1 ) dimensional dynamical form, but its image in N dimensions is a "surface" that contains all the information needed to describe the things going on in N+1. In terms of a black hole's entropy, a relation was established where the totality of entropy inside the black hole was proportional to the surface area of it's event horizon.

This relationship between surface and inside/outside is of fundamental importance to perhaps all the sciences, and the mother of all sciences - philosophy. For the surface is a distinction, and the act of marking the first distinction between an object and the world is an act of logik. It is logik that creates a cascade of distinctions, not distinctions that necessitate the need for logik.

And we return to the question posed in the beginning - what is the Shannon entropy of a linux box at any given point?

Graphite Music Sequencer

2008-05-24T01:12:00.000-07:00

I'm an idi0t. Yes, it's tr00.

I was playing with a similar concept in early Jan 2008, but apparently Caleb Coppock already made this absofrikking beautiful graphite sequencer on which you can compose symphonies with just a paper and pencil:

Graphite conducts electricity. Two wires brush against the surface of a paper disk as it spins. The wires are connected to a simple electronic tone generator. When a line of graphite is drawn across the disk, connecting the two wires, a tone is heard. The quality of the line effects the sound. For example, if the line is thick, allowing more current to pass over it, a lower tone is heard.

I'd also like to point out that the actual gramophone circuitry and hardware is simply being used as a rotor here, it has no role in the processing or amplification of the audio.

Microsoft memorabilia (1977)

2008-05-17T01:28:00.000-07:00

In the middle 1980s I joined an extra-curricular class to learn C, just down the street in Jaipur. Having come back to the city, I met up with my teacher Dr. P.D. Morarka again. He was happy with the success of Linux, and I found myself saying that, "Open systems survive, closed systems die. Linux is the future...".

Every time I make these sweeping prophecies, I often regret them very soon after. Given my recent experiences with Linux and the temporary solace offered by XP, I'd say this kid doesn't look that evil to me. I do think that Linux will be much better in two or three years than any OS ever made, but it might just get worse for now.

All that aside, this is the story of this fascinating video (from the man who shot it), aired when I was roughly an year old. I had no idea what countries were, let alone computers.

TV news report from KOB-TV in Spring, 1977. Includes maybe the first ever TV interview with Bill Gates.

When I was 22, I worked at a TV station in Albuquerque, processing news film and editing videotape. Occasionally, I'd do on-air stories. The first personal computer kit had been introduced by a local company, MITS, and Albuquerque was home to the first computer store. A small company called Micro-soft opened up shop to write software for these new machines, and I did a series of news stories about the news industry that began just up the street from me.

So, when I visited Micro-soft (it had a dash in the name at the time), I spoke to Bill Gates. We were both 22. His comments, and the other interviews, were prophetic about the future of software stores and illegal program copying at a time before most people even considered having a computer in their home.

Playing the Building - David Byrne

2008-05-15T00:50:00.000-07:00

I think this is an improved setup of David Byrne's classic installation piece - Playing the Building. As it suggests, he uses some nifty engineering tricks to convert an entire building into a giant musical instrument, playable via a deceptively simple organ.

Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

Chitra Bandham - geometric poems

2008-05-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

Geekery and crystalpunkism had reached its first peak in the vedic age, with Sanskrit poetry. Tesselating, combinatorially gossamer, and mathematically dense syllabic verse is not uncommon in the poetry of that age. However, it takes a special kind of talent to work on verse that can be interpreted AS geometry - chitra bandham - or verse that follows a geometric pattern, for instance the figure of the Lotus flower।

Go, vedicrystalpunks!!!

The Book of Five Rings

2008-05-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

This vedicrystalpunk (thanks, Paul) will soon begin learning Japanese from a native gentleman, and this post marks the realization that 1/f may be a Japanophile or otaku. Nintendo, you are to blame for injecting all this subliminal stuff into an innocent child's brain - but now the subject has discovered more sophisticated distractions, such as the Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, written circa 1645. Go ahead and read all the wonderful quotations extracted by the kind Wikipedian who wrote that detail, for example:

Timing is important in dancing and pipe or string music, for they are in rhythm only if timing is good. Timing and rhythm are also involved in the military arts, shooting bows and guns, and riding horses. In all skills and abilities there is timing.... There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. Similarly, there is timing in the Way of the merchant, in the rise and fall of capital. All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this. In strategy there are various timing considerations. From the outset you must know the applicable timing and the inapplicable timing, and from among the large and small things and the fast and slow timings find the relevant timing, first seeing the distance timing and the background timing. This is the main thing in strategy. It is especially important to know the background timing, otherwise your strategy will become uncertain.

There is going to be a whole lot more Japan to come, I suspect.

How to Grow a Spaceship - Part I

2008-04-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

I believe in a future where your spaceship is like your family car, parked in your garage. When something's broken, you should be able to fix it, and when it is stolen or destroyed you should be able to build a new one from scratch. Its literally your cow.

While the space elevator maybe a grand endeavour in its vision, I do not buy the argument that it is cost-efficient compared to manned spacecraft. Cost-efficient for who exactly? Not everybody works for NASA, and not everyone believes in Jack's beanstalk.

Much attention is being paid to the Japanese project aiming at releasing a number of paper-origami planes from the International Space Station. Newspapers have gushed, calling it -

....the longest ever flight by a paper plane: if one of the fleet should miraculously make it to earth, its journey will have been around 400km.

I don't see how this qualifies as flight, considering you are not going against gravity. At best, it would qualify as a rather expensive, gliding drop back to the earth.

Growing Spaceships in Processing

The first phase of our work this year involves simulated models of "artificial atmospheres". These atmospheres (or trajectories) will help us evolve stable, aerodynamic objects that may serve as unconventional designs for spacecrafts that may be used in traversing atmospheres present in the solar system, or beyond. We will be using Processing for this purpose, so that the simulator can be web-based and all you astronauts out there can play with it. Playing with it would mean aerodynamic modelling as a god-game, like making creatures in Spore.

Artificial atmospheres, or artificial physics, and environments can be modelled using the cellular automaton approach. The ideas therein are better expressed by the essay on computational monadology by Eric Steinhart. It's basically the monad-metaphysics of Leibniz remixed with cellular automatons.

I have no idea how much more efficiency can be achieved by using the traditional CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and 'physics engine' approach, but then, we want to try something that hasn't been explored at all - movement against gravity using very low Reynold's numbers (pdf). An excerpt that summaries my Bergsonesque approach to life:

.........what low Reynolds number means. Inertia plays no role whatsoever. If you are at very low Reynolds number, what you are doing at the moment is entirely determined by the forces that are exerted on you at that moment, and by nothing in the past.

It's a fantastic essay about a fascinating topic. Here we learn how organisms like Escherichia coli move in a fluid, under the influence of very "small forces".

So what we're going to do is define abstract physical dynamics, and aerodynamic, fluidic forces acting in a region, and then we will allow users to place material objects, shapes and mechanisms in the region to test whether that 'machine' is stable under the impact of those forces. There is an alternative to CFD, which is related to automata, a recently popular technique of modeling fluids called Lattice-Boltzmann. You can have a look at a very convincing Java animation on the mesoscopic scale. I also suspect that Fourier theory might have a decisive role in our design and operational philosophy. It is never too late to go back three centuries and wonder what someone would have done in a Victorian steampunk kind of way to achieve a similar objective.

Of course, an online animation will not have the computational muscle to simulate an actual atmosphere (even supercomputers don't). The only perfect simulation of the earth's atmosphere is the earth's atmosphere itself.

So we are going to try a novel, minimal approach. Many of these artificial atmospheres, which can be radically altered with a few variables, will probably not exist on Earth, or on nearby planets. Perhaps they exist only in some other parallel Universe. Conway's Game of Life is in fact entirely another Universe, in which "grow" its own gliders. The idea is simple - a model that might not work in an artificial universe, might work in this seemingly natural one, our own universe. The question still remains, how to grow a spaceship design out of this simulation that will actually work in "reality"? What kind of designs can we expect to see?

I have no clue whatsoever, but a few mornings ago when I went out for my morning run, I saw a cephalopod against the rising sun.

Gamelan (gaa-may-laan) music from Bali/Java

2008-03-27T19:43:00.000-07:00

Abxolutely faxinating muxik. Read more about it here.

Remuxed Super Mario Abstrakt Art

2008-02-16T19:00:00.002-08:00

So this circuit-bender chap who calls himself Cementimental has a very strange hobby.

He rewires the actual chip inside a NES (Nintendo's early 8-bit game) console and makes sounds/videos out of it. This on your right is Super Mario's world scrambled bit by bit, its physics 'remixed' and 'scratched' at a totally metaphysical level. It's so cruel its almost beautiful.

Now considering that I have access to NES consoles at Rs 250 ($6-7) apiece, I don't really mind frying a few chips with a 9v battery. Though it would be far more useful to hack a new optical-sensor equipped controller so that my thumbs don't hurt so much!!!

(((((Mario, the princess is in another castle)))))

microTetris: another glass-bead game from the future

2008-01-22T16:35:00.000-08:00

Just so you can appreciate what is going on in the video here, you have glass beads which are one million times smaller than a meter (micro-spheres) which are being manipulated using 'optical tweezers' to play a game of Tetris in a real physical field under a f-ing microscope! I pay homage to thee, powerful geek overlords!

To accomplish microTetris, we use the technique of optical trapping (explained elsewhere on our group's webpage) to hold the glass beads in place. In short, an optical trap is a laser beam which is focused to a very tiny spot (1 micrometer = about 1/1000th of a millimeter) by a strong lens, usually a microscope's objective lens. This focus appears to act as an attractor point, in which small particles like our 1-micrometer glass beads (but also cells or bacteria) can be sucked and from which they cannot escape. This tool, also more figuratively referred to as 'optical tweezers' is nowadays indispensable in biophysical research. It is being used to push cells together to monitor their elastic properties, or to stretch single molecules of DNA until the DNA helix unwinds or breaks, or to measure the forces of the 'motor' that propells bacteria through their surroundings. In fact, we could add a lot more things to this list without being complete.

In our Tetris case, a device called an acousto-optic deflector (AOD) was used to computer-steer the trapping laser light very swiftly across the 42 bead positions as seen in the video—pretty much like the way a monitor steers its electron beam across the pixels on the screen. This was done fast enough for a bead to stay at its location while the laser was scanning the other positions. (At the end of the video, you can observe what happens if we suddenly switch off the laser light: the beads are no longer confined to their traps and can diffuse away easily.)

[LINK]

Now how the hell am I going to make an AOD? Experiments begin soon at 'the lab' under an old microscope, a few laser pointers and .....well, microsound?

Morchang - 1

2008-01-15T00:12:00.000-08:00

DJ Fadereu with his wife.

Low Tech Hacking in 2008

2008-01-10T23:51:00.000-08:00

You can't know everything all at once, but you can know how to know anything when the opportunity arises. What good is an electronics expert who has never enjoyed Shakespeare? At AlgoMantra, the year 2007 was spent in making software that enabled human-computer interaction in innovative ways.

Towards the tail end of December I did a rather frustrating course on basic interfacing between circuits and computers, but I also realised that the answers I was looking for did not lie in knowing all the fundamentals of electronic engineering. I just wanted to hack cheap Chinese toys and make new stuff, but I think my instructors were trying to teach me the value of patience and perseverance. So if you're in a similar situation, I reccommend the following guide:

LOW TECH SENSORS AND ACTUATORS
for artists and architects

by Usman Haque [www.haque.co.uk] and Adam Somlai-Fischer [www.aether.hu]

The PDF is a great introduction to circuitbending philosophy, with the only problem that the first chapter mentions something called a CAT, which is actually explained a little later in the document. Who said it was a linear book anyway? I think it's a very useful thing to have lying around though. Also have a look at Doctronics for very clearly explained sensors like the LDR (light-dependant-resistor).

