Curiosities – St. Eutychus

Dumb Cuneiform, smart tablets: Mixing mediums and crafting messages for the ages

I love this so much. This service, Dumb Cuneiform, takes the messages you send using a frictionless, ephemeral, media transmission service built using modern ‘script’ (code and pixels) — Twitter — and converts them to a solid, long lasting, tangible message written in ancient script (cuneiform etchings). It’s brilliant.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs from my thesis that might explain why I think this is so cool.

“The written word evolved from image to word – the hieroglyphics of Egypt, to the Cuneiform text of Sumeria, to various alphabets. With alphabets came the rise of literature and scribal cultures, and the evolution of new languages. These were applied to changing mediums, from the walls of pyramids, to clay tablets, to papyrus. The rise of papyrus did not signal the end of communication with stone, just as the rise of the written word did not signal the end of visual communication. Communicative texts are produced on a space-time grid – durable media (eg stone inscriptions) emphasise time, while portable media (eg papyrus) emphasise space. This use of a medium is the choice of the communicator based on the situation and intention…

Low levels of literacy meant the first audience for written texts was smaller than a visual or spoken communicative act, but the ease of transmission of a papyrus scroll, as compared to a stone stelae, or clay tablet, transformed the reach of the written word. This reach depended on portability and repetition, or transmission of the message…

The success of any empire is proportionate to the success of its communication program. [Marshall] McLuhan expanded [Harold] Innis’ insight to suggest the empires who coped best with change had the best chance of expansion and longevity because “Any change in the forms or channels of communication, be it writing, roads, carts, ships, stone, papyrus, clay, or parchment, any change whatever has revolutionary social and political consequences.” The kingdoms that coped with this change were the kingdoms that thrived.”

You put stuff in stone if you want it to last, but to be harder to transport than paper, or the spoken word. You put stuff on paper, and make lots of copies, if you want it to spread throughout the borders of your empire (or beyond), and if you want this distribution to happen quickly. There are lots of examples of the rise and fall of empires from history that follow the Innis-McLuhan theory described above. People who grapple with how their messages can be supported by the available mediums are generally more successful than people who don’t. Here’s an example; the success of the Protestant Reformation which is often attributed to the printing press, was in part possible because the media the Reformers used was able to be spread quickly, and supported its basic thesis that people everywhere could, and should, know things about theology (the ‘priesthood of all believers’). The transmission of the key messages of the Reformation was supported by the media the Reformers used to carry these messages. The Catholic Church built big and beautiful churches out of stone, and couldn’t shift media practices — including the choice of medium — without ceding a vital point about lay people and their desire to read stuff in a language other than Latin. The war of these ’empires’ was, in some sense, determined by the media they used to fight it. Your choice of where to put stuff you want to say on the ‘space-time’ grid — timeless or timely — is important.

This service, Dumb Cuneiform, is fun because it invites us to ask questions about how we use media now, and what sort of messages we have become more likely to send via our digital media channels because they work to collapse the obstacles of space (digital messages occupy no physical space — they’re not paper or stone), and time (we can fling things across the globe instantly, they last in some sense, forever), and so cost. The ‘new media grid’ means messages are cheap to produce and last forever, but this means, too, that many more messages are produced and so nobody cares about, or can pay attention to, everything an ’empire’ writes — or everything you write. This service tips the scales back. It takes 2 weeks, and the process of etching and baking a tablet takes significantly more time than belting out a tweet.

You tweet stuff if you want to get it out fast, but to not last much beyond the average time the tweet stays on the first page of your follower’s twitter feed (unless you get your tweet favourited, which is a move towards permanence). This service is fun because it turns the nature of Twitter on its head, and maybe asks us to consider just how vapid our communication has become.

How are you using modern mediums to build something timeless — as the empire builders of the past did?

What would the internet look like if people started crafting their tweets as if they were going to be etched in stone?

November 7, 2015

Addressing #thedress

thedress

I see blue and black/grey/goldy-brown. How about you?

