Umberto Eco said in one of his books (roughly) that if a book gets quoted enough times it becomes an inquestionable authority. He said it about some pseudo-scientific books (like the ones that speak about Atlantis, using older similar books as evidence), but I think it sadly applies very well to (some/most) postmodernist/cultural studies writings (like the essay of "proto-cyborg Kevin Warwick"), too...
Well, some people have just read too many books, so that when they watch movie, they automatically think of all these things they have read and that are connected with the movie. Maybe the Wachowskis didn't even intend those references to Baudrillard and Descartes, but those people who analyse the movie have read them, so they put two and two together, and, presto, they have their bachelor's thesis (or article) ready...
At my university's (Tartu University, Estonia) library building, there are a group of assorted (vt220, vt510 etc) terminals, mostly used for email access and mudding. One of them (I don't know the type) has exactly the look of a TV-typewriter - small black and green screen, and a keyboard that feels like exactly like an old typewriter. It's like out of the movie "Brazil"... I have no idea how old it may be, but judging by the look it's definately over 20 years. As there weren't too many mainframes around here and those that existed have all probably been disassembled, it may as well be (one of) the oldest running pieces of computer hardware. I doubt whether there's any older Soviet computers running around here.
As for software, then last year in an AI class we were demonstrated the 'product' of a voice synthesizer program dating back to late 1970's or early 1980's. The audio file was quite new, but I don't know whether it was ripped from an audio tape or freshly made - the voice was speaking Russian with a terrible Estonian accent:D
It seems to me that discount-type ads appear mostly in local media - local (-ish) newspapers (which Wall Street Journal isn't, I think), radiostations (which usually don't cover an area too big), cable TV (which I don't know too much about). Advertising a new chain mall located in downtown Des Moines in Wall Street Journal isn't cost-effective and wouldn't probably even reach the right audience. Advertising New Coke in Wall Street Journal would be a better idea, as it (New Coke) would be on sale everywhere, you only need to draw people's attention on your product (and that's where brand-building steps in).
I remember seeing an earlier prototype version (?) of this thing on an Australian TV show called "Beyound 2000" sometime in the middle of the nineties (the show being even older). The prototype was cylinder-shaped and could only display primitive things like straight lines, but the idea was basically the same.
Consider a TV commercial that showed, say, a cannon firing hamsters at the letters "outpost.com", with no explanation of who or what outpost.com actually was. The thing would fail, and fail miserably (and, in fact, has).
The thing with ads is that they're not meant for conscious consumption. Their only purpose is to plant some trademark or brand in your brain - which, as I can see, worked for outpost.com:7 It's the same with newspaper (and radio?) ads: you don't pay much attention to them, but enough to get the "oh, I've seen it somewhere" feeling when you see the thing advertised and prefer the familiar product to one you dont know.
What's so different about banner ads? I think it's that they take you _directly_ to the place/thing advertised; you don't need to have, let's say, the.net name planeted in your brain to recognize it some time later. That's what the marketers fail to realise. A banner ad is like a sign saying "record shop around the corner" (or something like that) - no need for subliminal message there...
Well, then we should call it something else, until people notice it - biotech revolt, for instance. Or, inspired by Star Wars, the biotech rebellion. "Join the biotech rebellion today! Fight for a better biosphere!"
The first thing I thought about reading the headline was Normality, because at some point in this game (one of the funniest adventure games I've ever played) you had to use a big battery and a power transmitter/receiver to power something. That's why the story was a bit disappointing for me:7
Erm... yes, I think these were the same jammers I was referring to. And what I was trying to say was, that you should better not become over-confident because of some neat gadgets that you have. There isn't too many things that a big enough and well aimed stone can't break...
