Claus.dahl

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Hate Mail

Dirty Queen, via Erotic Review

Hair Portraits

I suspect that Mr Bingo is not as odious as he’d like us to think. And even if he were, i’ll forever admire his typically English touch of diplomacy:

Does Mr Bingo work for free?

In 2011, Mr Bingo started mailing insulting postcards to total strangers. All you had to do was ask and pay 50 pounds for the service. Probably because his hand-drawn messages had more foolishness than bile, people queued to be mocked and abused. The press loved the idea too and Mr Bingo soon ran a spectacularly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a Hate Mail book. If you live under a rock (like i do occasionally, nothing wrong with that), you might have missed the Hate Mail brouhaha but encountered his work in austere newspapers, dandy magazines, or on cans of beer, restaurant walls and skateboards.

Mr Bingo and his acerbic wit will participate to the Pictoplasma conference in May. I’d really like to go this year but if i can’t, i’ll have a series of upcoming interviews with the conference speakers to console me. Here’s the first one:

Hello Mr Bingo! I’m sure you’ve been interviewed thousands of times about it, but i’d like to talk about Hate Mail. The Hate Mail works are witty and funny but but did anyone ever get seriously hurt or angry about any of it?

Yes, you’re right, I’m bored of being asked about it.
As far as I know, nobody has been hurt or angry about any of my Hate Mail, but then if they are, we’ll probably never know.

When Hate Mail is available for sale, it comes with clear guidelines which say that I have no responsibility for any sad or suicidal feelings and it really is all your fault. Once you stipulate that upfront, unless they really are thick as fuck, people are too embarrassed to admit that they’re offended. Generally though, people who buy my stuff aren’t thick as fuck, because they understand the subversive/comical nature of the project.

Was it ever a possibility that worried you?

No. I’m not a total cunt by the way, I have 4 personal ‘rules’ for topics which are out of bounds for me. These are race, sexuality, disability and Religion. I care morally/ethically about the first three, the religion one is in there through absolute fear.

Hate Mail

Hate Mail

Hate Mail

Hate Mail

Are you still responding to Hate Mail requests? Or have you had enough of spreading horrors?

Yeah, I’ve stopped doing hate Mail.

Oldie made this video in support of Mr Bingo’s Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for Hate Mail

And if you had to Hate Mail yourself? What would it look like?

Well there’s so many things I hate about myself, looks, personality, mental problems, anxiety, loneliness, a terrible lover, it would be hard to choose one.
I find it’s always better to choose one thing and keep it simple and hard hitting rather than a diluted mixture of things.

Illustration for the Washington Post

Interactive iPad illustration with movable parts for Project Magazine

You also work for newspapers and do some illustrations related to politics and politicians. Do you manage to keep your own political views to yourself? Or does any of your opinions transpire in your drawings?

I actually stopped doing commercial work now, but yes I’ve done a few illustrations for ‘clever’ publications.

Sadly, I live in my own little bubble and have no idea what’s going on in news, current affairs and politics and as a result, I’m not even able to formulate opinions on politics. The only opinions that come out in my drawings are observations on modern life I suppose, kind of observational comedy.

I wish I did know about politics and had views and angles because I reckon I could make some killer work in that field!

Mr Bingo’s illustrations for ‘Show Dogs: The Road to Crufts’. Directed by James Newton

I love dogs (well, staffies mostly) and i always dreamt of going to the Crufts show. It looks too serious not to be hilarious. Could you tell us about Show Dogs? How did you get to make that film?

I was lucky enough to meet a bloke in a pub who was the director of Show Dogs and he asked me if I was interested in doing some type and animated bits for the film.
There’s a lot of different reasons for doing jobs but with that one, it was one of those “I just wanna be part of this, it’s a fucking documentary about people who show dogs” reasons.

Any advice you could give to young illustrators / students who would like to have a fulfilling career as an illustrator?

The most successful people in this industry aren’t necessarily the most talented ones, they’re just the ones who actually bother to do stuff.

What are you going to present at Pictoplasma?

I’m going to talk about how to get the public to fund your stupid ideas.

Thanks Mr Bingo!