Anyway. What you saw isn’t really as important, in my mind, as why you saw it.

Kottke points to this pretty incredible look at how Buzzfeed managed to dominate #thedress as it moved from trend to meme to whatever it eventually became. 27 million page views. More people visited Buzzfeed’s #thedress post than live in Australia.

“This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is utterly deserving of insanely paranoid criticism just like anyone who makes money from your attention, including me. But it’s worth pointing out that their recipe for traffic seems to be: Hire tons of people; let them experiment, figure out how social media works, and repeat endlessly; with lots of snacks. Robots didn’t make this happen. It was a hint of magic, and some science.”

Anyway. En route to that thing Kottke points to, he shared a couple of nice little anecdotes that are worth capturing and filing away in the ‘stuff to use one day in a talk’ or ‘interesting life lessons’… one of Australia’s best marketing minds (in my opinion), Sean Cummins, once said at a thing I was at “genius comes through the prolific” (he said Einstein said this, but I can’t find any thing to back that up). These are nice demonstrations of that principle.

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

March 2, 2015

She shells sea shells

This is almost enough to make me want a pet hermit crab. Aki Inomata, a Japanese artist, made these (and other) 3D printed ‘shelters’ for some hermit crabs.

Here’s a video of moving day.

February 25, 2015

Incredible // Three minute music video, shot in 5 seconds

“This is a real video performance, a slow motion video, a sequence map with a traveling in front of 80 extras placed on 80 meters along a little road, lost in an industrial area. Filmed at 1000 frames/second with a Phantom flex 4k from a car driven at 50km/h, the shooting took 5 seconds for a 3’30 video: a living and dreamlike mural.”

Here’s the incredibly short making of video…

Post by siska.

February 18, 2015

Stuff & Things: 5 December

Stuff //

Guernica // What Will Happen to All That Beauty

I mentioned I’d been reading deconversion stories this week. I’m not sure if this is actually a deconversion story, but it’s powerful stuff.

““We have become and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things…” 1 Corinthians 4:13.

These are Paul’s words, from his letter to the church at Corinth. He crisscrossed the known world to establish and support the newly formed, and continually persecuted, communities of Christ. Despite his eminence—and I realize this is unfair—Paul has always struck me as humorless, as an incredible curmudgeon. It is surely the case that a great deal of my vexation with him has to do with a kind of nostalgia for the Old Testament. The God of the New Testament, though more consistently benevolent and loving, more evolved, one might say, makes me long for His predecessor. I miss the messy, wrathful God of the Israelites, roaring out of dust clouds or burning on mountaintops. Vagaries, the mysteries of death and suffering, and of wonder, are on the surface of that God. He was at once the Israelites’ avatar and the source of everything they were and could be. In the New Testament, His contradictions are obscured, or at least softened, by the sacrifice of the extraordinary figure of His son. Nonetheless, in both testaments, the Jews and early Christians are the protagonists of a grand narrative of the underdog, an epic poem of the oppressed. The God of the Bible, for all the ways He has been twisted into monstrosity by the various agendas of our human history, has always been the God of the trash, of the forgotten and forsaken. Certainly, He was the God of American blacks and of their struggle for liberation.”

Also in Deconversion stories // How I Lost The Religion of My Childhood // Frank Schaeffer: The Atheist Who Believes In God // Why I Miss Being A Born Again Christian

Kingdomview // John Frame’s 30 Tips for Theology Students

Someone asked me for my tips on getting the most out of Bible College the other day. If I’d already seen this list, I would have just sent them a link.

CBN // CS Lewis Final Interview

When I was digging about for links between David Foster Wallace and CS Lewis I unearthed this gem.

“Wirt: Would you say that the aim of Christian writing, including your own writing, is to bring about an encounter of the reader with Jesus Christ?

Lewis: “That is not my language, yet it is the purpose I have in view. For example, I have just finished a book on prayer, an imaginary correspondence with someone who raises questions about difficulties in prayer.”