We have shown that against Russian technology, we can litterally take destroy an entire modern army into mush within 90 days
A minor correction: you're talking about Russian technology that's 20 or 30 years old. I'm not quite sure how you could manage the technology they have now (or would have, if they had the money to build any...). Stealth bombers? Well, Russians discovered that when you use some kind of old radars (from WWII era), they're not so stealthy anymore. GPS? the Iraqis had GPS jammers, and it turned out that they were built in Russia. I bet there's lot more that hasn't been made public.
By the way, you don't actually need bleeding edge laser-guided weapons to destroy Russian tanks 20 years old. The guerillas in Chechnya (also called terrorists) do fine with AK-47's and RPG's. I bet they could do just as well against modern US weapons. It's not the weapons that win the war, it's what you do with them that does.
This could be argued. People did very well without a car before there were cars - did they need cars? Most people don't know what they need before they can have it (and then they still may not actually need these things). Then again, the person who invented a thing probably needed it, or knew that there would be a need for such thing.
...it took princeples found from earlier sciences and applied them. we don't have this in CS.
Yes you do! Examples?
1) Pointless to mention that a lot of, if not all CS is based on mathematics/logic/physics...
2) OOP: the concept of classes and specialization is a standard in semantic analysis at least going back to Aristotle. The hierarchy of classes was developed by the semioticians of the middle ages (or Bertrand Russell in the beginning of the 20th century...). Gottlob Frege (modern logic and class theory is based largely on his ideas) talked about objects and functions just the way they are used in OOP. If it isn't taking the principles from older sciences, then it's just another case of reinventing the wheel (and this happens quite often).
3) Frames (also related to OOP), semantic trees etc in AI research - I'm not even quite sure where these have come from, but linguistics is the probable answer...
4) From the future: Quantum and DNA computers?
As of theories about how the computer space works... Well, there are some weird ideas about human-computer interaction and intelligent systems (computers as sign systems), but I couldn't find anything specific at the moment, so you'll just have to live with the knowledge of the information and ideas being out there (search for computational semiotics in google).
Isn't it where all the innovation comes from?
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Innovation on the Edge?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The edge is where the known meets the unknown. That's where all innovation comes from - you find out or do something new, something that has never been done before. What new can you find in a territory already explored? Only a place that hasn't been explored yet (or some interesting bugs/plants/animals).
I guess the concept of art is very subjective. Everybody has a different concept of it. The same applies to music and poetry, too. Theodor Adorno from the Frankfurt School of sociology said in the 1930's (I think) that jazz isn't real music, but just some noise. Then there's people who say that free-verse poetry isn't actually poetry. Beatnicks (Allen Ginzberg, for example) wrote poetry the write-on-impulse way, and there actually is something in there. Then there are many people who write verses that rhyme well, but are actually meaningless. The line between is and isn't is very thin, and constantly moving.
Not speaking out against communism doesn't automatically mean that you're a communist. It's just as well as saying that everybody was a nazi in Hitler's Germany. As I said, noone was forced to be a communist. Everybody was just forced not to publicly speak out against the regime.
Some crime theories say the same about abiding the law. Noone forces you to be a good citizen, there's no policeman behind you and threatening you. Everybody is free to do what they want (because all humans are free in their judgement), but when they do something that's not socially acceptable, then they just have to face the consequences.
Communism has never collapsed, because......it has never even existed. USSR was a socialist country, so were all its satellites. Socialism was suppposed to be just a preliminary stage before communism, which never was.
Communism doesn't mean that "everyone works on it", it means only that everyone owns it. In USSR, everything belonged to the state which was supposed to belong to the people, so theoretically I as a citizen of the USSR (only a child back then) owned a microscopic share of everything, but didn't work anywhere.
The idea that communism is "everyone gets paid the same, no matter what they do" is wrong. Being equal didn't, according to (Neo-)Marxist theory mean "finishing the same" (=getting paid the same), but having the same starting position - equal opportunities to get a good education etc. It's kind of the same in the Open Source community - you get your name higher in the list, if you do more work (correct me if I'm wrong), and some people get paid for working on some certain thing.