And when you start making your own low-tech sensors and actuators, you might want to contribute to the wiki they've setup. I think that the small PDF is a great idea, but one could have a gigantic repository of this stuff. Most DIY websites just don't explain things clearly to noobs, engaging in the same kind of vainglorious attitude that has allowed the consumer electronics market to become such a fucking pain in the arse.

Thank you, Usman & Adam.

千の風になって: Become 1,000 Winds..

2007-11-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

First, some Japanese Pizza by Pizza Hut:

Now with a full belly, to less serious matters.

The distinctly Oriental and exotic title of this post, since I'm not yet ready with anything new yet at the lab, comes from The Top 60 Japanese Buzzwords of 2007:

Sen no kaze ni natte (”become 1,000 winds”) is the title of a song performed by opera singer Masafumi Akikawa. Based on writer Man Arai’s translation of “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,” an English-language poem penned by an unknown author, the song has sold more than a million CDs, making Akikawa the most successful opera singer in Japanese history. [More]

The Nipponese continue to entrance me with their super-sized human games based on video and computer gaming culture. Please watch the insanely hilarious video below of Human Tetris, and go to the original post if you really want to see the one with a sexy Russian девушка instead.

Nor do you want to miss a YouTube video of Melody Roads in Japan, described thusly in The Guardian:

The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.

Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.

Patent documents for the design describe it as notches "formed in a road surface so as to play a desired melody without producing simple sound or rhythm and reproduce melody-like tones".

"parab0xx": a light-controlled musical interface

2007-11-12T01:50:00.000-08:00

On 3rd of November 2007, AlgoMantra Labs hosted its first public demo for an exclusive audience (viz., after Cellphabet) of parab0xx. Please watch the accompanying YouTube video to see the installation as it was shown to about 25 people. It's a little dark, but you'll be able to see what's going on, and the sound is clear. We couldn't get better quality since the installation needed dim lighting to work.

News!
After we made it to Wired News, I have released the source code (zip) under a GPL license! Have fun.

What parab0xx is
The parab0xx is a software prototype that shows how you can interact with virtual images projected on a simple living room table, using a webcam. You can play games, make music, or even edit videos. In short, it is a kind of primitive computer that obeys the instructions of a simple LED (light-emitting diode). Alternately, you can use a luminous phone screen, a candle's flame, or even a piece of white paper as a cursor.

Hardware Equipment & Setup
We used a Compaq Laptop running Windows XP, an old Intel webcam (probably Chinese too), and a regular data projector. The projector and camera were tied to a wooden slab which supported the roof and the image was projected vertically on a waist-high black table on the ground. The webcam was aligned to read the image from the projector, as it fell on the table's surface. The setup works only after nightfall and in a dim, bar-like environment.

Software
The whole thing was made in Python 2.5, running on Windows XP. We will provide the source code as soon as it is agreed upon internally to do so.

Conceptual Details
The ten orange boxes are programmed to bounce off the edges, and move perpetually slowly in a straight line. Apart from this, they do nothing unless somebody messes with them. The blue box follows any singular source of light closely, and if there are multiple sources, it sits at the place where their geometric average falls.

Everytime the blue box touches any yellow box once, a 4-5 second sample of tabla is triggered and the orange box that was hit changes its direction(bounces off). Normally, if the blue box is also moving, you will end up triggering it multiple times (direction also changes that many times in a second). The way to trigger the sample only once is to put the blue somewhere in the path of any yello box, take away or switch off the light, and wait for one of the orange box to arrive. This system allows us to create an endless number of rhythms and beats from a very small, single sample.

You can even program this arrangement to behave in preditable ways, by placing pieces of white paper on the black table. When the orange boxes pass over any paper periodically, they start behaving as a source of light themselves! You can create some funky feedback patterns using this, and play a game of prediction and strategy, besides creating complex tabla rhythms.

Applications
What we have made is a type of human-computer interface, and the applications can therefore be in any industry where humans need ways of interacting intuitively with computers - aerospace, surgery, gaming and music are the obvious ones.

Why we made it
If you've seen the movie Minority Report, you'd remember Tom Cruise uses light-emitting gloves to control a screen while searching through data. We thought that wasn't really science-fiction and could be achieved today itself. Morever, we wanted to explore the costs involved in simulating technologies used by interactive surfaces like Microsoft Surface & the reacTable (used by Bjork in her Volta tour).

Of course, we did not have a touch-screen and millions of dollars in research funding, but decades of slavery to the QWERTY keyboard (thump! thump!) and Engelbart's ridiculous mouse was enough to motivate us. If Brian Eno wants more Africa in computers, so that they can interface with the whole human body (not just fingertips), we tried to put a bit of India into computing - the country of light and sound.

On that note, Happy Diwali & Season's Greetings!

For more information or business/media queries, write to: algomantra (((AT)) gmail.com

CamPong 1.0: Adventures in haptic control

2007-11-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was toying with motion capture using the camera on my Nokia N70 and made a very primitive prototype of the classic arcade game Pong, but with only one paddle. I just thought I'll share the code now that I have a fast connection for a few days.

The camera simply tracks any black object in the periphery of the visual field, against a whitish background. The blue trace of the black object in the periphery drives the paddle. When the paddle hits the ball, the phone says "Pong!".

So it may not work everywhere, but it served as a stepping stone for our later, far more ambitious work - the Parab0xx (video releasing shortly), which we demonstrated in Bombay on Nov 3rd, 2007.

You can download the Python source code here. [LINK] Let me know if you have any problems with it by leaving a pheromone trail, err....comment here. You need to have Python installed on your S60, okay?

Some theoretical notes:

This essay by William Bogard places my recent work into a theoretical space I'm quite satisfied with:

Presumably, if man could see what touches him, it would ease his fear of it. Canetti, like Foucault, sees visibility, optical space, as a trap; what is observed can be known and thus controlled. But he notes another way that man loses his fear of being touched, and that is simply through being touched itself.

- The Coils of A Serpent: Haptic Space & Control Societies

There are two easy strategies of making the cellphone motion-aware - 1) moving the phone itself and using its video feed as the control signal 2) moving an object to be tracked in front of the camera (this is the one I chose for CamPong).

The cool thing about 1) is that its a great way to communicate with the phone for any person holding the phone. Like every time you shoot down a spaceship you feel a vibration. Some of this trickery is already in the market (Wii?)

In number 2) there is the elegance of dance, like Tom Cruise demonstrates in Minority Report.

AlgoMantra Labs is currently very interested in using motion-detection techniques using a mobile phone, specifically those that do not involve the use of an accelerometer (the Nokia 5500 makes me dr00l, though). I do not expect gyroscopes to become ubiquitous among mobile handsets anytime soon.

While reading a paper by Drab & Artner I came across a mention of Mozzies, a game that was released with Siemens Sx1 in 2003, also using the S60 platform.

The Camera is used to detect the motion. The mosquitoes can be seen as they are placed on the live video feed from the camera. Aiming is done by moving the phone around so that the mosquitoes are at the cross hair.

Cellphabet on BBC Radio 5

2007-09-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

AlgoMantra was recently interviewed by Chris Vallance of BBC Radio 5 Live about our latest work, the Cellphabet. I have made the 6-minute segment available as an mp3 of roughly 5.5MB. [Download MP3]

Chris Vallance dubbed it 'a very sedate way of messaging someone' and Rhod Sharp called it 'amazingly sophisticated'. Thank you, gentlemen.

There are some other great stories too in the show, you can hear the whole thing off their website.

Spellbinder: All ur reality is b-long to us...

2007-08-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

Dr. Mark Wright at the University of Edinburgh and his colleagues have broken the reality barrier, as far as I see it. This is not your geotagging, GPS-caching, social networking application for cartographic simpletons - this is the new canvas on which will be born Picassos and Rembrandts, although my personal favorite is the pointillist - Seurat.

Here's what the Beeb sayeth:

"It's about using a camera phone as a magic wand," said Dr Mark Wright of the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh who came up with the idea.
At the heart of Spellbinder, as the project is known, is a database of all the places that participants have added data to. People query it by taking a snap of a location with their phone then using multimedia text messages to send it to Spellbinder.
Although Spellbinder has been used to spot locations it could, said Dr Wright, be used to match almost anything.
"With Spellbinder, the real world becomes a computational resource," he said.

Misc:
1. Bored this morning, so I have joined this eclectic mailing list & wiki.
2. One more reason why I love Nokia (sponsor me, folks).

The Cellphabet: What next?

2007-07-30T14:09:00.000-07:00

On Saturday we did the first public exhibit of Cellphabet 1.0 in Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. I walked for several hours and did three walking assignments -

1. Pratyush of Zee News whispered the word 'GOTCHA' in my ear. The walk worked fine for G and O, but then the tower signals got scrambled and GORG appeared from nowhere. I could only go next to a letter whose code began with '-'(minus) - so I asked Pratyush if I could walk Z, which went fine. So the assignment was only about 40% successful.

2. Next Abhay Sardesai of Art India asked me a question:"Where do the streets lead?" To this I wanted to respond by walking "MOON" but fearing that Gabriel (who was receiving the 'signals' by SMS) could get confused by the double 'O's, I decided to write 'MONEY'. MONE went fine and I got a freak 'L' instead of Y, which I did again. I'd say this is where I came closest to spelling my first word correctly in English.

3. I was too tired by this time, but the last question was asked by Jana of Time Out - "What is money". I wanted to write ART, but I gave up when AY appeared.

Officially my walk began at 2PM and concluded at about 7PM, but I had been walking to test the phone's software and cell tower signals since 11AM that day - so no wonder that my feet are still recovering. While I do that, you can head over to some of the pictures we took that day. I'll be uploading the source code on the PyS60 Applications wiki, the hall of fame.

Update:
The Cellphabet Wiki
is now online. You can also download the Python for S60 source code there.

Previously:
1. The Cellphabet announcement
2. The Cellphabet Explained

Cellphabet 1.0 on Saturday!

2007-07-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

Do you know that 'someone' always knows where you are? Do you know that the mobile phone in your hand is always being watched by invisible eyes?

क्या आप् जानते हैं कि हर वक्त कुछ अद्रश्य नज़रें आपको देखती रहती हैं? आपके मोबाईल फ़ोन के ज़रिये..

In the 1982 film Namak Halal , Amitabh Bachchan famously declared: "I can talk in English, I can walk in English...because English is a very funny language." This statement is no more a metaphor since the Cellphabet 1.0 - a radical new system to convert the movement of a mobile phone into plain English text.

ऐसी ही मोबाईल फ़ोन प्रनाली का इस्तेमाल करके, डी जे फ़ेडरू प्रस्तुत करते हैं - सेलफ़ाबेट,हवा में शब्द् लिखने की एक अनूठी तकनीक!बगैर फ़ोन को हाथ लगाये!

The system will now be demonstrated publicly and all are invited to witness a first in history - a man walking to write an SMS text message, without touching his phone. As he walks, you play a game of words like no other...

चलिये हमारे साथ, और खेलिये एक नयी चाल...

Where: Kala Ghoda Art District's Parking Lot, Mumbai

When: 2PM, Saturday 28th of July 2007

Team:
DJ Fadereu(a.k.a. Rohit Gupta) (software)
Tara Chowdhry(documentator)
Angad Chowdhry (event manager)
Gabriel Greenberg (visual display)
Vickram Crishna

Live on the Web! The Cellphabet Twitter Feed

अधिक जानकारी के लिये सम्पर्क करें!For more information please contact: Gabriel Greenberg (09870181434), DJ Fadereu(09821424074) or email algomantra@gmail.com

Cellphabet 1.0: How I can walk in English!

2007-07-24T04:28:00.000-07:00

I have devised a way to convert the movement of a mobile phone in a 150X150m area into plain English text - the Cellphabet।

मैंने मोबाइल फोन के एक छोटे इलाके में चलने फिरने की क्रिया को अंग्रेजी शब्दों में तब्दील करने की प्रणाली बनाई है!