Wirt: How can we foster the encounter of people with Jesus Christ?

Lewis: “You can’t lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.

“But we can block it in many ways. As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the faith. We give in too much. Now, I don’t mean that we should run the risk of making a nuisance of ourselves by witnessing at improper times, but there comes a time when we must show that we disagree. We must show our Christian colors, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent or concede everything away.

“There is a character in one of my children’s stories named Aslan, who says, ‘I never tell anyone any story except his own.’ I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how he deals with me personally. Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase. As Charles Williams once said, ‘The altar must often be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.”

McSweeney’s // I Am An Artisnal Attorney

I could have posted 10 different McSweeney’s articles, such was the backlog in my Feedly… but these will suffice.

“Not long ago, while attending a small-batch honey wine tasting at a meadery with friends, I realized that we bought only organic produce at the local farmers market, ate only free range meat prepared by our traditional neighborhood butcher, and filled our apartments with only free trade, hand crafted furniture. We—and many others like us—insist on authenticity in everything in our lives. We don’t want to eat. We want the fullness that only comes from a meal created by the human experience. We don’t want to drink. We want the buzz that is produced by the draught of a person’s skill. It occurred to me that people who demand realness in their food and homes should also demand it in their legal representation. That was when I became an artisanal attorney.”

Other McSweeney’s // Snopes investigates the Anderson Family Holiday Letter — does what it says on the tin // Speaking for All Christians Exactly Like Me — A Christian novelist reflects on culture // Home On The Range — A long time gun lover is confronted with gun mania, and isn’t sure he likes what he sees.

Things //

io9 // Most Amazing Science Images of 2014

My Book, The Movie // Authors try their hands at selecting the cast for hypothetical movie versions of their books.

McSweeney’s // Liberal Arts Thesis Sub-Title Generator (list)

Vimeo // Hipster Designer Aaron Draplin makes a logo

http://vimeo.com/113751583

More Aaron Draplin on a Metafilter round up.

Vimeo // We Were Not Made for this World

A Robot walks on a sandy, desolate, planet.

YouTube // Terminator Genisys Trailer: Paradox Edition

Photo Invasion // A guy draws cartoon characters on stranger’s Instagram photos

Some are rude.

January 5, 2015

Stuff & Things: 27 December

Here are some things I enjoyed online this week.

// STUFF //

Grantland // The Raid

A piece analysing True Detective and modern TV through the lens of one exceptionally well-crafted one-take scene.

It’s as if True Detective happens in a diorama. Walking out of a coroner’s office, Cohle tells Hart, “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town. And the memory’s fading.”

Staring at this diorama like a blinking god, watching these men at a crossroads, watching their cars coursing across gray highways is Fukunaga’s camera. With the wonderful cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (Animal Kingdom, Top of the Lake), he captures the two protagonists as they are pulled toward their inevitable reckoning.

In the early episodes, this perspective has a unique power. It’s like Cohle and Hart are the only two people on earth. True Detective’s pacing mirrors Cohle’s drug use. In the first three episodes, it’s moody and ponderous, as Cohle pounds cough syrup and swallows ’ludes. But as Cohle hooks back into the “Crash” persona and meets up with his old Iron Crusaders cohort, switching to speed and coke, Fukunaga tightens the vise — the cutting gets quicker, the scenes play faster, and the camera movement goes from languid to frenetic.

Grantland // The Birdcage

An examination of the movies that are being made, and just how little originality is out there. I love this description of a scene from the movie Birdman.

“Now, in a hospital bathroom, he finds himself face to face — or really, beak to beak — with not only his own remade reflection but Birdman himself, who has, in full costume, made himself comfortable on the commode in a way that reawakens questions about certain superhero practicalities that have crossed the mind of every kid who ever read a comic book. So there they are, the two of them, taking each other in: silent, irritated, perplexed. Whatever kind of contest between Riggan and Birdman we’ve just been watching, it seems to have ended in a futile tie.