Why do some projects get "less hot" do work on? Maybe it's because there's nothing more to do?
Correction: Nobody was _forced_ to be a communist in USSR. The constitution stated freedom of thought etc, it wasn't against the law not to be a communist. You could live all life without being a member of the Party (and being a member didn't mean that you're a communist, usually people joined the Party because you couldn't go abroad if you weren't a Party member...). According to the constitution everyone was free to found their own party or express their thoughts in any other way. It just happened that the KGB (which no law mentioned as far as I know) didn't like it. So, nobody forced the people in USSR to be communists, but they strongly suggested it...
"It only takes a single grain of sand to move the world" - Mao Zedong
I can't help but begin this post with a cynical remark (sorry, but I've had a bad week...) You don't need masses for a job that one man can do... Lee Harvey Oswald thought he was a patriot, too. And the man who murdered Pim Fortyn (a right-wing populist politician from Netherlands; I don't support that kind of politicians, by the way) said he did it for the sake of the country...
Now, what I really wanted to say was, that Josef Goebbels would be proud of the Bush administration's rhetorics. I mean, calling a law that just invites people to be unpatriotic "The Patriot Act"... Another thing that's just impressive was how in the news today, someone from the Pentagon or US government talked about how the Iraqis may have destroyed all their weapons of mass destruction before the war had begun, and he made it sound as if it had been something unspeakable and unheard of ("how dare they?" was the message)...
Please think about it a bit before modding me down. Then my karma at least served some purpose.
Any random garbage isn't art. I think (and I hope) I'm not overgeneralizing, if I say, that only mediocre artists say so - as an excuse for them being so bad. And not only the artists (""), but also the people who think that anyone who has graduated art school (or whatever) is automatically an artist. Sure, sometimes you really do need to have some background information to truly understand a work of art (or a book or a film or a song...), but "you just don't understand it because you don't have the education" is not an excuse in my opinion. I've seen paintings that look like just some random brushstrokes, but make me feel like I was listening to really really good music. And then there are others that ARE just random brushstrokes - "avant garde", but not art, at least not for me. (NO, I'm not even close to being an expert...)
Of course it could be, that all those so-called art people are just trying to fuck everybody's brains with their abstract art and avant garde music (made with chainsaws, hammmers etc) so that they could rule the world. In that case, I'm doomed (listening to Einstürzende Neubauten is to be blamed)
PS. For the n-th time today, I apologize for sounding bitter and cynical. It hasn't been a good week for me. Sorry.
Re:the question isn't "is it art?", it's "do I car
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HTML: Is it Art?
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· Score: 1
I honestly don't understand why people assign so much value to calling something art. It's as if calling something art assigns it to a higher plane where it can't be questioned.
That's because calling something art... assigns it to a higher plane where it can't be questioned. "...What are you talking about? It IS art, it must be, because HE went to an academy and got his diploma so he must know what art is, whereas YOU are only an ordinary person who knows nothing about art. For Christ's sake, even I see it's art, although I don't understand it..." etc. It's like sticking a sign that says "This is an orange" on an apple and then insisting that it must be an apple, because it's been written.
Enough of cynicism, but. Art is what you think it is, I think.
Before I begin, a quote about definitions. "To define is to limit". I don't know who said it, but I completely agree with it.
And, before I finish (sorry, I'm not in a mood to start ranting about art), I suggest you to read "The Origin of the Work of Art" by Martin Heidegger. It's not an easy read, but I like the summary: All art is poetry. There, now have it:7
First. I haven't seen those piles of fat, but I (try hard not to) imagine they might have been ugly. But who says ugly can't be esthetic? Ugly is an esthetic category just like beautiful. Take, for instance, Baudelaire's poems - one is about a rotten corpse. A rotten corpse isn't a pleasant thing to look at at all, but I really like that poem.