Illustration for the Camden Town Brewery

Skatebearding

Illustration for Foxtel

Illustration for Tiny Acts of Rebellion

Catch up with Mr Bingo at the 12th Pictoplasma Conference & Festival on 4 – 8 MAY 2016 in Berlin.

superb Sarah Jeong piece on bot ethics with four of my favorite bot creators  

Yesterday was Piano Day – a day recently christened by composer/pianist Nils Frahm in order to celebrate that ubiquitous keyboard instrument. (It’s held on the eighty-eighth day of the year.) There are concerts, marathons, project, releases – and unlike Record Store Day, this event won’t clog the ability to produce piano music.

With that day as inspiration, I thought it was a good moment to look at some of the technology of and around the piano, to understand what has made this instrument special. That includes both strictly acoustic innovations as well as design features and breakthroughs that either inspired the electronic world, or helped bridge acoustic and digital.

The piano (and its organ counterparts) has had a tremendous impact on how we model musical information. The pianoforte, clavichord, and organ all helped produce a conceptual model where pitch could be abstracted from expression, and that’s been influential in digital and analog synthesis from the start.

But to begin with the piano’s influence, there’s only one place to start:

Hammers. What makes a piano a piano is really the hammer mechanism. “Piano” is of course short for “pianoforte”; it means the name of the instrument itself advertises its big selling point, the ability to play loud and soft.

The reason that’s a thing is that chamber keyboard instruments at the turn of the 18th century, when the piano first emerged, weren’t able to pull off much in the way of dynamic range. Harpsichords are loud enough, but their plucking mechanism is more or less binary – either you plucked, or you didn’t. Clavichords have levers that strike the strings with small pieces of metal, which allows some dynamic range, but they’re very soft. There’s a reason you see these in paintings in small home chambers. Bartolomeo Cristofori is credited with solving the problem on his pianoforte by first devising a hammer.

The challenge: hit the string then, get out of the way again (so you don’t damp the sound – you can try this with your finger on a piano), and then get ready to do it all over again. That’s easy to do if you’re using a lever as on a clavichord, but much harder with a hammer. Cristofori got it right around the beginning of the 18th Century, and then others who researched his technique spread the concept. The 19th century then brought the invention of what’s called a double escapement action, which lets you hit multiple notes quickly by adding an additional lever. (You can see that working if you peer inside a piano and hit a note repeatedly.) The materials used on the hammer have been refined, too. But on a fundamental level, every piano has the basic mechanism that the Cristofori instruments did, making this a revolution in instrument building.

Wendy Powers has written a lovely overview of the Cristofori pianos for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is also one of the best places to see his invention in person.

The Piano: The Pianofortes of Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731)

Pedals. The piano might have been a forgotten invention had it not been for a German organ builder named Gottfried Silbermann. Just as today, music tech ideas in the 18th Century spread through a combination of research, writing, and building, transmitted to others (and ideally translated to their native language). Silbermann applied his experience in building other instruments to producing variations on Cristofori’s fortepiano. And he added one essential addition: the sustain pedal. That has utterly changed the piano’s playing technique and tone. The hammer makes the piano possible; the pedal makes it more desirable. We take it for granted to such an extent that almost any electronic keyboard instrument you find of any size will have a sustain pedal jack on the back. Leave it to an organ builder to figure out that you can add more to a keyboard instrument by having the musician use his or her feet.

Wire and iron. If the Enlightenment gave us the idea of the piano, the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century gave us the raucous, loud instrument we know best today. From a mechanical engineering perspective, the 19th Century piano is not completely unrelated to the Brooklyn Bridge. A cast iron frame supports wire strings under tremendous tension. Attach a tree (okay, something like a spruce soundboard), and you get an instrument like the enormous, very much not-portable Steinway D.

The Steinway frame can support up to 23 tons. And yes, if not cared for, those strings do sometimes break. The instrument quietly sitting in a living room is actually full of unseen forces.

(I will avoid the controversial issue of Steinway’s claims about low tension versus high tension scales; let’s leave it at … tension matters.)

Stringing. All the above give you the basics, but to me it’s the much subtler questions of stringing and the soundboard that actually make you fall in love with the piano. The use of strings that resonate when you play notes (another reason to use that sustain pedal) mean that each note contains not just the sound of a single string vibrating, but a rich resonant timbre around it.