Abstract: Let us say, I am standing at Kala Ghoda art district's parking lot in south Bombay. You walk up to me and whisper a word in my ear. Without touching my phone at all, I walk around for 30-40 minutes within the Kala Ghoda area. You can walk with me if you like to keep an eye. Soon enough, the word you gave me appears as a text message on your phone.

Description: At any given moment, a mobile phone is connected to a cell tower nearby. Each cell tower has it's unique ID which can be hacked from the phone (technical details below). In urban areas like Bombay, cell towers have a reach of 100-200 meters. There are thousands of such towers in the city. So as you walk on a road, or travel in your car, your phone is switching towers as it goes out of range from one, and enters the area of another. Towers often switch even if you are standing in one place, because your phone is always looking for a stronger signal.

My phone is a Nokia smartphone, that is - it is more like a computer that can be programmed. I used this functionality to write a program which does the following.

The main algorithm fingerprints various cellphone tower signals, and uses them to correctly identify three-four street corners near to each other. Now if you see in the picture above, it has labeled the area around the Kala Ghoda parking lot as a (*), the area near Jehangir art gallery as a (-), the area near Khyber restaurant as (0), and the area leading to Lion's Gate as (+). Each time I (that is, my phone) enters one of these areas, it adds a (+)(-)(*) or (0) to my 'path'. So as I tumble through this triangular shape I'm generating a trail of characters which looks like this:

0*+*+*-*-*-*0*-*-*0*-*-*-*-*0

It only looks like gibberish, because my phone will clean up the stars(*), pick up each remaining 3-bit block in this string and map it to it's 'meaning', which is a character of the English alphabet. For instance each block of '0++' would be converted to the letter 'h', '---' to 'e' and so on. The whole trail will be now understood as:

'0*+*+*-*-*-*0*-*-*0*-*-*-*-*0' = 'hello'

Technical: I'm using a Nokia N70 Music Edition, which is from the S60 series. I have developed the application using the Python API for S60.

The Countdown Begins

2007-07-18T19:15:00.001-07:00

I'll be releasing my secret project within 7 days now, and it's not J.U.N.G.L.E. as earlier planned. In the meantime, Clive Thompson@Wired finally came up with something that makes some sense of generation Twitter:

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

However, kind of coordination would require some kind of syntax or mark-up. Twitter is a chaotic, unstructured data, very difficult to 'mine' for meaningful objects.

In other random links, a variant of the esoteric prog-lang aptly called brainfuck is Piet, named after a famed Dutch painter.

MISC: The World's Tiniest PC's
I wonder why they haven't included the Nokia N70 ;)

Rethinking cellphones

2007-07-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

On the heels of the article about our work that appeared the Mumbai edition of the Hindustan Times, I was reading a piece that echoes my thoughts about mobile phones. Oh, before that - in the picture is Gabe and myself sitting at the Bandra bandstand amphitheatre in Bombay.

(Interesting thought: if VoIP over wifi took off in a big way, there would only be mobile phones. The GSM cellphone would become extinct.) The following was an exhilerating read, my goodness - I'm on target so far. The text below is nothing short of fascinating, because THIS IS WHAT I'M DOING.

Over to The Telephone Repair Handbook by Mark Pesce with Angus Fraser:

Why is the mobile telephone so underutilized? Once again, we see the vestigial behavior of analog fixed-line telephony. Fixed-line telephones did nothing until the network sent a call to the handset, or until the user picked up the handset to make a call. The duty cycle for the fixed-line telephone was entirely driven by users, as the only actors within the network. This basic assumption drives the design of mobile telephones: the devices are essentially passive, waiting to be activated by the network or the user. But why should this be? There’s no essential purpose served by such passivity – far from it. But the mobile telephone has been cursed by its ancestry, and this curse has kept it from reaching its full potential. This is the most important thing we must unlearn, if we are to repair the telephone.The mobile telephone is only a passive device because we have designed it so.

We believe it a necessary precondition for telephone repair that we treat the mobile telephone as an entirely active device, a network terminal which has been designed from its outset to facilitate management of and communication with the social network of its owner-user. The mobile telephone is already the de facto device for digital social network management; voice calls and text messaging are arguably the most significant components of the electronic communication within our social networks. The ephemeral nature of synchronous voice communication and asynchronous text messages means that these informational transactions are not captured by existing digital social networks, which, in turn, means that we unconsciously underestimate their importance, because they are not counted (except on our monthly bills), and are not tracked, except within the mobile handset. If we transform the mobile telephone into an active device, and design it to be conscious of the electronic communication which takes place through it and around it, we have a device which can gather a wealth of data – a “data shadow” – from which we can build emergent models of a dynamic digital social network. The mobile telephone is the only device which is well-suited to the task of feeding our ever-hungry digital social networks; it is the only device capable of recording our lives as they are lived. The mobile telephone should be fully realized as an active device which takes note of our digital social interactions, using this information to assist us in improving the quality of these interactions.

Yoshida Brothers: Rising

2007-06-07T18:35:00.000-07:00

Man! The music rocks! I dug up some more info about these chaps from the Wikipedia:

The Yoshida Kyōdai are Japanese musicians and have released several albums under the Domo label internationally as the Yoshida Brothers.

They are a pair of brothers and performers of the traditional Japanese music style of Tsugaru-jamisen which originated in northern Japan. They debuted in 1999 in Japan as a duo playing the shamisen and have since attracted an international audience.

Their music has been a fusion of the rapid and percussive Tsugaru-jamisen style along with Western and other regional musical influences.

re: Seamless Pictures

2007-06-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

I remember blogging the first series of these pictures here, but can't find it right now. Here's a pick from the second series.

The Psychogeographical Trade-off

2007-05-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the main purpose for which AlgoMantra was setup in 2004 on a street in Bandra while talking to Matti. The initial ideas were indeed inspired by Wilfried Hou Je Bek, but I get the feeling that both of us are missing some crucial elements to really make it work for a large crowd. I've zeroed down to a few basic properties which must be inherent in the system to fulfill my own vision of the thing:

1. Each person or agent who is doing the walk must have a simple instruction card, which should be fun to play with, easy to mutate. The agent must have a personal goal to achieve, a winning prize in mind. This would mean that his experience of being a part of the psychogeographical computer must be game-like, until the day this game becomes too commercial for its own good. Most multi-agent modelling systems or swarm simulation experiments are useless for our purposes because none of them take into account the fact that the bits that do the running around for them, do not seem be having any fun themselves. Humans are better at making aesthetic judgements rather than executing mechanical tasks, so is this game asking you to make aesthetic judgements in a mechanical manner? That seems to be a good conceptual start to the problem.

2. The various agents and their instruction sets make up distributed and parallel parts of a larger mechanism, a computation. The intent of this computation cannot be trivial, and must be very clear to the designer. This level can be as complicated as the designer's capacity for detailed abstraction and depth. It cannot be as trivial as crowdsourcing, or the Amazonian Mechanical Turk program. Also, you shouldn't be able to simulate the walk on a piece of paper - the interactions between agents effect the course of each player. so you can't just program it on a computer or execute it on a paper napkin to advance-guess the resulting path.

3. Algorithmic walking in left-right binary algorithms assumes its elegance based on a Cartesian grid, which is mostly absent from the city of my concern - Bombay. What you have is a random 2-D graph that has to be traversed. Are we going to have each walk tailor-made for a section of the city? Is this simply some kind of urban neo-tourism? are we using cellphones which are using Twitter? I'm flooded with these questions. It's going to rain soon in the city. What happens to the game during rain?

4. Another key aspect will be the card/pass, the real navigational instrument of our autonauts. It cannot be a fixed thing, it must have some degrees of change. Each move made by the player changes the state of the instrument, so that - the available choices in the next move depend on the last. Now we're getting somewhere to generative modeling of the path - so that the final path taken can never be predicted. We're probably looming close to a maze-gen algorithm.

5. A stray thought - could the data on the card/pass be represented by phonemes? This would truly be algomantric! Ringtones? Cellphones? Compose mode? WHAT?!!

इब्न-ए-साफी (Ibn-e-safi)

2007-05-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

Some random browsing about spy fiction landed me at this strange Wikipedia page about an Indian-Pakistani writer of pulp fiction in Urdu. You'd probably want to compare the covers that were printed in Allahabad and Karachi. Most of them are simply mind blowing art. Here's the gallery.

Mid Day columnist Mahmood Farooqui has the dope on him:

He grew popular in the years immediately before partition although his novels continued to be set in a politically neutral terrain long afterward. I was especially keen to tease out the lineaments of the utopian and the secular state that emerges in most of his early novels. The country�s head is never mentioned by name, nor are any other international facts or names.

Unlike a Forsyth or a Le Carre, Ibn-e Safi is not after verisimilitude; instead he invents his terrain with great confidence and boldness. In his work, India stretches from the Hindu Kush to the Far East, though South India is rarely invoked.

There is an international dimension to the battles and there is a too palpable desire to show the goras their place and uphold India�s greatness and integrity.

ऐँल्गो-मनत्रा अब hindi मॆं भी!

2007-05-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

Hm, I'm just going to coredump some of the useful webpages I saw today from the cybercafe. Notes to myself, as usual:

1. Read this essay later on your laptop. From Entering the Machine and Leaving It Again: Poetics of Software in Contemporary Art by Florian Cramer:

Psychogeographic computing has a double effect: It demystifies computing and turns it into a radically simple and popular low-tech and low-cost operation. Secondly, it liberates the imagination of what a computer can be and which purposes it may serve. Socialfiction.org has expanded and systematized this idea into a broader concept of "speculative programming" in which computing becomes a figure of thought and reflection not only in theory, but also in artistic practice.

2. research.techwondo blog has stuff on urban gaming. Lots of clues to my secret project of Building an API for an Urban Time Machine.

3. Also by Florian Cramer Words Made Flesh : Code, Culture, Imagination - this is going to be essential for my next chapter of RmxRpblk'

4. Bibliodyssey: Great blog!

TapTap by Andy Huntington

2007-04-30T01:33:00.000-07:00

Among Andy's many interesting projects is this fabulous modular toy, a Lego-like way to arrange rhythms.

The boxes themselves do not learn or loop, they only repeat. This keeps the system as simple as possible. There is no perpetual motion only tap, pause and tap. At 4 seconds the delay is just long enough to give the boxes a life of their own...

...just long enough to wonder if they have forgotten.

[LINK]
[LINK 2] Finally, I'm not the only one on this path. "QUERY-BY-BEAT-BOXING: MUSIC RETRIEVAL FOR THE DJ"

The ComeBack Turtles

2007-04-15T02:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not obsessed with the tortoise for nothing, you know. The shape of the Great Indian Tortoise might just be a mathematically unique structure. Normally, for a shape to be titlted and come back upright, the bottom needs to be heavier than the top. What if this balancing quality was not a property of the weight distribution, but of the very shape of the surface? If this article is correct, that is:

Now, Domokos and Várkonyi are measuring turtles to see if any of them are truly self-righting, or whether the turtles need to kick their legs a bit to flip themselves back upright. So far, they've tested 30 turtles and found quite a few that are nearly self-righting. Várkonyi admits that most biology experiments study many more animals than that but, he says, "it's much work, measuring turtles."

The mathematicians still face an unanswered question. The self-righting objects they've found have been smooth and curvy. They wonder if it's possible to create a self-righting polyhedral object, which would have flat sides. They think it is probably possible, but they haven't yet managed to find such an object. So, they are offering a prize to the first person to find one: $10,000, divided by the number of sides of the polyhedron.

The Remix Republik!

2007-03-21T01:43:00.000-07:00

The first chapter of my ongoing book project The Remix Republik is now online, and you can download it for free here {LINK TO PDF}. Here is the description of the book:

India is predicted by many as a rising star in the global village nightsky, but only one book describes the new zodiac. In the dark theatre of DJ Fadereu's mind, Google Earth and binary computation copulate with Hindu avatars and Vedic timekeeping, Neitzche necks with nadabrahma, and Baudrillard blows apart Bollywood.This cybernetic ride flickers uneasily through the vast landscape of Indian and Western techno-philosophy.