Second. Abstract art doesn't necessarily mean cow corpses or whatever (I've seen it called protest-art). Think of abstract paintings. The day before yesterday, I was reading (quite incidentally) an art book in a book shop, when an abstract painting caught my eye. It was just some criss-crossing black stripes (a black and white repro of the painting...), but it felt (I can't say "looked", because there was not too much to look at) so fucking beautiful... It definately had esthetics.
This experience made me completely dump my previous attitude of abstract art as "the artist trying to show how she would paint if she could paint". Screw the pragmatic logic, says me (depressed and tired).
Slashdot Mirror
(couldn't think of anything intelligent to say)
Umberto Eco said in one of his books (roughly) that if a book gets quoted enough times it becomes an inquestionable authority. He said it about some pseudo-scientific books (like the ones that speak about Atlantis, using older similar books as evidence), but I think it sadly applies very well to (some/most) postmodernist/cultural studies writings (like the essay of "proto-cyborg Kevin Warwick"), too...
Well, some people have just read too many books, so that when they watch movie, they automatically think of all these things they have read and that are connected with the movie. Maybe the Wachowskis didn't even intend those references to Baudrillard and Descartes, but those people who analyse the movie have read them, so they put two and two together, and, presto, they have their bachelor's thesis (or article) ready...
(essays generated with The Postmodernism Generator)
As for software, then last year in an AI class we were demonstrated the 'product' of a voice synthesizer program dating back to late 1970's or early 1980's. The audio file was quite new, but I don't know whether it was ripped from an audio tape or freshly made - the voice was speaking Russian with a terrible Estonian accent :D
It seems to me that discount-type ads appear mostly in local media - local (-ish) newspapers (which Wall Street Journal isn't, I think), radiostations (which usually don't cover an area too big), cable TV (which I don't know too much about). Advertising a new chain mall located in downtown Des Moines in Wall Street Journal isn't cost-effective and wouldn't probably even reach the right audience. Advertising New Coke in Wall Street Journal would be a better idea, as it (New Coke) would be on sale everywhere, you only need to draw people's attention on your product (and that's where brand-building steps in).
I remember seeing an earlier prototype version (?) of this thing on an Australian TV show called "Beyound 2000" sometime in the middle of the nineties (the show being even older). The prototype was cylinder-shaped and could only display primitive things like straight lines, but the idea was basically the same.
The thing with ads is that they're not meant for conscious consumption. Their only purpose is to plant some trademark or brand in your brain - which, as I can see, worked for outpost.com :7 It's the same with newspaper (and radio?) ads: you don't pay much attention to them, but enough to get the "oh, I've seen it somewhere" feeling when you see the thing advertised and prefer the familiar product to one you dont know.
What's so different about banner ads? I think it's that they take you _directly_ to the place/thing advertised; you don't need to have, let's say, the .net name planeted in your brain to recognize it some time later. That's what the marketers fail to realise. A banner ad is like a sign saying "record shop around the corner" (or something like that) - no need for subliminal message there...
Well, then we should call it something else, until people notice it - biotech revolt, for instance. Or, inspired by Star Wars, the biotech rebellion. "Join the biotech rebellion today! Fight for a better biosphere!"
The first thing I thought about reading the headline was Normality, because at some point in this game (one of the funniest adventure games I've ever played) you had to use a big battery and a power transmitter/receiver to power something. That's why the story was a bit disappointing for me :7
Erm... yes, I think these were the same jammers I was referring to. And what I was trying to say was, that you should better not become over-confident because of some neat gadgets that you have. There isn't too many things that a big enough and well aimed stone can't break...
A minor correction: you're talking about Russian technology that's 20 or 30 years old. I'm not quite sure how you could manage the technology they have now (or would have, if they had the money to build any...). Stealth bombers? Well, Russians discovered that when you use some kind of old radars (from WWII era), they're not so stealthy anymore. GPS? the Iraqis had GPS jammers, and it turned out that they were built in Russia. I bet there's lot more that hasn't been made public.