Even if you know nothing about piano construction, you’ve probably admired the interlaced rows of strings inside the piano – and maybe even wondered why the pattern changes across registers. Cross-stringing (overlapping the strings) and the construction and disposition of the soundboard help define that unique character. By the end of the 19th Century, piano builders were perfecting techniques of Aliquot stringing, originated by Julius Blüthner in 1873.

These particular patterns are a bit part of what gives particular makes of piano their character. I don’t want to advertise Steinway & Sons specifically here. But, for example, when Steinway players speak lovingly of the “Steinway sustain,” part of what they’re talking about is the result of the tunable aliquots Theodore Steinway added to his instrument. Those strings produce a characteristic set of resonances in the higher octaves.

Player piano. Before the recording industry involved records, the piano was the original music industry. This was the technology that introduced the idea that you could recreate someone else’s performance in your own home. Barrel pianos, favored by street musicians, preceded the technology. But the player piano as we know it made its public debut at the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. That was a heck of an expo, featuring the first monorail, and Alexander Graham Bell exhibiting his first telephone, opposite Thomas Edison showing off the telegram. And you could try Heinz ketchup for the first time.

The player piano as product arrives at the beginning of the 20th Century. Hilariously, early adopters got stuck with rolls that became instantly obsolete when later models upgraded to 88 keys.

The player piano or pianola is itself an excursion in piano history, one that’s fascinating but obsolete today. But it gives us three major ideas:

1. Reproducible performance. Alongside recordings, the player piano is the breakthrough technology that helps people to imagine they don’t need a human around to appreciate a performance. And it in turn helps popularize the idea of robotic musical performance many artists today are exploring.

2. Copyright law. Believe it or not, it’s actually the pianola and not the phonograph that established one of the most important battles around copyright law that’s still relevant today – even when we’re talking SoundCloud and Spotify. You’ll hear copyright lawyers today talk about “mechanical” royalties, and wonder why the heck they’d use that term. Well, the pianola is why. The US copyright law that ruled most of the 20th Century overturned an associated Supreme Court decision. At hand, the question was whether a piano roll (as a mechanical object) qualified as a “copy” (in the way that sheet music would). The Supreme Court said Congress’ definition was too narrow and would have denied composers royalties. Congress rewrote the law in 1909, and the compulsory mechanical royalty was born.

3. Visualization of music. The “piano roll” (still frustratingly called by that name) is by far the dominant visual model for representing music on computer devices. And it’s not a bad choice. The mechanical logic employed by the piano roll makes for an intuitive spatial, visual picture of what’s happening in the music. Furthermore, because the piano roll is aligned to the piano keyboard, and many musicians learn pitch from playing the piano keyboard, the image corresponds to muscle and visual memory.

One other note on the copyright law question – there’s a great quote from a circuit court decision (by one Judge Colt) quoted by the Supreme Court a hundred years ago. You can find it in the full text on FindLaw:

‘I cannot convince myself that these perforated strips of paper are copies of sheet music within the meaning of the copyright law. They are not made to be addressed to the eye as sheet music, but they form part of a machine. They are not designed to be used for such purposes as sheet music, nor do they in any sense occupy the same field as sheet music. They are a mechanical invention made for the sole purpose of performing tunes mechanically upon a musical instrument.’

Digital piano interface. The piano and pianola were conceptual predecessors to everything that would happen in digital music. The instruments themselves, though, were a bit late to the party: the mechanical-acoustical world of the piano didn’t immediately interface with the analog or digital control schemes of the synthesizer.

That changed in 1982 when Yamaha released their first Player Piano (now called Disklavier. (That’s in reference to floppy discs; it was the 80s.) The instrument interfaces both input and output with the keys. For input, it uses electronic sensors, opening up the ability to record performances or transmit them to another instrument. For output, it uses electromechanical solenoids to move the keys, hammers, and pedals in place of your fingers.