Meanwhile, the murder of reality is imminent. The media are converting each street into a studio, masses into extras, and life itself into the new movie. The dynamics of these phenomenon are mediated by a new logic of speed, and a new movement determines the games of territorial power. The present, the past and the future have become exceedingly intertwined in the instantaneous (and yet ancient) society we live in - we are the remixed republic. The state of siege now remains poised at the most dramatic point in our history since the Partition of 1947.

The world's oldest civilization, the author hopes, will rise to the challenge with befitting ingenuity....

If you like the chapter, please consider donating some cash by clicking the Paypal button below.

Wishing Tree

2007-03-20T00:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen anything more beautiful in a long time. As it is, I love tessellations of triangles and circles too much. Please explore the "wishing tree"-->

2007 Lulu Blooker Shortlist

2007-03-16T00:45:00.000-07:00

I'm judging the Lulu Blooker 2007 prize, with a very distinguished cast whose company I probably do not deserve: Arianna Huffington, Julie Powell, Nick Cohen and Chair of Judges — Paul Jones. Now I'm not going to write about what my feelings are after a brief preview but, I'm especially interested in the comics section.

[LINK] The Official Shortlist!

The Comics AlgoYatra 2007

2007-03-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

A huge welcome to readers of RJ Malini's Mid Day column!

To participate in the Comics AlgoYatra, you will need to put your name on a wiki, which is simply a webpage that anyone can feed information into. [Link to Wiki]

The wiki also contains all other details, as and how they are being assembled by the gang of comic lovers. You may also want to join the Yahoo mailing list of Mumbai's only Comics Club.

If you have a Blogger account, you can post your queries as comments and I will answer at the earliest. Open comments are disallowed due to spam, sorry!

Here is the video of a small-scale, indoors AlgoYatra. We are taking this kind game to the streets:

Islamic Superheroes

2007-03-08T01:08:00.000-08:00

Why read something when you can blog it first? I'll finish this article later, but an excerpt will do for now:

“I understand how it is when people have not had heroic characters to call their own,” comments Nicieza, who emigrated from Argentina to the United States when he was a child. “I was enthused to work with someone who has a chance to bring his dreams and ideas to life. I respect Naif’s beliefs. We have a real chance to do something here that can affect people positively.”

Working together over more than a year, Nicieza and Al-Mutawa fine-tuned the character guide and story line. The plot is built on a historic event familiar to every schoolchild in the Middle East—Hülegü Khan’s invasion of Baghdad in 1258. It was, as the story begins, “a time of dark and light....”

Gold-digging ants of India

2007-03-08T00:56:00.000-08:00

I haven't discovered an interesting myth for some time now, dark days for a generative mythologist! I have read the Egyptian travels of Herodotus, but not the Histories. That's why I missed this gem, explaining why India ("the bird of gold") possessed so much of the yellow stuff:

Eastward of India lies a desert of sand…. There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size—bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog…. These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just as our own ants throw up the earth…. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this is what the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert…. When the Indians reach the place where the gold is, they fill the bags they have brought with them with sand and start for home again as fast as they can go; for if the ants—if we can believe the Persians’ story—smell them, they at once give chase.

Two great articles on the subject, one from Antlion Pit and the other by historian Paul Lunde.

Rabdology

2007-03-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

In his treatise Rabdology, John Napier described a technique to do binary arithmetic using a chessboard-like grid. He termed his technique Location arithmetic (Latin arithmeticæ localis) from the way that positions of counters on the board represented numbers.

The Neanderthal Flute

2007-03-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

Snip:

A well-known example of a controversial musical instrument is that of the so-called Neandertal flute from Divje Babe Cave in Slovenia, found in the Middle Paleolithic layers of the cave and described by the finders as possibly the oldest musical instrument in the world.

Links: Musilanguage, Prehistoric Music

Spinor Psychogeography

2007-02-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

The act of walking needs to be quantized on the basis of quaternions, and for this reason I find the idea of spinors very appealing. The three hypercomplex vectors (i,j & k) can represent three unit spins. The forward and backward movement may be considered rotations around the I-axis, movement sideways can be seen as rotation around the J-axis, and movement up or down in height (through stairs or elevators) can be called rotation around the K-axis. So each walking agent is a spinor, in that sense.

Now only if the quaternion equation was true for displacement in this hypercomplex space. Maybe I'm just too stupid.

My eyes just caught the XBox action in the screen next door, a kid playing some "road rage" type of game. What the psychogeographical agent too needs is a "joystick" based on spinors, so you can roll and flip like in the CG world - in the real world! There could be a way of recording all the movements of this rollerball via GPS, but wouldn't it be cooler if it were done by hand?

The pattern is your hand is your history, and your future. It is money.

Learning Lambda Calculus

2007-01-27T00:58:00.000-08:00

Getting deeper into my journey that began with Spencer Brown's Laws of Form (the book costs over $50 on Amazon! I haven't read it yet) I am now learning lambda calculus, inspired by its usage in a Bruno Marchal paper. A paper by David C. Keenan called To Dissect A Mocking Bird describes the same with the use of a graphical notation of "bird-brains" which was very enjoyable.

Later today I hope to practice my skills on this page with Javascripts, and maybe I'll quickly go through this introduction. And before I go home now, I'm glad that the link to this great essay on sundials is live again. The Shadow Knows by Dana Sobel:

His delving into that subject helped revive Andrewes' own sundial idea, what he calls the Longitude Dial. His original inspiration came from a 1610 map that University of Wisconsin cartographer David Woodward had once shown him. That map and others by the mathematician Franz Ritter are the oldest known examples of a gnomonic projection. They appear in Ritter's how-to book on sundials, Speculum Solis (Mirror of the Sun), published in Nuremberg, Germany. Ritter's map placed Nuremberg at the center of the Western Hemisphere. The farthest reaches of the map's landmasses look grossly distorted as a result, but the novel perspective causes the meridians of longitude to radiate out from the North Pole in straight lines, so they can double as the hour lines of a sundial. Ritter's innovative pairing of time and place might well have impressed any dialist, but it struck Andrewes with the force of a revelation. And although Ritter intended his gnomonic projection as the basis for a novel sundial, he seems never to have built one. Andrewes knew of no such dial anywhere. But he determined to make one.

In Search Of Lost Time

2006-11-26T23:42:00.000-08:00

The performers are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust’s novel. During the eight hours of a working day the humans are playing computer. For these purposes the text is first deconstructed into its individual parts - the letter and characters - which in turn are decoded into the Ascii-code - a code underlying digital text processing. Each letter is represented by an individual sequence of signs, consisting of zeros and ones.

[LINK] Download The Performance Manual.
[Website]

Al- Zaman & Kalachakra: The Physics of Time in Two Major Religions

2006-11-26T03:18:00.000-08:00

Time in Islam: The nature of Al-Zaman (time in Islam) is explained by Abu al-Barakat like this: Al-zaman miqdar al-wujud or, “time is the dimension of existence”. Such a definition helps the Muslim absorb life’s events as a continuous experience, and helps him remain sane. In every religious system though, the structure of time is centered around a divine uncertainty – that which cannot and should not be known. The Prophet forbade intercalation, or correction of the thirteenth month to fall in line with the seasons, because it is in the very “irregularity of the phases of the moon, they revere the manifestation of mysterious Will…independent of the solar seasons[1].” It is not permissible in Islam to “foresee” the moon by tables. It must be watched and established by at least two “witnesses of the instant”. At the most, one is allowed to use a calendar with 28 lunar mansions (364 days) that gives an indication as to which najm (stellar constellation) the moon will occupy, not when it will occupy it. Astrology is prohibited too, since in such a universe, where everything happens by the Will of one supreme God, how can stars, planets or the sun exert any influence over the destinies of men?

2. Ghurrat-al-hilal or ‘sighting of the new moon’ marks the beginning of a new era for the Muslims, and opens up a period for legally embarking on a pilgrimage, a period of widowhood, etc. When a new era begins, it is intended as a stopping place for the faithful mind, as a place of regeneration of the tired human spirit. The life sanctioned by God is not linear, moving seamlessly towards a future, but follows an algorithmic recursion from announcement to sanction, on and on till the yawm akhir, or the Ultimate Day. There is a sudden rise in the number of catastrophes leading to the Great Review, the Great Judgment. It represents the rising of eschatological phenomena, the accelerating process of God decomposing an imperfect world, only to start all over again with a blank slate. That Ultimate Day alone is perfect because on that day alone there is no delay between the divine decree and the apocalypse. Islam is “occasionalist”, and postulates atoms of time, or a constellation of epochal instants resembling the twinkling of an eye of God, the eye that confers a hukm (decree) upon nascent human actions. There is assumed to be no continuous duration in Islam, but only an announcing and another ending instant of divine sanction. It is in the waiting for discontinuous moments, that the devout Muslim finds continuity. The delay between these two instants (imhal) implies that all such days that pass in the waiting for Sa’a, the hour of Last Judgement, are imperfect. Those philosophers who divinize duration are regarded by Islam as being dahriyun, the materialists or atheists who do not believe in the Creator. Fakhra Razi wrote that psychological phenomena in human beings (such as pleasure or pain) have no duration, and therefore there is no such thing as eternal bliss. “The instant of anguish is not a fragment of duration; it is beyond doubt a divine touch of theologal hope, which transfigures our memory forever.” According to scholar Kalabadhi, when the sufi mystic Al-Hallaj was asked what an instant is, he replied, “It is a breeze of joy (farja) blown by pain, Wisdom is waves which submerge, rise and fall, so that the instant of the sage is black and obscured.”

3. Time In Hinduism: Here is a story that illustrates the Hindu theory of time, or kalachakra: While traveling through a forest, Narada asks Lord Vishnu about maya, the illusory world. After a while Vishnu feels thirsty and sends Narada to a nearby village to fetch him some water, where Narada falls in love with a farmer’s daughter and sets up a household. He lives happily with his new family for many years, before a terrible flood wipes out the whole village and he finds himself wandering through the forest. Upon hearing his footsteps, Vishnu says, “O Narada, where have you been? I have been waiting for half an hour.” Mircea Eliade contends that this is the Hindu myth, an invocation of sacred time that periodically relieves us from the Now ( hal in Arabic) which is considered material or ‘profane’ time. The Hindu concept of time is illustrated well by the myth cited above, and it also serves as a mnemonic to periodically invoke the original rules of the cosmic game. According to the above theory, maya manifests itself through time, the cyclical Kalachakra, and time dilates from human being to gods. Time occurs in differing durations of cycles, in wheels within wheels where one second for a God may be experienced as millennia for a mortal.

4. These cycles are normally broken down into four key ages (or yugas) which bear a correspondence with geometric figures and their harmony. Krta Yuga is the age in which human society accomplishes things of greatness, the perfect age (corresponding with the perfection of the square, the number 4), when the ideal of dharma is totally aligned with human existence. In the Treta Yuga, things go downhill and men see only 3/4^th of dharma, ½ in Dwapara Yuga and so on to Kali Yuga where man’s moral integrity is at its lowest before the advent of darkness, or destruction. It is useful to note that these periods are of descending duration, in a perfect mathematical series, with Krta being the longest, or 4000 divine years of Brahma. These larger cosmological cycles are also complemented by the routines cycles of everyday life, and the cycles of birth, death and rebirth until complete realization of the cosmic harmony relieves one from the eternal washing machine that is existence, leading to moksha. The Hindu idea of creation and destruction came most likely from watching the growth and decay of the moon, but they chose a quasi-solar calendar that needed correction every once in a while.