What does this moment mean? In the movie’s artistic scheme, it means Riggan can’t ever truly free himself of the needy, frail ego that his sturdy, gruff alter ego represents. But if you work in or follow the movie business, what we have here is a grim joke with a grimmer punch line: There is no escape anymore. We will never get away from Birdman, even as he threatens to poop all over everything. If movies have, for a century, been the repository of our dreams, and every generation gets the dreams it deserves, then ours is Rodin’s The Thinker reimagined as a superhero poised on the edge of the crapper, and the rest of us poised on the edge of … well, it may be a little extreme to invoke the abyss. But we’re on the edge of something, and thesomething is big and dark and annihilating. So call it what you will, but come up with a name fast, because we’re all about to get sucked in.”

Overthinking It // Icons and Empathy: on the weird difficulty of player identification in videogames

I’ve spent a bit of time wondering about how, given the emerging sense that video games are an art form, we’ll start to see some interesting stuff that goes beyond the ‘games make young men violent’ trope exploring the idea that how we approach games, and in game decisions, might reveal something about our own character, and also teach us about the world around us. This is an interesting exploration about how games where you play as someone not like you, or very like you, might do different stuff for you. I’ve also read some cool stuff like the dad who watched as his four year old played GTA, just as an emergency services worker (alternatively, there’s this violent cussing grandma playing it very differently – language warning), how another guy played Skyrim committed to non-violence (there’s a whole movement of non-violent gamers, more), a guy who played Far Cry 2 as though he only had one life (then wrote a 391 page book about the experience), and a piece about a war photographer who found playing a war game hit too close to home for him when he conducting an in-game photo shoot. What’s interesting to me is the way the approach we take to games completely transforms our experience of those games – such that when people talk about how a game necessarily produces X result for all people who play it, those people are talking about games from a much more linear time, and not really understanding the medium.

But while the solitary experience of reading a book is mitigated by the ability to share it with other people (since everyone more or less experiences the same events in a book in the same order and context), the solitary experience of gaming increasingly loses the sense of being a shared experience the more choice is presented to the player; when you can choose not only whether you traverse none, some, or all of the optional side-quests, when you can choose whether or not to romance one or more of the other characters, when a vital character might die halfway through for me but live to the end for you, when even the name, race, gender, appearance, sexuality, specializations and abilities are certain to be different for every player who takes on this protean persona, a game risks exchanging an increased sense of empathy for a draining-out of the sense of community that comes from having the very same aesthetic and narrative experience as countless other experiencers out there in the world.

I’m not sure that’s a game design problem, exactly…but it’s a design decision that’s important to consider and to keep in mind, whether you’re making a game or just playing one: what does this game force me to be? About what or who does this game compel me to care? Just how far can you abstract empathy? If Hawke can be whoever you want, who actually is Hawke?

The Guardian // The Guardian view on religious intolerance: the burden of the cross

An interesting story about the persecution of Christians around the globe, but especially in the Middle East, with a pretty anthropocentric conclusion.

“Just as important is a resolute stand for the principle of religious freedom everywhere. Religious belief is fundamental to many human identities. Freedom of faith must be defended, irrespective of whether the attacks come from totalitarian atheist regimes or theocracies. For the faithful, what they believe about God is inseparable from what they understand about human beings. But God’s rights must never be allowed to trample on human rights.”

The Australian // Is Science showing there really is a God? (the Google search results will let you get to this otherwise paywalled article)

I hover between thinking the argument from fine-tuning is compelling evidence for God, and finding Douglas Adam’s sentient puddle quote a useful antidote to overreaching with the explanatory power of this kind of thing.

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

I find most of the tit-for-tat arguments around the existence of God based on natural evidence neither here nor there. The bits that show how incredibly complex the natural order of things, which I believe are naturally ordered by God, fascinate me, and reveal something to me about the nature of the God I believe in, but I feel like, if I try to unpack why I believe in God, I can see things from the other side of the fence.

