May 2015

two fun smackdowns

Comments Off on two fun smackdowns

1. Noam Chomsky vs a "popular atheist and torture-supporter".

2. Jon Stewart vs NY Times reporter who facilitated Bush's "fall product rollout" (prepping America for an elective war in '02) with an alarming story about nuclear tubes. Part 1 / Part 2

Smackee #1 just isn't very smart and posted his email exchange thinking he'd gotten the better of Chomsky. Smackee #2 was riding high during the days of Bush war fever but now claims not to have known she was part of a promotional push that was glaringly obvious outside her circle of consensus.

Kara Hammond, "Remember These Things" exhibition

Comments Off on Kara Hammond, "Remember These Things" exhibition

kara_hammond_the-cloud-server650

Image from Kara Hammond's show at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria VA.

Combining original drawings and quotes with historical prints and appropriated photographs on a backdrop of dictionary wallpaper, Kara Hammond’s installation, “Remember These Things”, is a response to the ongoing revolution in information technology. Exploring ideas about the meaning of libraries in relation to knowledge, the work juxtaposes ink wash images of hard boiled detectives “seeking information” with photographs of information storage from the past to the present.

Some earlier posts on Hammond's work: 1 / 2 / 3

brief glimpse of reality through crack in spacetime

Comments Off on brief glimpse of reality through crack in spacetime

the_real_mccain

Was watching Senator John McCain, the "foreign policy grownup" who appears regularly on talk shows advocating a more muscular U.S. military presence around the globe, when suddenly the LED screen "glitched" and for a few brief seconds I... saw his true face. Fortunately I had enough time to do a screenshot.

hat tip aoifeml

firefox again

Comments Off on firefox again

Lauren Weinstein, When Mozilla's Fanatics Make Us All Look Bad

Have noted this attitude problem of the Mozilla developers -- looks like these egomaniacs are on the verge of driving Firefox and a large chunk of the web off a cliff over the https thing. Weinstein writes:

What they're discussing for Firefox is turning off unencrypted http support. You're not able to run encrypted https? Too bad, Firefox users won't be able to access your sites. Or perhaps for a while they'll just get a big red warning telling would-be visitors that you're subhuman slime who just doesn't care about security.

Plus -- you guessed it -- it seems that they'd like to make this an Internet standard so you'd effectively have no escape regardless of which browser was in use.

Meanwhile Firefox continues to worsen with each accelerated update. For example, I can't page back in my dump.fm log now without getting browser windows of blank space from never-loading images -- this starts happening about 5-10 pages back -- the buggy behavior appeared with FF version 37. Mozilla's Seamonkey browser isn't affected by this contagion. Am contemplating my future as an Opera user.

random meaningless tumblr art

Comments Off on random meaningless tumblr art

tumblr_random_art

OK it's not truly meaningless, was just clickbaiting. Visually it's kind of intriguing. Graffiti-oid comic book surrealist panels on canvas, hanging on walls with softly sprayed graffiti-oid floor-to-ceiling imagery that somewhat mimics the panels, but with less tonal range.
It's meaningless because there is no context or explanation. Who? Where? When? Why? How? What did eyewitnesses say? If you were standing in this room would the art be good or would it "thin out"?
The pic appeared on Stephanie C. Davidson's Rising Tensions tumblr, always trenchant/entertaining.
She reblogged it about midway along the chain of 83 notes (currently). That chain originated with a post of the pic on Vacations and Tennis, a tumblr of eyegrabbing images with no captions or explanations -- one person's taste (presumably) in random interesting stuff.
The post is captioned "60197762097" and the pic is captioned "http://41.media.tumblr.com/cac61d3a2537603294bb49b7b415127b/tumblr_msk2q5Qapr1qaukwao1_1280.jpg" -- thank you David Karp for the ultimate lazy naming scheme.
The true so-called shitpic is not images blurred out by repeated instagram captures, it's a pic that exists in a void of senseless regurgitation. Lot of baggage to heap on one moderately compelling image but it must be said.
It's always possible someone will recognize the pic and email to say, "that's _______, of course, how could you not know that?" That would be documentation after the fact, completely justifying the anonymous cool-hunting.

Update: The "how could you not know that" reply took about 5 minutes. A few people noted that I could have just reverse image searched it in Google. Bamboo found the source page. Right, yes, since we live in a world of algorithmic visual intelligence the "caption" and "the art review" are probably useless backup (as long as the algorithms function). The superfluous art review for this project: "the work does not improve with increased number or clarity of documentation jpegs."

Update 2: Apparently the Goog's visual search algos have improved since a previous attempt to use them -- yes it's been that long.