5. While the traditional Muslim sees Time as the twinkling of God’s eye, the Vedic Hindus measured time by the blinking of his own eyes (paramanu, approximately 4 seconds in Vedic metric system). Both Hindus and Muslims invoke sacred time by the use of mantra and azaan, which represent a verbal program for a release from the immediacy of human existence, to a place beyond time and closer to God. They are both followers of a code of conduct based on daily, seasonal or lunar routine, while these may differ greatly in practice. The Muslims worship no idols, and the Hindus have no evidence of any Prophet who started the religion (so they endlessly keep inventing new images to deify). Both religions believe that the universe is in a state of becoming, and imperfection pervades through it all, justifying the temporary presence of evil, towards a final reconciliation. In the case of the Muslim, the reconciliation is a perfect moment, and in the case of the Hindu, it is the self-assembly of God’s body (the original universe). If everything happens with the decree and sanction of Allah for a Muslim, it also happens for Hindus because only one God is the player of the cosmic game in Hinduism[2] - Lord Krishna: I am Mârgasirsha among the months, the spring among the seasons, of cheats, I am the game of dice, I am the greatness of the great, I am victory, I am industry, I am the goodness of the good. And yet, in spite of an all-powerful God, both Islam and Hinduism allow a human being some free will in changing his destiny. A Hindu can keep earning good karma from his actions and ascend the levels in the game of life, whereas a Muslim can indulge himself in innovations (tajaddudat) and thereby receive a positive feedback in God’s will leading him closer to Oneness with Him. In Hinduism, human existence forms a part of the body of God, and in Islam it exists as a symbiotic feedback relationship[3].

[1] Louis Massignon, Time In Islamic Thought.

[2] Quote from Bhagawad Gita

[3] A popular film song called Tu Hi Meri Shab Hai (Gangster) has an interesting line that echoes this sentiment : “Tu waqt mere liye, main hoon tera lamha..” (trans. “You are my Time, and I am your Moment.”

Xiangqi

2006-11-17T01:25:00.000-08:00

Once again via Social Fiction:

Xiangqi appeares to be an old inbetween state of the ur-game that branched into current day go and chess. The board is go-based, the rules chess based (checkmate etc). Comparative boardology will one day reveal its exact position in the tree of games.

The wikipedia entry has some intersting details that could reveal the way local changes in the rules and boards might evolve a game into a new, if you like, specie.

[Wikipedia]

Snip: The Diamond Age

2006-11-09T23:43:00.000-08:00

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was very good, but I left it incomplete and should pick it up again, if the following paragraph from Wikipedia on a hive-mind technology described in the novel is anything to go by:

Hackworth's life in the meantime also has become more complicated. Upon his arrival in North America, he had been led to an underwater system of tunnels, the abode of the "Drummers," a society whose life consists of drugged trances accompanied by drumbeats. The nano-particles that induce the ecstatic trances actually carry bits of information among the individual Drummer's brains to form an immense network of human thinking capacity that—if used to such purpose—would exceed the capabilities of any existing computer system. The nano-particles pass from body to body through sexual intercourse performed in an orgiastic ritual in which a large number of men pass their semen into a single woman. As a result of the excessive heat-producing nano-activity, the woman's body bursts into flame and is in turn ingested as part of a drink passed around the remaining Drummers to keep the information flowing. After ten years with the Drummers, exactly the duration of his sentence, Hackworth emerges from the underworld of the Drummers and returns to Atlantis/Shanghai. His wife has divorced him, but he is able to re-establish his relationship to his now grown daughter, as he is still looking for the Alchemist. Eventually he discovers that he himself is the mysterious Alchemist, and that he had been sent to the Drummers to utilize their collective mind and to develop the Seed. However, he had stopped shortly before finishing the discovery, and the book leaves the question of the Seed open in the end.

The Sonic Fiction of Kodwo Eshun

2006-11-09T01:59:00.000-08:00

An interview with the author of More Brilliant Than The Sun, British writer and afrofuturist Kodwo Eshun:

I always thought that Springsteen's power was his strenuous voice. It has muscles in it. The grain of his voice indicates labour and struggle. So his tracks become these epics, these odes to the dignity of labour, a narrative of heavy industry. There is this idea that Americans mistrust the law of least effort, something which Simon Reynolds (author of Energy Flash, a Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture Eds.) and I talk about a lot. Americans mistrust too much digitisation, too much loss of distinction between effort and output. Think of the sampler that allows the click of a button to produce a massive noise. So they like Springsteen because he restores this equivalence of effort. His voice is struggling, straining and is carrying the burden of everybody's hopes for the duration of his song and his narrative.

[LINK] »Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there« another interview with Kodwo Eshun

Hamlet's Mill

2006-11-08T00:29:00.000-08:00

Wahoo! I found the entire text of a book I needed, online. I was looking for a book that could summarily connect the processes involved in the construction of mythology, and the processes involved in computation. Via astronomy, this connection is established by Hamlet's Mill:An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (anonymous commentary follows from Fusion Anomaly):

The implications of Hamlet's Mill appeared to me nothing short of revolutionary:

* Embedded within myths were astronomical observations at least as accurate as carbon dates, thus enabling investigators to compare the content of myths so dated with the archaeological record.

* Was it not possible that myth represented the "software" that would show us how to run the "hardware" of ancient astronomical monuments?

* Was it not possible that the term prehistory was a misnomer if oral tradition possessed the means to transmit not only the seminal philosophical ideas of the human race, but the precise skies (i.e., internal linktime) that inspired these thoughts?

* And, as a consequence, did not a completely unsuspected history of the human race--in the form of the recorded myths of ancient and contemporary "prehistoric" (nonliterate) peoples--lie gathering dust in internal linklibraries around the world?

Picture: Hamlet's Mill by Ken O'Neil

Geoff Manaugh: The BldgBlog Guy

2006-11-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

Hm, I link to this gentleman often. And now I find him interviewed on another favorite blog of mine - Ballardian. I saw an excellent excerpt on Boing Boing, from The Politics Of Enthusiasm:

You once wrote, “just about everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture”…

What I really mean is that, in any discussion of architecture, there are these inevitable holes through which you might glimpse something else, something supposedly outside the bounds of architecture entirely: gravity, say, because you’re calculating stress-loads, or plate tectonics as you design a building in an earthquake zone – Tokyo, Los Angeles, Istanbul. For that matter, you have to decide where to put the windows, and so the movement of the sun comes into play – and, thus, you’re talking about astronomy, and terrestrial rotation, solstices, the equinox, constellations. Soon you’ve got the climate, and topography, and even forestry and botany and global trade and labour law – etc. etc. Global economics. The list expands and expands until ‘everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture’. Good moods, bad moods; enclosure, frustration, claustrophobia, imprisonment. Freedom. The price of steel. Natural history. Military bases, oil derricks, mining camps. It’s all architectural.

Give & Take: Electroplating Roses

2006-11-06T21:40:00.000-08:00

In another of Coupe's works, Give and Take, roses are placed in tanks of copper solution. A current passing through the tank means the flowers are slowly electroplated. This principle – electroplating – is common in the creation of cutlery and coinage. In Give and Take copper pipes are placed in the solution with a positive charge while the roses are placed in with a negative charge. As the copper solution begins to settle on the roses they are slowly entombed in a growing accumulation of copper

[LINK]

Among other works by the same artist, I really like the elegant simplicity of Cosmic - the galaxy in a paperbag.

Nada Brahma: The Humming Earth

2006-11-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

An old paper I found says some interesting things about the sounds of our planet:

The vibrations triggered by cataclysmic events fade away to nothing, but the Hum continues, regardless.

[LINK] fusion Anomaly's The World Is Sound

If the world is sound, what does The Doppler Effect mean?

Pundit Nain Singh: AlgoMantrics In History

2006-11-01T00:11:00.000-08:00

Nain Singh walked twelve hundred miles in the employ of the British Secret Service. Dressed as a pilgrim, he was dispatched to survey the road to Lhasa. Singh was specially trained to walk every pace at exactly 33 inches. His pilgrim's rosary, on which he counted several million of those paces, was used to click off the distances. The rosary had only one hundred beads on it, instead of the sacred 108, and if any of the numerous guards, police, and customs officials had bothered to count he would have been instantly killed.
Singh's pilgrim outfit had a few other special modifications. His tea bowl was used to hold mercury to find the horizon. His walking stick held a thermometer, which he would dip into the tea water just as it came to a boil and thus determine the altitude.

The biggest sacrilege, though, was Nain Singh's prayer wheel. A prayer wheel is a holy object containing the Tibetan mantra "Om! Mane Padme Hum!" ("Hail! Jewel in the Lotus!") written many times on a scroll of paper. The scroll is put inside the wheel, and when it is spun the prayers are sent upwards. In Lhasa, and later in Dharamsala, huge prayer wheels will contain a million prayers, all sent with a spin of the mighty discs.

Inside Singh's prayer wheel was his route survey, careful notes that showed the altitudes, the landmarks, and the distances that he walked. The route survey was brought back to Dehra Dun where Captain T. G. Montgomerie, the man who hired Nain Singh, was building a map.

[LINK] Wikipedia
[LINK] Image of Nain Singh's Compass

Go Crystalpunks!

2006-10-31T05:25:00.000-08:00

Browsing through text about the Chinese game Go, I wondered whether one could step back a bit in the game's architecture and make the board not just a stage, but 'a part of' the progress of the game. Initially there could be a limited number of squares, which grow as pebbles are placed. So if you place a bead on some lone square, it might now "grow" neighbouring empty squares. I believe this would be a worthy experiment, and increase the complexity of the binary representation into trinary - just the way I like it.

In other news, my friend Wilfried Hou Je Bek (Social Fiction) has released yet another crazy product of his fertile mind - Gargoyle: A Crystalpunk Automaton for the Chain-Reaction Glitterati. An excerpt from his introduction, with my favorite themes as usual:

The automaton provides a framework for creation as much as playing a goad game of chess or go is a form of art. Herman Hesse seems to have hinted at the possibility of writers refusing to write any more of them library cluttering books, and would instead create new games in which readers can contruct their own novels and music and metaphors. This automaton is the crystalpunk gesture towards this idea.

Virilio: Games, Love, War

2006-10-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

An interview with Paul virilio that simplified many of the things I've been thinking about these past few months, by Jérôme Sans:

Two attitudes are possible with respect to these new technologies: one declares them a miracle; the other—mine—recognizes that they are interesting while maintaining a critical attitude. The imminent home installation of domestic simulators and virtual space rooms for game-playing, poses many questions, and in particular this one: "What is a game once the virtual invades reality?"

There are two ways of understanding the notion of play: playing cards, dominos, checkers; or the play of a mechanical part when it is loose in its housing. I think, in fact, that the second is the angle from which we should envision play today. Play is not something that brings pleasure; on the contrary, it expresses a shift in reality, an unaccustomed mobility with respect to reality. To play today, in a certain sense, means to choose between two realities.

[LINK] to another interview called Future War

Is rhizogramming the new kinetic art I'm looking for?

2006-10-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

Michael Betancourt's essay Motion Perception in Movies and Painting:
Towards a New Kinetic Art veers quite close to the kind thing Mahesh Senagala has described in his paper on Rhizogramming : A Synaesthetic Transformation Of The Designer's Mind (PDF). Betancourt writes in conclusion:

The possibility of a cognitive link in our interpretation of movement in both painting and movies also proposes the possibility for hybrid works that employ aspects of both art forms. One such potential is the flickering shutter (literally a strobe or flickering light) used to illuminate and create motion in what are otherwise completely static images. In effect this places the movies' content literally on "screen." Such a kinetic painting is a logical potential that resides within this conceptualization. To even consider it a possibility requires that the basis for motion in film and painting be examined with the framework described in this paper.

1. [LINK to Essay]
2. [LINK] to Bin Danh gallery

Dreamachine

2006-10-22T23:35:00.000-07:00

Found while rummaging at Social Fiction.

