When pictures live in pictures – pt2..

Couple of weeks ago I was blathering about a picture I took of a picture Jody took of Corinne taking a picture of me, and musing that the guy in the background might be looking at the same picture. Well, sure enough, turms out these guys had already beaten me to the punch..

When pictures live in pictures..

This is a photograph that I took, of a print of a photograph that Jody took, of Corinne photographing me with my own camera, which is the one that took this photograph..

… all I need now is to discover, upon zooming in, that the guy in the background is looking at a copy of this picture..

Hamlet as Facebook news feed..

If you don’t do the Facebook thing I’d imagine that this item would make little sense to you. If you do, then I think you’d have to concur with me that this is a work of no small genius. Click the pic below for the full size version..

Recursion again..

“In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.”

The post below got me thinking and, as is the way with these things, I discover that all the time I’ve been banging on about recursion on this blog, there has been, sitting at the back of a shelf in my kitchen in Manchester, an unopened box of this product..

For clarificatiion, here’s the dictionary definition..

Recursion

See “Recursion”..

A nice spot of recursion for a Thursday evening..

Still my favourite t-shirt..

Limits, again

Am reminded today, for some unfathomable reason, of a thing I used to feel when younger – not so much these days – a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia, of already missing the place I was in. I remember my first real trip abroad, must have been about 13-14, wandering round Malta in the blazing heat. Came across the remains of some old Roman settlement and was suddenly hit with a wave of sadness – that ‘you-can-never-go-down-to-the-same-river-twice’ kind of thing. I would never see this place again, not the same way. I could revisit it, but it wouldn’t be the same place, or I wouldn’t be the same me..

Anyway, used to get that a lot, as I said, not so much now. Not sure whether I miss it. Ha – not sure if I’m nostalgic for the feeling of nostalgia, that sounds like me.. On the odd occasion it does happen still, it’s usually triggered by searingly hot days, freshly-cut grass, melting tarmac, certain pieces of music, or the poetry of Borges, most notably this one.. (I make no apologies for the fact that I may have previously posted it here some time ago…)

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Remember, remember, the 27th of September..

..Google will..

Brief snippet from a piece in the Boston Globe, which I happened to find as a result of a routine Borges trawl, on how we’ve lost the art of forgetting…

“… Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form – or the Bpowerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. “What you do online is potentially there forever,” says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo – but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere.”
The personal costs of this reality are clear, but there may be broader social costs as well. “What a lot of people forget – no pun intended – is that forgetting is hard-wired,” says Mayer-Schönberger. “Cognitively and sociologically, we’ve never had to develop the capacity to forget or to put things in temporal perspective, because forgetting was built in biologically …”

The advantages of amnesia – The Boston Globe: “

(Via Boston Globe.)

Subliminal packaging

There’s a nice little design touch in the FedEx logo which I certainly wouldn’t have noticed were it not for this article..

..anybody get it without looking?

Actually, The Sneeze, which is home to the above piece, also carries my absolute favourite food review series, the marvellous ‘Steve, don’t eat it!’, which I was lucky enough to be directed to some time ago by Cheechwizard, and which I still consider to be possibly the funniest web page currently in existence..

Gene tunes

Genome Technology Daily Scan

If a Patented Gene Appears in a Song, Who Gets the Royalty?

“..Sure, genetic music was the out-of-left-field offshoot of the Human Genome Project, but we can’t deny that the field — such as it is — has shown surprising longevity. If you have a free minute, check out this newly issued patent. It covers ‘music generated by decoding and transcribing genetic information within a DNA sequence into a music signal having melody and harmony,’ according to the abstract..”

(Via Genome Technology Daily.)

Anti-piracy group pirates anti-piracy report

Now this one is right up my strasse, and no mistake..

Anti-piracy group pirates anti-piracy report: “Cory Doctorow:
A reader writes, ‘The International Chamber of Commerce ‘Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting And Piracy’ initiative has been accused of pirating thousands of documents from anti-piracy tracking service Gieschen Consultancy. The documents apparently later reappeared in a slightly different format under the ICC’s own brandname. Statement from the consultancy:’

‘The ICC and BASCAP misrepresented themselves as a partner in 2006 and 2007, gained access to proprietary information and then took what they learned and incorporated it into their own product offerings.

Its functionality, user interface, presentation, method of classification, and delivery is clearly based on our designs and existing products. It is extraordinary that an organization committed to fighting counterfeiting and piracy would steal the intellectual property of another organization.’

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

DNA Portraits: Art from within

..thanks Dosfer..

 ”Portrature that’s more than just skin-deep.”

“The process begins with the DNA being collected using a patented, non-invasive technique: using a special swab (much like a Q-tip) to painlessly collect cheek cells. The whole process is simple and takes less than 30 seconds. This sample is then sent to our highly secure, certified laboratory, where the DNA is extracted to create a unique genetic fingerprint, using a technique that takes advantage of the variation that occurs among the DNA sequence of every individual..”

DNA? Elementary, my dear Watson and Crick

April 25, 1953: Riddle of DNA’s Architecture Finally Solved: “April 25, 1953: Two researchers finally unlock the mystery of DNA’s architecture and now the real work can begin.”

(Via Wired News.)

The famous Double Helix.

(The acronym ‘DNA‘ of course stands for ‘Deoxyribonucleic Acid’ and not, as is often thought, the National Dyslexic Association..)