Also worth mentioning is the Bob Moog Piano Bar. Whereas Yamaha’s solution required you buy an entirely new piano (good for Yamaha, possibly less ideal for you), the Piano Bar was non-invasive. Add the titular bar atop the keys, and sensors register as your fingers play. Moog joined in a historic collaboration with fellow synth pioneer Don Buchla to create the instrument. The product itself wasn’t a huge hit – better electronic pianos trumped heavier, pricier acoustic instruments in the market. But while an oddity, the Piano Bar deserves a place in music history for bringing together these minds.

Physical modeling. All of these beautiful acoustic characteristics are something that electronic instruments don’t easily reproduce. Now, there are plenty of electronic pianos or “digital pianos” (Yamaha again being arguably the first commercial vendor). But these generally rely on simply sampling recordings of the instrument – and you can do that with any sound, so it doesn’t really count as a piano innovation

Alternatively, it’s possible to apply concepts of physical modeling to reproducing the very acoustic principles that give the piano its character. (You can read a 2003 paper on the subject to get nerdy. My favorite software piano instrument is Pianoteq, which is built around this principle.)

Physical modeling is a gift of the piano to the electronic world, because once you approximate the physics of an acoustic piano, you can then warp those rules to produce pianos that could never exist (or exist practically) in the real world.

The multi-touch keyboard. If you want a modern counterpart to the Cristofori fortepiano, I believe the Eaton-Moog Multi-Touch Sensitive Keyboard is a similarly important breakthrough. Now, technically, it’s not a piano – it’s an electronic keyboard controller. But just as Cristofori (and the clavichord) introduced the notion of velocity control, Bob Moog and John Eaton helped pioneer the idea of an electronic keyboard that would use an additional axis for more expression. This idea didn’t come out of the blue – the Martenot, for instance, layers expression atop a keyboard, as does an organ. But what makes the Moog-Eaton project special at this moment is that the idea seems destined to go mainstream. With instruments like the Haken Continuum and ROLI Seaboard taking up the mantle, and an effort to rewrite the MIDI specification to make it easier for hardware and software to communicate in this way, we seem destined to finally see this sort of expression reach a prime time audience.

And more innovation to come. You may have noticed that acoustic piano innovations reach a crescendo at the end of the 19th century, and then – they stop. The Steinway Model D, the one you’re likely to hear in a concert hall and one that has served as a template for most other brands, dates to 1884. The Bösendorfer Imperial, a “radical” outlier with 97 keys, is the young upstart — from 1900. That’s why someone like David Klavins is interesting. Klavins is a German piano builder who has rejected piano orthodoxy, creating instruments like a two-story piano accessible by staircase, or the beautiful, delicate Una Corda, with just one string per key.

And with physical models and new expressive interfaces at hand, I expect piano lovers will also find ways of translating inspiration from the piano to electronic and digital creations.

There’s no way to overstate this: digital music is what it is because of the piano.

The post These piano breakthroughs changed music forever appeared first on cdm createdigitalmusic.

Yesterday, the Duke Chronicle reported that disgraced former New Republic journalist Stephen Glass had repaid $200,000 to various publications for which he wrote during his “fabulist” days.

The publications reimbursed include The New Republic, Rolling Stone and Policy Review. The Chronicle’s source for the story was Glass himself, who made the claim while speaking to a group of Duke students last week.

There are a few remarkable things about the story, not least the fact that a reporter who admitted to fabricating countless high profile stories was able to rehabilitate his career sufficiently to have $200k spare to repay the publications he scammed.

It was, of course, former Pando editor (and then Forbes writer) Adam Penenberg who broke the story that brought down Glass. Penenberg later reported that Glass had gone to law school but was having difficulty being allowed to pass the bar due to his past history of dishonesty.

This latest news seems like a great time to revisit the whole wildly entertaining story. And what better way than by downloading Adam’s incredible (and sometimes hilarious) ebook “Unbelievable: Stephen Glass wants a second chance.” It’s just 99c on Amazon, and also available on iTunes.

Here’s a brief extract...