I feel like science, the data it produces and our understandings of the mechanics of life in this world, will only ever support the view of the person interpreting the data. I might be wrong. But I think it’s only when we’re able to say that finding out about the universe God made doesn’t actually do anything but describe the world God has made that we can properly talk about science and God. We’re not going to find God’s signature in the mathematical improbability of our existence if we’re not looking for God, and a better place to look for God’s signature is in the way he marks the world with word and image. Jesus. His word made flesh, the man made in the image of the invisible God. And people being transformed by God into bearers of this image.

I think, when I read articles like this, and when I think about why I believe what I do, that I don’t necessarily believe in God because I’m alive, as a product of my very existence, I believe in God because I am convinced Jesus lived, died, and was raised.

// THINGS //

This Hipster Business Name generator is pretty awesome.

Screen Shot 2014-12-27 at 3.05.07 pm

I don’t know why I find this sort of video as funny as I do.

Jesus: Watch, Listen, Follow

At church in term 1 next year we’re experiencing the Gospel of Mark as though social media was around when Jesus was alive. Through the eyes of the characters who feature as eyewitnesses in Mark. It’s potentially going to be a lot of fun. Join in from afar. Or near.

December 27, 2014

Spicing up the orchestra

Take one orchestra, add the world’s hottest chilli, shake.

You get something like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvUaFp_qMQ

November 11, 2014

I believe this is what the youth call ‘cray cray’

Man jumps off incredibly super high building. Lands in pool. Survives. There’s a parachute which makes this survival slightly more probable (well. Significantly. But still).

A bit of a language warning.

October 12, 2014

Bird. Meet camera.

I like where the ubiquity of cameras is taking us.

October 10, 2014

The (hidden) cost of parenting a (destructive) child

We recently added a puppy to our family menagerie. Taking our pet tally up to 1 turtle, 4 chickens, and said puppy. It turns out puppies chew up lots of stuff they’re not meant to. They’re expensive. So too, are children. They break stuff.

calvin

There are all sorts of studies out there about how much it costs to raise a child – few, if any, consider the damages bill. So this study, which uses Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes, as a test case, is ground breaking research.

“According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, raising a child from start to age 17 costs, for those in the middle-income groups, anywhere from $226,800 to $264,600 total^[1]. These costs include housing, food, transportation, clothing, health care, education, and other miscellaneous items (such as entertainment, personal care, and reading materials^[2].) Missing from this estimate is an explicit approximation of the amount of damage that children can cause (here, damage refers to that of the break-a-window physical kind, not that of the mommy-and-daddy-need-a-therapist emotional kind). Such an estimate would increase the accuracy of the USDA’s estimate and the budgets of new parents, depending on how destructive they project their child to be. “…

To estimate the cost from damaged goods, I searched amazon.com for comparable items, with some exceptions (e.g., Calvin’s Mom seems somewhat fashionable, so when Calvin placed an incontinent toad on her sweater, I looked for a replacement on jcrew.com). To estimate cost for property damage, I used homewyse.com and fixr.com (using the zip code for Chagrin Falls, OH). In the few instances in which a monetary value was given in the comic, I used that value.

Results and Discussion

In total, Calvin caused an estimated $15,955.50 worth of damage over the duration of the comic strip (Figure 1). Damage ranged from a broken glass jar^[6] ($2 from amazon.com) to a flooded house^[7] ($4,798.83 from homewyse.com). Taking into account Watterson’s sabbaticals (see Figure 1) and the November start to the comics, Calvin caused $1,850.55 of damage per year. For context, the USDA estimates that middle-income families spend an estimated $1,750 per year on child care and education for 6 year-olds. In fact, the amount of damage caused by Calvin would rank 4th out of the USDA’s categories in annual expenditures, behind Housing, Food, and Transportation, and ahead of Education, Miscellaneous, Health Care, and Clothing.