Me, My Soul, and I

Me, My Soul, and I: “Writer Douglas Hofstadter elaborates on his more mind-bending ideas. By Kevin Kelly from Wired Magazine.”

In 1979, an unknown just out of grad school published his first book, using a then-exotic computer to do his own typesetting. The work was the inimitable Gödel, Escher, Bach, and its creator, Douglas Hofstadter, stunned the world with his zany, in-depth, and utterly brilliant investigation of self-reference in art and mathematics. Gödel earned him a Pulitzer Prize and inspired legions of youth to study computer science, but Hofstadter always felt readers didn’t quite get it. So to make his point perfectly clear, he has expanded upon his original thesis in I Am a Strange Loop, due in March. Wired asked Hofstadter to elaborate on some of his more mind-bending ideas.
— Kevin Kelly

.. a few brief excerpts..

WIRED: How is your new book different from Gödel, which touched on physics, genetics, mathematics, and computer science?

HOFSTADTER: This time I’m only trying to figure out “What am I?”

Well, given the book’s title, you seem to have found out. But what is a strange loop?

One good prototype is the Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. A more abstract one is the sentence I am lying. Such loops are, I think anyone would agree, strange. They seem paradoxical and even strike some people as dangerous. I argue that such a strange loop, paradoxical or not, is at the core of each human being. It is an abstract pattern that gives each of us an “I,” or, if you don’t mind the term, a soul.

Does this insight increase your understanding of yourself?

Of course. I believe that a soul is an abstract pattern, and we can therefore internalize in our brain the souls of other people.

You have a great line: “I am a mirage that perceives itself.” If our fundamental sense of what is real — our own existence — is merely a self-reinforcing mirage, does that call into question the reality of the universe itself?

I don’t think so. Even though subatomic particles engage in a deeply recursive process called renormalization, they don’t contain a self-model, and everything I talk about in this book — consciousness — derives from a self-model.

One of the attractions of your writing is the wordplay, a fascination with the kind of recursions that appeal to programmers and nerds.

It is ironic because my whole life I have felt uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers. I always hope my writings will resonate with people who love literature, art, and music. But instead, a large fraction of my audience seems to be those who are fascinated by technology and who assume that I am, too.

(Via Wired News.)

I notice..

.. that there’s been a paucity of ambigrammatical material on here of late. Let’s address that right now..

Mashup Mcluhan

Since my twin themes this morning would appear for some reason to be Woody Allen and geeky t-shirts, I thought I’d take the opportunity to try a little mix’n'matching in the.. ahem, ‘contemporary’ style. So, here’s a geeky tee from the Imaginary Foundation, as spotted on boingboing..

.. and a classic clip from Annie Hall..

Big Brother’s watching himself watching you..

.. Speed cameras in the Scottish Borders may soon be monitored by security cameras to protect them from vandals, reports the BBC..

.. but how will they monitor the security cameras?..

It’s been a fairly recursive day all round. I spent the morning filling in an online application form in order to apply for an application form for a new passport. On receipt of my online application, the passport office will send me a physical application form, which I then sign and return to them, Upon receipt of the form, signed by me, they will then generate my new passport and send it to me, upon receipt of which..oh, I can’t remember now..

A bloody good read..

Being and Seeming: the Technology of Representation

The inestimable Richard Powers in stellar form. An op-ed piece that starts quite sedately as an homage to architecture as the preeminent artform..

“…Buildings embody our most profound, ambitious, and capital-intensive attempts to overhaul the conditions of existence. More than any other aesthetic instrument, monuments stand metonymically for whole cultures and eras. Old chestnut definitions for the field attest to how it incorporates the expressive capabilities of the other arts. Cathedrals are the bible in stone. The exterior of a classical facade sounds as frozen music in the mind. Archaic spaces are said to open onto pure theater, infinity made imaginable. The architect Mulciber was one of the first to be cast out of heaven. Writers, painters, and musicians had to take a number and get in line behind him. And this demonic creators masterpiece, the city of Pandemonium, has stood the test of time, outlasting all other created works except, perhaps, the first…”

..but doesn’t take long to concoct a soaring parable, somehow encompassing J.S. Mill, data structure, maps, Borges, Bayreuth, Chartres, Lewis Carroll and, of course, Manhattan..

“…You take on a virtual character and move in. For a while you are thrilled, the thrill of dice baseball, of dress-ups, of massively persistent, parallel, populated role-playing games, the rush of lying to someone at a wild party, completely reinventing who you are, and, for a while, getting away with it. You have finally found another life, a sculptable, moldable, replayable thing. You make yourself into the Count of Monte Cristo, come back to set this sleepy little bourgeois fable alight. You make yourself into Tess or Anna or Emma, and vow to stay alive, to get it right this time. You thrill to your growing stats, the heaping up of fortune here, the unlooked-for, surprising, incremental addictive payoffs of this alternate existence…”

“And then, in time, another sadness sets in. The sadness of consummation. The sadness of infinite freedom. Of save and reboot. Of having the world, in all its heft and bruise and particularity, go utterly your own way.”

Fashion victim..

“…Recently, The Star, a newspaper in Toronto did a fashion layout using some of Poster Child’s posters as a background.

To let them know that he was watching, he put the model up on the same wall as a stencil in the same scale as the photograph…” (via wooster collective)

..so, now all we need is another fashion shoot with the same model in front of the same wall, and then another stencil, and then another shoot.. and pretty damn soon we should have our very own genuine 21st century Bodhisattva…

The IBM Paradox..

.. in web form…