Migrantkrisen: Mindst 16 migranter, som flygter fra krigen i Syrien, er blevet dræbt på den tyrkisk-syriske grænse, skriver den engelske nyhedsserver Daily Mail. Ifølge det engelske medie er antallet af dræbte formentlig noget højere og inkluderer også mindst tre børn. ”Tyrkiske grænsevægter har tidligere hjulpet flygtninge ved at bære deres baggage, nu skyder de på

1. Deep Learning for Analytical Engine -- This repository contains an implementation of a convolutional neural network as a program for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, capable of recognizing handwritten digits to a high degree of accuracy (98.5% if provided with a sufficient amount of training data and left running sufficiently long).
2. Supervisor Trees in Go -- A well-structured Erlang program is broken into multiple independent pieces that communicate via messages, and when a piece crashes, the supervisor of that piece automatically restarts it. [...] Even as I have been writing suture, I have on occasion been astonished to flip my screen over to the console of Go program I've written with suture, and been surprised to discover that it's actually been merrily crashing away during my manual testing, but soldiering on so well I didn't even know.
3. How to Avoid Brittle Code -- If it hurts, do it more often.
4. Developing Quantum Annealer Driven Data Discovery (Joseph Dulny III, Michael Kim) -- In this paper, we gain novel insights into the application of quantum annealing (QA) to machine learning (ML) through experiments in natural language processing (NLP), seizure prediction, and linear separability testing.

Migrantkrisen: De seneste dages nedgang i antallet af ankomne migranter til de græske øer er onsdag blevet afløst af en stigning. Hundredevis af migranter er ankommet til de græske øer Lesbos, Samos, Chios og Kos, skriver den græske nyhedsserver Ekathimerini. Ifølge de græske myndigheder er 766 migranter ankommet onsdag morgen. Det forhøjede antal migranter kommer

Call it music for Internets. Brian Eno has a new album coming, and you can listen to 21 minutes of gently undulating sonic seas, a weary plodding deep melody bobbing atop it, in the stream of “The Ship.”

Here it is:

Whether Mr. Eno is reaching uncharted territory or not, it’s worth a focused listening just as a reminder of how influential his work has been on defining what ambient music is. If the past decades have been defined by grids, Eno is the obvious pop mascot for its polar opposite.

And sure enough, he explains that the origins of this piece even came from installation. That itself is an interesting experiment in songwriting. Far from the verse and the middle eight, this is a song – successful or not – floating atop a static structure.

THE PIECE STARTED AS AN AMBIENT WORK INTENDED
FOR A MULTI CHANNEL SOUND INSTALLATION IN STOCKHOLM,
BUT DURING THE MAKING OF IT I DISCOVERED THAT I COULD
NOW SING A LOW C – WHICH HAPPENS TO BE THE ROOT NOTE
OF THE PIECE. GETTING OLDER DOES HAVE A FEW FRINGE
BENEFITS AFTER ALL. FROM THAT POINT THE WORK TURNED
INTO AN UNUSUAL KIND OF SONG… A TYPE I’VE NEVER MADE
BEFORE WHERE THE VOCAL FLOATS FREE, UNTETHERED TO
A RHYTHMIC GRID OF ANY KIND.

And it works nicely if you imagine stepping into a sung installation.

The program here is a reflection on failed human endeavor in history, the sunken Titanic as harbinger for the horrors of World War I, with similarly bleak thoughts on the present time.

I also find it interesting that this absorbs some zeitgeist I found myself meditating on at the Berlinale film festival (finishing that article up now) – ocean as metaphor for historical uncertainties, in its vastness, faintly detuned radio transmissions. I also hear echoes of Eno’s colleague Thomas Dolby, also fond of nautical metaphors and dwellings and exposed vocal narratives. I actually really enjoy it more as it progresses, and whispered narratives start to create some friction across layers.

I’m at least intrigued to hear the rest of the album.

More info, links, thoughts from Eno, and of course various ways you can preorder this (including colored vinyl, natch):

http://brian-eno.net/the-ship/

The post Listen to 21 minutes of new Brian Eno ambient music, free appeared first on cdm createdigitalmusic.

Polen: Den polske premierminister Beata Szydlo afviser onsdag, dagen efter terrorangrebet i Bruxelles, at Polen vil tage imod de flygtninge, landets forrige regering har forpligtet sig til gennem de fælleseuropæiske flygtningekvoter, skriver Polskie Radio. ”Den tidligere regering gik med til at tage imod flygtninge. Den sagde ja til, at nogle tusinde flygtninge kunne komme til

A quickfire look at scenes from 20 movies (Gravity, The Revenant, Planet of the Apes) that were done with the help of green screens and computer animation. What, no Carol?!