"I have made a simple flicker machine. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over your eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colors on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of color are pounding to get in. After awhile the visions were permanently behind my eyelids and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but It was well worth getting through for I found that when it stopped I was high above the earth in a universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably. All conceptions of being dragged or tired had dropped away..."

- Brion Gysin [LINK]

Allegorism

2006-10-20T22:24:00.000-07:00

McKenzie Wark is the author of GAM3R 7H30RY, where he makes some interesting observations. allegorism is a tempting word, though (para 030):

Perhaps a game like The Sims is not just an allegory but also an ‘allegorithm.’ To be a gamer is a slightly different persona to being a reader or a viewer. Lev Manovich: “As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by this game.”19 Alex Galloway: “To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel allegorithm).”20 What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm. The intuitive experience and the organizing algorithm together are an allegorithm for a future that in gamespace is forever promised but never comes to pass. The allegorithm by which the gamer relates to the algorithm produces a quite particular allegory by which gamer and algorithm together relate to gamespace. In a game any character, any object, any relationship can be given a value, and that value can be discovered. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict can be passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which any value is arbitrary or absurd. [LINK]

Also notable is the book's use of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards.

Deleuze: Cinema Of The Brain

2006-10-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

Some new Deleuzean connections have emerged to support my ongoing study of life as a movie - [Excerpt taken from the book: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, by Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Althone Press, 1985, pp. 204–215. All Rights Reserved]:

The film does not record the filmic process in this way without projecting a cerebral process. A flickering brain, which re-links or creates loops – this is cinema. Lettrism had already gone a long way in this direction, and, after the geometric epoch and the ‘engraving’ epoch, proclaimed a cinema of expansion without camera, and also without screen or film stock. Everything can be used as a screen, the body of a protagonist or even the bodies of the spectators; everything can replace the film stock, in a virtual film which now only goes on in the head, behind the pupils, with sound sources taken as required from the auditorium. A disturbed brain-death or a new brain which would be at once the screen, the film stock and the camera, each time membrane of the outside and the inside?

In short, the three cerebral components are the point-cut, re-linkage and the black or white screen. If the cut no longer forms part of either of the two series of images which it determines, there are only relinkages on either side. And, if it grows larger, if it absorbs all the images, then it becomes the screen, as contact independent of distance, co-presence or application of black and white, of negative and positive, of place and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outside. It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic and irrational. which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a circulation: the noosphere.

Wade Schuman Kissing Metal

2006-08-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

Please watch/listen with high volume. Yeah, that's what you can do with a harmonica.

Play me

2006-08-09T02:19:00.000-07:00

There have been several experiments in interpreting human movement through space as music. I'm linking some here for future reference, starting with Jen Lewin's Laser Harps (pictured) - this looks real good, but I don't know how it sounds yet. Must see, though!

Others:

1. Interactive Strings
2. Sound Suit: This is cool, but I don't like wearable gadgets. I prefer playing the abstract machines of thin air.
3. TransPose: Umm...not bad. Passable.

The Trancelator Has Landed

2006-08-04T00:33:00.000-07:00

Perfect is the Eye of Horus. I have delivered the Eye of Horus, the shining one, the ornament of the Eye of Ra, the Father of the Gods.

[LINK]

Sound Dunes ~

2006-07-28T03:49:00.000-07:00

I'm really beginning to like the BLDG BLOG. Which Rajasthani pink-noiz loving boy wouldn't love these sound dunes?

The transformation of a sand dune – and, by extension, the entire Sahara desert, indeed any desert – even, by extension, the rust deserts of Mars – into a musical instrument.

Music of the spheres, indeed.

"When the sand avalanches, the grains jostle each other at different frequencies, setting up standing waves in the cascading layer, says Douady. These waves reinforce one another, making the layer vibrate like the surface of a loud speaker. 'What's funny is that in these massive dunes, only a thin layer of 2 or 3 centimetres is needed to set up the resonance,' says Douady. 'Soon all grains begin to vibrate in step.'"

Douady has so perfected his technique of dune resonance that he has now "successfully predicted the notes emitted by dunes in Morocco, Chile and the US simply by measuring the size of the grains they contain." The music of the dunes, in other words, was determined entirely by the size, shape, and roughness of the sand grains involved, where excessive smoothness dampened the dunes' sound.

Words On Water

2006-07-28T02:57:00.000-07:00

I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS! THIS IS SIMPLY A CYMATIC CHLADNI WET DREAM. I MEAN, WHO THOUGHT OF THIS? PHUCK. SIMPLY PHUCK! *GAWKING*

a device that uses waves to draw text and pictures on the surface of water.

The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels.

[LINK]

Bendito Machine

2006-07-22T02:39:00.000-07:00

Bendito Machine by Zumbakamera. The best flash movie EVER, periodDd.

[link via Drawn]

Behold the beauty

2006-07-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

And what you see here is just one of the fascinating stuff out there. Go get it! Spike Walker at the Biomedical Imaging Awards:

"Microscopes have been my life since I was about ten and photomicrography since I was 12 years old, which is quite a long time," he says.

Pink Noiz

2006-07-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

The theory behind pink noise is very attractive as it links to self-organised criticality:

We shall see that the dynamics of a critical state has a specific temporal fingerprint, namely 'flicker noise', in which the power spectrum S(f) scales as 1/f at low frequencies. Flicker noise is characterized by correlations extended over a wide range of timescales, a clear indication of some sort of cooperative effect. Flicker noise has been observed, for example, in the light from quasars, the intensity of sunspots, the current through resistors, the sand flow in an hourglass, the flow of rivers such as the Nile, and even stock exchange price indices. Despite the ubiquity of flicker noise, its origin is not well understood. Indeed, one may say that because of its ubiquity, no proposed mechanism to data can lay claim as the single general underlying root of 1/f noise. We shall argue that flicker noise is in fact not noise but reflects the intrinsic dynamics of self-organized critical systems.

Another cool blog is here:

Walking along one day on the newly-discovered coast of Australia, Captain Cook saw an extraordinary animal leaping through the bush.
"What's that?" he asked one of the aborigines accompanying him.
"Uh - gangurru." he replied - or something like that. Captain Cook duly noted down the name of the peculiar beast as 'Kangaroo'.
Some time later, Cook had the opportunity to compare notes with Captain King, and mentioned the kangaroo.
"No, no, Cook", said King, "the word for that animal is 'meenuah' - I've checked it carefully.
"So what does 'kangaroo' mean?"
"Well, I think," said King "it probably means something like 'I don't know'..."

So ever since, the story goes, the English word 'kangaroo' has been based on a misunderstanding, and really means 'I don't know'.

tsk tsk brrrrraaaaaaoooOtskOOOOoo!! tsk

2006-06-29T00:57:00.000-07:00

I was walking around making the lion roar, when the sounds I need started coming to me...meditating, warming itself upon the cushion of the electric bulb sun in the airconditioned virtuality of 304 was a giant fly!

I have the scratch sound in many levels now. The only thing I need now is simultaneity of two instruments and if you look to the right, it seems like an interesting ensemble, yes - this is apparently what mine (and everyone else's) larynx-sharynx lux-like.

An insect warmeth the mouth of the shower, and it also moves depending on the temperature of the spout. It likes the heat. Will global warming lead to the Biblical starlings coming in like black suns from Jatinga? There is a smaller House-fly on my fl00te!! w00te! A dark whisper comes from the past of Superman:

So scheiden sich die Falschen von den Echten
Ich greife in das Fibelnest hinein
Und gebe dann den Guten und Gerechten
Mit meiner Formel Segen und Gedeihn.

And all who are full of impudence during the day
Are made small by the magic formula!
They draw shining steel - but instead of going into combat,
They solidify into stalagmites.

Beware of yourself, Fadereu. There is no difference between the nice man and the monster. The Pharoah is a slave of the sun.

On this day I take heed of elders who have come before me and seen this movement:

As the days passed, I no longer paid much attention to the internal play-by-play, and my inner sports-caster gradually faded like the sound of a transistor radio carried away down the beach. Cresting into one particular heartbeat one particular afternoon, I felt myself expand and dissolve into a spacious and enormous web of interdependence. There was no longer a world "out there" that sent me information that I processed "in here." Events simply occurred within a shimmering and bountiful field of lazy and luxurious becoming. A stomach rumble, a bird call, a flash of intense warmth in a knee, a warm breeze -- they were like notes in an atmospheric symphony, organically related but freed from the linear rule of melody or the steady beat of clocktime.

- Erik Davis, Meditating in Sensurround

Sun Tan Sen Ra Ga Dee Pak

2006-06-27T23:56:00.000-07:00

Looking at a laptop, moving fingers
is meditating pure, participating in
the mindwork of Shiva it eeez. Shiva
has arrived on Earth to destroy doubt
with his sound of thought.

Give me the Internet for WAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR, Human - and I will leave reality with peace. HAHAHA!!

A performance that displays the internet as the mind of Shiva, what would it look like? It must be created solely by sound, of course - it must be the sound of thought. What does thought sound like? Do I need to become a language-less child again, bursting with cosmic energy that wants to express itself through my fragile sanity?

The artist must seek to dissolve himself within the performance, nullify the Self that separates thought from sound. At such extreme situations, it is often seen that strange phenomenon happen. The cognitive flow of the artist is shared by the audience almost directly. The metaphor for this performance probably lies within my immediate surroundings, the infosphere. So purely by using simple music instruments and the modulation of my voice, I should be able to create a sonic box around the audience and dance inside it da bloody tandava. How mythologically perfect that it was performed by Ravana!

Ravana received from Shiva the boon of indestructibility by all powers on heaven and earth - except by a human being. Distaining the seeming weakness of humans, Ravana abducted the wife of Rama, Lord Vishnu incarnate.

However, it can't be the Shivatandavastrotam that I will perform as it is. Perhaps I could start the performance with that, and then display its relationship to Shiva's nature. HAHAHAHAHA I must become an omnivistascope!!! Should I amplify my heartbeat as it races through loudspeakers and then dance while singing?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! YAH! Interstellar travel should be for everyone. Cheapofy the hyperdrive! Burn the witch-CDs! I should also make some audio recordings and put them online here. Trance music disco light, by human voice wonly.

So far the performances that shine have created stars. It is not just a metaphor for celebrities depending on how much spacetime they occupy on the luminous screen. it is what they are - stars. In the near future the planet will take more interest in comets that come periodically and then go back - like avatars do. For example, I am now interested in this oooOOOOOOOrrrrrTTT Cloud.

In 1950 Jan Oort noticed that

1. no comet has been observed with an orbit that indicates that it came from interstellar space,
2. there is a strong tendency for aphelia of long period comet orbits to lie at a distance of about 50,000 AU, and
3. there is no preferential direction from which comets come.

From this he proposed that comets reside in a vast cloud at the outer reaches of the solar system. This has come to be known as the Oort Cloud. The statistics imply that it may contain as many as a trillion (1e12) comets. Unfortunately, since the individual comets are so small and at such large distances, we have no direct evidence about the Oort Cloud.

THE SUN IS AN INFORMATION ROUTER, THE EARTH IS A VIRTUAL GAME, THE UNIVERSE IS A COMPUTER, THE COMETS ARE ALGORITHMS RUNNING AROUND IN THE MIND OF SHIVA.

GEDDIT?

The same pattern is shown everywhere as the frequency of sound increases and Chladni patterns are formed. In the distribution of comets inside the oooOOOrt cloud, in the spin distribution of atomic electrons, in the salt that is rearranged on a vibrating plate, in the tomography of a human brain, in the magnetic interactions of bodies, and in light. [ See: Dialing the Sun]

A Shaivic Mythology For The Internet

2006-06-27T03:26:00.000-07:00

Shiva's army consists of ganas, the literal meaning of which is "categories". The head of the ganas is naturally {Gana+Ish =} Ganesh. Democracy is a binary processor which is translated as gana-rajya or the Rule of Categories. One interesting analysis notes:

Those who feared the awful ghosts and goblins were destined to remain outsiders. Only heroes could be near him in the cremation ground, heroes who had defied death and liberated themselves from passions and fear. These were the true devotees - those who had nothing to fear, who had mastered the onslaught of the multiple categories of threatening powers that were fatal to those who were less than heroes and could not control the frightening phantoms because they had not controlled themselves.