By the way, you don't actually need bleeding edge laser-guided weapons to destroy Russian tanks 20 years old. The guerillas in Chechnya (also called terrorists) do fine with AK-47's and RPG's. I bet they could do just as well against modern US weapons. It's not the weapons that win the war, it's what you do with them that does.
This could be argued. People did very well without a car before there were cars - did they need cars? Most people don't know what they need before they can have it (and then they still may not actually need these things). Then again, the person who invented a thing probably needed it, or knew that there would be a need for such thing.
Yes you do! Examples?
1) Pointless to mention that a lot of, if not all CS is based on mathematics/logic/physics...
2) OOP: the concept of classes and specialization is a standard in semantic analysis at least going back to Aristotle. The hierarchy of classes was developed by the semioticians of the middle ages (or Bertrand Russell in the beginning of the 20th century...). Gottlob Frege (modern logic and class theory is based largely on his ideas) talked about objects and functions just the way they are used in OOP. If it isn't taking the principles from older sciences, then it's just another case of reinventing the wheel (and this happens quite often).
3) Frames (also related to OOP), semantic trees etc in AI research - I'm not even quite sure where these have come from, but linguistics is the probable answer...
4) From the future: Quantum and DNA computers?
As of theories about how the computer space works... Well, there are some weird ideas about human-computer interaction and intelligent systems (computers as sign systems), but I couldn't find anything specific at the moment, so you'll just have to live with the knowledge of the information and ideas being out there (search for computational semiotics in google).
The edge is where the known meets the unknown. That's where all innovation comes from - you find out or do something new, something that has never been done before. What new can you find in a territory already explored? Only a place that hasn't been explored yet (or some interesting bugs/plants/animals).
Umm. As Wookie is one of the best UK garage artists, I'm sure he has a lot of fans. By the way, why should it be a fetish thing?
Oh, you were talking about the other Wookie...
I guess the concept of art is very subjective. Everybody has a different concept of it. The same applies to music and poetry, too. Theodor Adorno from the Frankfurt School of sociology said in the 1930's (I think) that jazz isn't real music, but just some noise. Then there's people who say that free-verse poetry isn't actually poetry. Beatnicks (Allen Ginzberg, for example) wrote poetry the write-on-impulse way, and there actually is something in there. Then there are many people who write verses that rhyme well, but are actually meaningless. The line between is and isn't is very thin, and constantly moving.
Not speaking out against communism doesn't automatically mean that you're a communist. It's just as well as saying that everybody was a nazi in Hitler's Germany. As I said, noone was forced to be a communist. Everybody was just forced not to publicly speak out against the regime.
Some crime theories say the same about abiding the law. Noone forces you to be a good citizen, there's no policeman behind you and threatening you. Everybody is free to do what they want (because all humans are free in their judgement), but when they do something that's not socially acceptable, then they just have to face the consequences.
Communism has never collapsed, because... ...it has never even existed. USSR was a socialist country, so were all its satellites. Socialism was suppposed to be just a preliminary stage before communism, which never was.
Communism doesn't mean that "everyone works on it", it means only that everyone owns it. In USSR, everything belonged to the state which was supposed to belong to the people, so theoretically I as a citizen of the USSR (only a child back then) owned a microscopic share of everything, but didn't work anywhere.
The idea that communism is "everyone gets paid the same, no matter what they do" is wrong. Being equal didn't, according to (Neo-)Marxist theory mean "finishing the same" (=getting paid the same), but having the same starting position - equal opportunities to get a good education etc. It's kind of the same in the Open Source community - you get your name higher in the list, if you do more work (correct me if I'm wrong), and some people get paid for working on some certain thing.
Why do some projects get "less hot" do work on? Maybe it's because there's nothing more to do?
