Things. And Stuff, too.

Re: An Astronaut's Advice ›

Do not knock.

What is is always a totality of ensembles, all present together, in an orderly series of stages of enfoldment and unfoldment, which intermingle and interpenetrate each other in principle throughout the whole of space.

When a planet absorbs a meteorite or a cat breathes, the identity of the planet or the cat is not altered.

A solid object like a rock is almost entirely filled with empty space and only feels solid due to electrical repulsion forces.

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. “Common as the air” meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving—no, demanding—of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.

For [Marius Watz, an artist working with visual abstraction] this return to tactility is an expression of the digital artist’s quest for the ultimate “high resolution” object. After all, although digital processing can now shoulder prodigious amounts of information, a physical thing for the human perceiver is still the most substantial representation of information possible. Unlike something on a screen, a real object requires no suspension of disbelief. Software-made objects are a new category: the finished product is unlike anything that could ever be molded or sculpted by hand, and yet it’s distinctly the product of human creativity.

The idea of edges, of separateness, is antithetical to the web, which as a hypermedium dissolves all boundaries, renders implicit connections explicit. Indeed, much of the power and usefulness of the web as a technology derives from the way it destroys all forms of containment and turns everything it subsumes into a part of a greater, ever shifting, amorphous whole. The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces. An electronic book is therefore a contradiction in terms. To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something’s got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

zoom

ˆ—ˆ

(via acornfables)

zoom

scienceisbeauty:

Weierstrass functions are famous for being continuous everywhere, but differentiable “nowhere”. Here is an example of one:

The graph zooms in quite a ways, and you can see that the graph does not become smooth, or linear, as a differentiable function does. However, at the last frame, the graph looks rather smooth due to computational limits of the software used, but theoretically one could zoom in forever and it would never become smooth or linear.

Wikipedia and MathWorld both have informative entries on Weierstrass functions.

Source: Weierstrass functions, Dr. Conroy’s Math Department Page, Department of Mathematics, University of Washington

I want all my possessions to be networked so I can get in touch with them via a Web site or my phone. Please, network my pants so I can go to my pants’ Web site and find out if they’re in my closet or at the cleaners, or if they need to be brought to the cleaners.
…
[The problem with developing an online network of tangible objects, besides cost of nodes] is that researchers and companies have been annoyingly slow in coming up with compelling Web of Things applications. There are environmental sensor networks that can monitor the health of crops, and you can buy large, expensive GPS sensors for tracking shipping containers. But what good does that do us consumers? Besides home-energy monitoring, the only apps Guinard [scientist, researching the Internet of Things] could name as currently in play are shoplifting security for stores and soil-moisture monitoring for plant-care services.
…
We may not even have to wait for mass-marketed tags and readers in order to start tracking our stuff. …as our mobile phones get smarter, they should be able to use their cameras to map and link that info to GPS data in order to create a map of our earthly possessions.
…
Imagine! Thanks to our phones, not only will the network know where everyone’s stuff is, but it will be easier for all of us to envy and acquire each other’s things. Finally, a solution to that vexing lack of consumerism that has been plaguing society for so long. Just please leave my pants out of it. Though if your phone happens to spot them, please have it ring my phone. I’ve been looking everywhere.

Impatient Futurist: The Internet of Things