One possible structural pataphor for the internet as rhizome of connections would be Shiva's jata or dreadlocks. He throws one dreadlock on the ground in anger and splits into two, creating two super-entities of extreme destructive power - Virabhadra and Mahakali, male and female respectively. So when a strand of trinary logic algebra breaks, two destructive binaries are born.
Each gana can be sen as a taxonomic category or label, a name of a "thought-subroutine" in the entire phylum that is Shiva's universe. Some good ideas about this can also be found in Mahesh Senagala's essay Circuits, Death & Sacred Fiction: The City of Banaras.

Banaras is the oldest continually ingabited city in the world, and it is on the banks of the Ganga. Senagala makes an astute algomantric observation:

The city is defined by neither the fort walls nor the boundaries, but by the circuits of sacred circumambulation. Instead of a map, these circuits around the city and its countless temples form a mandala in the minds of the devoted pilgrims, as they follow the routes chanting and reciting the myths and stories of the places that they come across. In this way, the pilgrims meditate the city and establish a correspondence between the city of the mind and the city of the material world. Ultimately, what people carry with them is the city of the mind, not the material city.

There is a distinction between the "map reading" and the "myth reading" images of the city. The mandala of Banaras is a kinesthetic and mytho-poetic image that one forms by experiencing the city and traversing it ritually in space. You may find your way by means of a map, but with a mandala, you become the mandala. Unlike a map, a mandala is a constellation of myths, legends, imagery and sensory experiences. Through chants and processions, the city is constantly conserved, imagined, created and revised. In the process of traversing the city, one existentially transforms one's own self into the city which is thus projected as an image of one's self.

At this point we can start making a few theories as to what Shiva is and what is the relationship of the self to Shiva. Of course, a simplification will follow in some time, and that's our objective.

1. The Universe seen by the self is a Consciousness in flow, which is like a river. this consciousness does not belong to the Self.

2. The river of consciousness flows out of an eye of Trinary logic, an algebraic ring theory represented by the trigram across Shiva's forehead. It is firmly tied with the rhizome, the phylum of categories and abstract machines that are Shiva's dreadlocks.

3. Chaos and negative feedback are chief qualities of Shiva, who is the cybernetic seed (bija). Al-gebra is translated as bija-ganit (seed categorisation) in Vedic terminology.

4. Vibration or sound is the nature of this consciousness, both inner and outer sonic experiences are the same. Even the presence of the smallest atomic objects is registered by sonic vibrations. Resonances also play an important role.

It would probably help to make a diagram of these concepts at some point.

Conclusion: There is a clear connection between Shaivic mythology with algebraic theory and logic, which forms the basis for computation. It also forms the basis of language and communication, which are the precursors to the Internet. Our goal is to be able to show this through a performance of music and storytelling in an entirely new way.

The Nanditron Starts Here

2006-06-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

A friend wrote from Bangalore today about the Virgin Comics (formerly Gotham Comics, India) launch, and the small gratis issue they have put online.

"Created by acclaimed film-maker Shekhar Kapur" - indeed, since the folking thing looks like a Hollywood animation movie's storyboard.

Its standard-edition mythology defines "yagya" as "self-imposed exile", which is so hahahahaha! And this is the depth of their research while attempting to revive "an Indian culture of superstition". They have launched "free promos" for 2 titles - Devi & Ramayana. [Just an aside, why do they insist that the promos ARE free?]

You will find the same obsession with "window by window" panels that Microsoft has firmly hypnotized into the American mind. The American mind does not belong to America anymore, of course, a perfect example being Shekhar Kapur, whose only claim to fame is a Bollywwod movie called Mr. India (which was Invisible Man + songs + Mogambo). And don't even get me started on how badly this has been written and scripted. "She never asked to be the devil, but she is..." I mean, WTF. More: "forced up their collectives asses", "Dark Lords, I've failed you!". UGH!!

You get me? It's like a stream of worn-out cliches - smelly socks hung upon the nylon of digitised images. The only saving grace on this piece of fetishistikshit is the anonymous artists who somehow manage to hold the damn thing together. This online comic is not a comic at all, its not a complete story. It's barely an advertisement cloaked as a trailer cloaked as a comic book. Why am I not suprised? I had expected a lot of bad film-makers to embrace the medium of this new century with "yantra clad claws" (see: Ramayana, page 16), and they are here with their shaman-in-chief - Deepak Chopra.

So what does the Ramayana teach us?

In fact, what does Hindu mythology really hide behind its many interweaving strands? Let us try and understand that, alone. Never together. First assumption: There is no one in this world but ME. Everything else, and everyone is a figment of my own sum of assumptions about life.

Now take for example Zizek's fabulous essay taking the piss out of "liberal communists".

The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’

- Slavoj Zizek, Nobody Has To Be Vile

In order to become Rama, teaches the Ramayana - you must defeat Ravana, the demon lord with ten heads. Since Ravana is simply a product of your (Rama's) mind, it represents ten ways of thinking, ten faces of human thought, and encourages you to destroy this multiplicity and become one streamline of consciousness. The Ramayana encourages you to conquer yourself. Villains of the modern world may sometimes be compared to Ravana, especially when they show duplicity (schizophrenia) - as in the case of tycoon-philanthropists.

In order to conquer Ravana (who rules a city of gold, built by the divine architect Vishwakarma) you must cross a wide sea by building a bridge. This bridge is also built inside the head of Rama by an army of monkeys, or mimics. Hanuman is a monkey/mimic who reflects Rama's desires (to be One with Sita) perfectly, and this is shown by his devotion and superhuman strength (that of the mind, since everyone is superhuman in the Ramayana). He leaps that insurmountable sea and sets Lanka afire with his tale. It is a leap between Rama's core, and his external faces - the multiple faces are burnt in the fire, and thus internal unity is achieved with the death of Ravana. It is a war of internal emotions, and a history of meditating upon the idea of Self.

Rama is an avatara (or updated version) of Vishnu, a subroutine in the prmordial software which consists only of three statements. These 3 statements formulate a logic, a ring theory, and a trinity. In particular, Vishnu represents "preservation" operator in this algebra of process, of which Krishna is a recurring form.

So Brahma is the source of thought, Krishna/Vishnu ARE the body of thought, and Shiva is the destroyer or rejuvenator of thoughts. He has the ability to kill thoughts, which gives way for new ones. In a way, he cleanses the universe of our minds from illusory demons. Vishnu has some peculiar characteristics:

The most celebrated act of Vishnu in the Rigveda is the 'three steps' by which he strode over this (universe) and in three places planted his step.

One early commentator, Aurnavabha, who is mentioned by Yaska in his Nirukta, interprets the three steps as the different positions of the sun at his rising, culmination, and setting. Though such solar aspects have been associated with Vishnu by tradition as well as modern-scholarship, he was not just the representation of the sun for in Rigveda he traverses in his strides both vertically and horizontally.

In hymns I.22.17, 1.154.3, 1.154.4 he strides across the earth with three steps, in VI.49.13 , VII.100.3 strides across the earth three times and in I.154.1,I.155.5,VII.29.7 he strides vertically, with the final step in the heavens. The same Veda also says he strode wide and created space in the cosmos for Indra to fight Vritra. By his stride he said to have made dwelling for men possible, the three being a symbolic representation of its all-encompassing nature. This all-enveloping nature, assistance to Indra and benevolence to men were to remain the enduring attributes of Vishnu. As the triple-strder he is known as Tri-vikrama and as Uru-krama for the strides were wide.(The reference to the three strides of Vishnu in the Rig Veda is most possibly a prototype for the later legend of Vamana.)

I will leave the discussion of Vishnu for a later need, but it suffices to know now that Vishnu preserves the Trinity of thought itself - yes/no/maybe. Brahma only creates the seed for thought, when doubt enters the mind. Shiva kills thought by making a man act in complete certainty and without any doubt. Shiva kills all doubt. Shiva is the "transformer" who transforms pure thought into a pure act. Shiva's popular representation is also associated with the lingam (phallus) since all human folly is associated with following its urges blindly (you're a dick, prick, lunda, etcetera).

The Shaivic lingum is always inside a "garbha griha" (sanctum sanctorum or cosmic womb), outside which sits a bull called Nandi. Since I'm committed to meditate upon the nature of Shiva over the next few months, which is a kind of worship, I'll seek the blessings of Nandi the Bull, he who blocks the way:

When the positive forces, the devas and the negative forces, the asuras joined together on the rare occasion to churn the mountain to obtain the nectar of immortality they utilized Vasuki, the serpent as the rope. The devas pulled from one end and the asuras from the other. In the process of churning, Vasuki, the snake vomits poison. This poison (human karma) was so dangerous that none of the gods or deities or asuras wanted to have a part of. It was extremely sticky and coming into contact with this poison, i.e, human karma, would in an instant bring the entity into the realms of human suffering and ego. As everyone ran away, Lord Shiva comes to help. He is the only cosmic dimension who could counteract this deadly poison. He takes all the poison in his hand and drinks it. Nandi, his most ardent follower sees the poison spill over Lord Shiva's mouth. Nandi drinks up the spilt poison from below. Everyone is shocked and wonders what would happen to Nandi. Lord Shiva says, "Nandi has surrendered into me so completely that he has all my powers and my protection".

Do it, Solo : Part II

2006-06-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

hhhhHHHHoooOOOOoooookkkKKKKKK D 2 bbbbBBBtttTTbbbXXX
vvVVVDDDDdddooOOOzzzZZZZ rrrRRRRzzzZZZpppPPPkkkKKTTTttt

(vid: Yuri Lane, human beatbox, wid harmonica)

1. EWanDan video. What a great riddim he makes! Jiyo mere laal!

2. Yuri Lane is un-B-lee-viable. The things Tim Barsky does to a flute (so well) Yuri does to a harmonica. Check out the video. ZZZZDOZZZZNOTZZZMISSZZIT.

Do it, Solo

2006-06-22T04:12:00.000-07:00

Most of these geniuses are either doing beatbox versions of phophular songs or freestyle riddims. However, (((psst psst))) if they were doing actual komposition (((taka-bhush)), it would have to be the soundtrack of komputation (((tik-tak-toe))).

There is absolutely no doub-dt-bdbdbd-ttt in my mind-b-t about that. So here I lissst some of the videos with the best-t-b-d, according to me (((trrrrrrrr))).

With the moon revolving the tides change, the sea, aided by the wind perhaps, generates pools and streams on the beach, manmade filters, child's play, force water to stand still or flow in certain preordained directions. Logic can be sandbased, computation can be executed by waves. Every now and again somebody comes up with some arcane use of loops and to those who can appreciate the novelty it is as if you learned to drink water in an entirely new way.

- from Software Wants To Loop Forever [LINK]

Fadereu's Beatbox Select (((OMMMMM)))

1. Some anonymous artist doing a free style at a Beatbox Effex 2003 in California.

2. Killa Kella's recorded video, Secrets. It's pretty cool, but I prefer live gigs.

3. So here is a video of of Killa Kela, live. THIS IS MINDBLOWING, OKHAI??!!!

Fascinating also is Kela's scratch pad which he used to pen the lyrics of his latest album, Elocution.

Exxtraa

For some strange reason, I want to have a spliff smoke with this guy someday.

Zambetti Turing Machine

2006-06-12T02:18:00.000-07:00

So here is the first graphical representation of a Turing Machine, using 5 colours and two states (imagine the complexity with trisate!). There is also a Java applet which explains the opration very clearly and concisely. I think this is a fabulous work by a very inventive artist:

Modeled in a minimalist style that borrows heavily from mid 1980s video game concepts, the proposed representation is designed to appeal to those attracted to exploratory interaction with software. The minimalist interface allows for the complexity of displaying operations over time via buildup of graphics.