Correction: Nobody was _forced_ to be a communist in USSR. The constitution stated freedom of thought etc, it wasn't against the law not to be a communist. You could live all life without being a member of the Party (and being a member didn't mean that you're a communist, usually people joined the Party because you couldn't go abroad if you weren't a Party member...). According to the constitution everyone was free to found their own party or express their thoughts in any other way. It just happened that the KGB (which no law mentioned as far as I know) didn't like it. So, nobody forced the people in USSR to be communists, but they strongly suggested it...
I can't help but begin this post with a cynical remark (sorry, but I've had a bad week...) You don't need masses for a job that one man can do... Lee Harvey Oswald thought he was a patriot, too. And the man who murdered Pim Fortyn (a right-wing populist politician from Netherlands; I don't support that kind of politicians, by the way) said he did it for the sake of the country...
Now, what I really wanted to say was, that Josef Goebbels would be proud of the Bush administration's rhetorics. I mean, calling a law that just invites people to be unpatriotic "The Patriot Act"... Another thing that's just impressive was how in the news today, someone from the Pentagon or US government talked about how the Iraqis may have destroyed all their weapons of mass destruction before the war had begun, and he made it sound as if it had been something unspeakable and unheard of ("how dare they?" was the message)...
Please think about it a bit before modding me down. Then my karma at least served some purpose.
Any random garbage isn't art. I think (and I hope) I'm not overgeneralizing, if I say, that only mediocre artists say so - as an excuse for them being so bad. And not only the artists (""), but also the people who think that anyone who has graduated art school (or whatever) is automatically an artist. Sure, sometimes you really do need to have some background information to truly understand a work of art (or a book or a film or a song...), but "you just don't understand it because you don't have the education" is not an excuse in my opinion. I've seen paintings that look like just some random brushstrokes, but make me feel like I was listening to really really good music. And then there are others that ARE just random brushstrokes - "avant garde", but not art, at least not for me. (NO, I'm not even close to being an expert...)
Of course it could be, that all those so-called art people are just trying to fuck everybody's brains with their abstract art and avant garde music (made with chainsaws, hammmers etc) so that they could rule the world. In that case, I'm doomed (listening to Einstürzende Neubauten is to be blamed)
PS. For the n-th time today, I apologize for sounding bitter and cynical. It hasn't been a good week for me. Sorry.
That's because calling something art... assigns it to a higher plane where it can't be questioned. "...What are you talking about? It IS art, it must be, because HE went to an academy and got his diploma so he must know what art is, whereas YOU are only an ordinary person who knows nothing about art. For Christ's sake, even I see it's art, although I don't understand it..." etc. It's like sticking a sign that says "This is an orange" on an apple and then insisting that it must be an apple, because it's been written.
Enough of cynicism, but. Art is what you think it is, I think.
Before I begin, a quote about definitions. "To define is to limit". I don't know who said it, but I completely agree with it.
:7
And, before I finish (sorry, I'm not in a mood to start ranting about art), I suggest you to read "The Origin of the Work of Art" by Martin Heidegger. It's not an easy read, but I like the summary: All art is poetry. There, now have it
First. I haven't seen those piles of fat, but I (try hard not to) imagine they might have been ugly. But who says ugly can't be esthetic? Ugly is an esthetic category just like beautiful. Take, for instance, Baudelaire's poems - one is about a rotten corpse. A rotten corpse isn't a pleasant thing to look at at all, but I really like that poem.
Second. Abstract art doesn't necessarily mean cow corpses or whatever (I've seen it called protest-art). Think of abstract paintings. The day before yesterday, I was reading (quite incidentally) an art book in a book shop, when an abstract painting caught my eye. It was just some criss-crossing black stripes (a black and white repro of the painting...), but it felt (I can't say "looked", because there was not too much to look at) so fucking beautiful... It definately had esthetics.
This experience made me completely dump my previous attitude of abstract art as "the artist trying to show how she would paint if she could paint". Screw the pragmatic logic, says me (depressed and tired).