Now, if only Zambetti had added midi-music to his program, you could debug the code with it.

[LINK]

Also:

Check out RadarFunk, which is more of a very clever toy interface for creating music with patterns. This could very well be installed in nightclubs as an experiments thingie

Datafunk Crystalpunk

2006-06-09T02:13:00.000-07:00

Listening to: "Building A Religion", by Cake

I am learning about cognitive style, from Tufte
Of Power Point. How to tile, the right style
My tesselations are going down the Nile (POSE!)
He signed the book, when I met Roger Penrose
Working out, eating no junk, to be a hunk
I'm a crystal punk, with crystal eyes and datafunk
I'm the science of art, the art of science
The sign of heart, engineering con-science

The 7-Day Search Meme

2006-06-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

---------------fade/in--------------

Dear Brain -

Pinky challenges you to prove that we have conquered the
world. Your time begins now.

Story: Paramvir Singh (30, sardaar) is a dedicated and
talented banda. He's a crossmedia (print/web/film) artist,
and an exceptional thinker. Naturally, he finds it difficult
to promote himself. *sigh*

This herculean task now falls upon Pinky to ensure that Param finds
a freelance project of his liking, as soon as possible. Pinky is certain
that there are people who need him right now
in Bombay, but don't know him.

Everyday the Brain forwards petitions aplenty, but the results
never come. What a f*&^ing waste of bandwidth! Lets try
and make one small thing work, eh Brain? Paramvir Singh's resume
is copied below, and I vouch my word for your voucher, babydolls.
Egg-jack-lee.

Your task is this! Get him a freelance
project within - that's right - 7 days. As soon as
he gets the project, Pinky will post the result of this "7-Day Search Meme"
on my blog. You can Google "Paramvir Singh"
to find the result three days from now.

You have 7 days to accomplish this job.

Suggestion: Do not mass-forward this notice.
Send it only to one person who might be interested
in hiring Param, and send the mail with a small personal
note.

*spit bubble supernova, bankshoot*

- Pinky

----------------fade/out------------------

By my green candlestick!!

2006-06-01T01:04:00.000-07:00

[The illustration on the right is by Heath W. Robinson, entitled Modern carpet designs may provide endless entertainment for your guests - ]

I'm reading a 78-page essay by Christopher M. Fairman called Fuck, a very important document I feel:

This Article explores the intersection of the word fuck and the law. In four major areas, fuck impacts the law: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. However, to fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power must be tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo.

If you're unable to download this from the lovely SSRN document delivery service, email me and I'll forward the PDF to you. I'm also SIMULTANEOUSLY reading (or sampling?) a small translated excerpt from pataphysician (or pataphysicist?) Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi:

PAPA UBU: Oh, I'll give in to the temptation. For shitsky's sakesky, for sakesky's shitsky, if I ever meet him somewhere in the woods, he'll have a hard time of it.
MAMA UBU: Oh good! Papa Ubu, now you have become a real man.

It is not entirely obvious from the beauty of this play that it was written by Jarry at the age of 15. This is enlightenment, you see? That moment when everything becomes clear as it was on the day of birth. I should write a play from which it is not entirely obvious that it was written when I was still....in other words - when my diapers were my dialectic canvas.

The Bhook of Changez (The Hunger of...the Khan??)

2006-05-30T00:33:00.000-07:00

Frenlish or Englench? I'm reading an essay called Liquid Grammar, Liquid Style by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein "On the East-Asian Way of Using English or Reflections on the "Linguistic Air-Guitar". He too shares my view that mutation of languages in East Asia represent the creation process on an entirely new language. He cites some hilarious phrases, and some very sensible observations:

....in Asia this phenomenon is more frequent. Foreign language words are often used as effective tools without creating language by relying on their visual function. These words are to be understood as silent (to be seen rather than heard), expressing a style rather than a clear semantic message.

Of course, this transition is hand-in-hand with the shifting scales of power between the East and the West over the last century. In fact, languages are the real empires and they are not controlled by people (quite the contrary). Sanskrit was being studied in China extensively for this reason, the Chinese know the power of language. "Steal the beams, change the pillars.." says their 8-legged Book. The fact that a large population of urban Indians survive on Chinese street food (cooked by slant-eye d chefs from the North-east of India!) is evidence that the beams have already been stolen. By using EA English one intends, says Thorsten:

(1) To be respectful towards the English language (and thus to degrade oneself because "we cannot say these things in Chinese or Japanese"). At the same time, by distorting it, one ends up being disrespectful towards English.

(2) To colonize the English language by using it, though at the same time being aware that one is colonized by it through its use.

All this makes a lot of sense in terms of my own evolution as a writer/performer (and joker) but the most revelatory conclusion by the author is here:

from the outset EA English was not supposed to be "real English" but what people imagine English to be. The words in magazines, pictorial as they are, ask to be entered like one enters a dream. The words and sentences are silent and mysterious and the opposite of concrete: they have the fleeting character of words overheard on television or of words written by a talented computer which has language but no thought processes. They also resemble the language of e-mails because they have neither the presence of spoken speech nor the documentary commitment of traditional letters.

Bingo! Brillianto! And it is no suprise that he ends by a nod to Deleuze & Guattari (hurray!) or that he teached in Finland *wink*.

The Bridge Of Rama & Computability

2006-05-29T04:06:00.000-07:00

What a glorious day! I have found a relationship between sequential logic, Rama's Bridge to cross over to Lanka. Also, another symmetry between Shiva Sutras (the laws of Panini's grammar for Sanskrit, a kind of periodic table for phonemes) & Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Elements (PDF). But it gets more mysterious, boys - think of the following process as an algorithm:

They stood in one long line and passed the hills from shoulder to shoulder, all the while repeating aloud the Name of Rama. Off and on, they also uprooted huge trees, and passed them onward to the bridge side, where Nala and Nila were casting the materials into the water.

The whole of that day they worked without rest and with no thought of food or sustenance. They built a length of 14 yojanas in one day. Refreshed by a good night's sleep, they rose before dawn, during the Brahma muhurtha itself, and resumed work. They acclaimed with cheers, "Jai to Sri Ramachandra, our Lord," and hurried to the various corners of the land in search of hills and mountains. They brought them on to the shore and piled them there for being used by Nala and Nila.

The second day, the bridge was extended by another twenty yojanas; the next day, they were able to build it for a further length of twenty one yojanas; the fourth day saw the bridge extending over a further twenty two yojanas. And, on the fifth day, by constructing a further twenty three yojanas, they completed the 100-yojana bridge in another successful spurt.

Thus, Nala and Nila, unconcerned with exhaustion or the need for rest, intent on fulfilling the task assigned by Rama for the completion of his mission, were able to announce in the Presence of Rama that the bridge was ready, because his Name and Form were ever before those who toiled for its completion.

Rama was informed through Sugriva that the hundred-yojana bridge, he had resolved upon was finished and ready to be used.

The Algebra of Quota Protests

2006-05-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

Emphasis: Control and generation of Electric power equals political power on a democratic stage. There is no difference, virtually. The government acts as a clearing, forwarding and distribution agent, sometimes by proxy.

Part - I

When you study at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, one of most enduring lessons you learn during the four-year course is a line attributed to David Gilmour : "If you give a stratocaster to a monkey, don't expect him to sound like Pink Floyd." The question the Indian government faces now is how many Givson Jumbos should be given out to rhesus macaques, how many Hobner F-holes to langurs, and so on, while the guitars gently weep.

According to the Manmohan Singh government, 27% seats at medical education institutes should be reserved for people of backwards classes (OBCs), perhaps even more. The students are arguing for a meritocracy, while the government leverages its options to protect the electorate. Both parties ignore the massive penetration of the Internet in India, and the merits of long-distance education. Is it possible that with the presence of countless cybercafes and mobile phones, educational institutions
may have to radically alter what they currently offer?

They have always offered degrees and jobs, yes, but there is a sudden realisation in the face of quota protests that some education could also be (possibly) imparted by these institutions. The Indian Institutes of Technology may admit some of the best brains in the country, but once inside - they offer little more than textbooks, bored professors, sexual repression, and out-of-date laboratory equipment. Please note that such an atmosphere can prepare you for hell in professional life, and as such, it is the best education you can get anywhere on earth. In comparison to this, the cybercafes of India offer everything except coffee - airconditioning in the summer, casual banter between cubicles, cheap rates for surfing, and occasional hideout for a
snog with your mate (IITs on the other hand, have a pathetic sex ratio).

The students of India are slow on the uptake that the institutions they are fighting to get inside "are" the factories that generate backward classes. Educational reservations are really mechanisms of distributing the profits of economic liberalization, and a disturbing type of bribery to the poor. After all, which sensible farmer would dream of reaping the harvest before he has sown it? Which teacher would expect a dakshina before his student graduates? The Government of India has a massive programme for self-employment, and it is surprising that self-education has never occurred to them as an alternative approach to learning. How can it, when the government has little or no role to play in it?

The real question is how many students of this country cheated through their 7th grade algebra paper, or solved the equations themselves. Here is presented the algebra of reservation quotas – for all to see and critique.

Part II

Asumption: There are two kinds of people – forward and backward.

Logic: It is common sense that only backward people would want reservation quotas, since it is only in their favor. If you're a forward rooting for backward quota, you are really backward in forward clothing and should be beaten up.

Algebra: Let us assume the population of India is P, and that Y people are already inside the said institutions which take in X people every year, and emit the same number annually. It is widely rumored that India is a democratic republic, where more than 50% majority is needed to pass any bill as a law. Now, the proposition of reservation quotas effectively says that:

More than 50% of X students seeking admission to institutions containing
Y people are backward, and therefore need at least 50% reservation for
those people (sic). X/2 students are backward, at least, and the same
number forward when they get in.

Number of people in society total at this time are (P-Y), out of which X are seeking admission. If India is a democracy it is necessary that more than (P-Y)/2 people are backward, and that is why they are given 50% reservation. X/2 backward people are added to the institutions and that same number pass out as 'forward" graduates or retirees. The total number of people of both kinds in society, outside of the Y people undergoing "forwardification" now changes:

Less than (P-Y)/2 would be added with X/2 = forwards

More than (P-Y)/2 – X/2 = backwards

For the reservation of 50% for forwards to remain in effect, it is necessary
that, assuming that the Y people who have gained access to institutions
do not count yet:

(P-Y)/2 – X/2>(P-Y)/2 + X/2
OR
X<0
…………..which is an impossibility!

So the situation will keep oscillating between forwards and backwards
having the upper hand. In fact, it would be necessary to ensure that
more than 50% people remain backwards for reservation laws to be
effective. The law will unquestionable lead society to a situation
where a minority would be ruling over a majority.

A majority of Indians believe that this is already the case.

Part III - The Truth

1. All industries and large-scale organisations run on electricity, including
the supply of water, illumination, airconditioning, and communication.

2. The nation state depends on electricity to maintain its relevance. If the
government cannot provide electricity to its people, it has no reason to exist. The constitution was also printed on a Movable Type press (which runs on electricity too)

3. In 1910 when electricity was brought to Bombay, and mill workers were
expected to work overtime in the night, they revolted. This started the nationalism movement which overthrew the British Empire in 20 years.

4. Energy prices have been raised in the shadow of the protests, quietly - by Reliance. The government says that there is no more subsidy available. The UPA government has focussed most of its attention on nuclear plants and the energy problem since its inception.

5. All educational institutions depend solely on electricity for their functioning. They are, in fact, social machines that run on electricity. Can you imagine an IIT without electricity?

6. Essentially, reservation quotas are a way of distributing electricity (for studying) to aspiring students on a caste to caste basis. Shocking, isn't it?