Tags: movies   video

Lighting 6000 closely grouped wooden matchsticks takes less than a minute, but waiting for the resulting fire to extinguish takes quite a bit longer and is surprisingly relaxing to watch. (Two is a trend, right...it is also surprisingly relaxing and satisfying to watch a tomato being unsliced. Is there an entire genre of videos like this out there?) (via digg)

Tags: video

• Adventures in Narrated Reality — Medium
  Ross Goodwin on algorithmic prose, machines to make writing, neural networks, and more. Suddenly feel very inadequate; a reminder of what staring at a topic for a long while looks like.
  (tags: neuralnetworks prosegeneration poetry writing art rossgoodwin )

I've started writing for Campaign again, I can't remember if I told you that. I wrote a thing about interfacing with robots and snuck in some tricky Javascript that changes some of the words every couple of seconds. It's not really necessary for this piece but I wanted to make sure it worked with the CMS because I want to do something a bit fancier next time.

And big thanks to Tom for showing me how to do it. 

(It seems like Typepad doesn't allow the same kind of nonsense)

*Political campaign managers are a really weird breed. This Murphy guy is genuinely strange. I mean, he’s odd even by generous James Carville and Mary Matalin standards. *This would make a pretty good sci-fi novel about a campaign advisor if I hadn’t already written a sci-fi novel about a campaign advisor. http://www.weeklystandard.com/debriefing-mike-murphy/article/2001632 (…) “More seriously, […] The post Meanwhile, in the wreckage of the Jeb! campaign appeared first on WIRED.

• The Spark File — The Writer’s Room — Medium
  You know, that's not a bad idea.
  (tags: stevenjohnson writing process )

1. Engineers of Jihad (Marginal Revolution) -- brief book review, tantalizing. The distribution of traits across disciplines mirrors almost exactly the distribution of disciplines across militant groups…engineers are present in groups in which social scientists, humanities graduates, and women are absent, and engineers possess traits — proneness to disgust, need for closure, in-group bias, and (at least tentatively) simplism…
2. Box of a Trillion Souls -- review and critique of some of Stephen Wolfram's writing and speaking about AI and simulation and the nature of reality and complexity and ... a lot.
3. Alphabet Starting Sidewalk Labs (NY Times) -- “We’re taking everything from anonymized smartphone data from billions of miles of trips, sensor data, and bringing that into a platform that will give both the public and private parties and government the capacity to actually understand the data in ways they haven’t before,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s chief executive, who is a former deputy mayor of New York City and former chief executive of Bloomberg. Data, data, data.
4. SIGBOVIK -- the proceedings from 2015 include a paper that talks about "The Tortilla Endofunctor." You're welcome.

Suppose you want to find pages that use the word “Disneyland” as a link, as in: Disneyland?

I looked and looked but could not find a way to do that at Google. The first return at Google for the query “google advanced search” takes you to a form where you can construct a more finicky search than normal. The Google help page for advanced search has some interesting operators, but not what I need. Limiting my exploration to Google.com (advanced search site:google.com) I could find no explanation of how to do this.

Fortunately, Gary Stock knows more about this than I do. He told me about “inanchor.” Once you know what to look for, you can find some well-hidden Google pages that mention it, such as this aging Google Sites page. Inanchor gets close to what I’m looking for. In fact, for my particular purposes, it’s better.

The following query will return all the pages linked to by the word “Disneyland”:

inanchor:disneyland

For example, if you click on the link in the first paragraph of this post, you’ll go not to Disneyland.com but to a page about Disney’s role in tightening copyright restrictions. If you run the inanchor query, that page about copyright will show up in the results, because it is a page linked to by the word “Disneyland.” In other words, you don’t get back a list of the pages that contain a link that uses the word “Disneyland”; you get back the pages that those pages link to.

A better example might help. If you search for:

inanchor:”most likeable person ever”

you’ll find the pages people have pointed to with a Most Likeable Person Ever link. (“allinanchor” searches for links containing the words that follow in any order.)

I’m not 100% sure inanchor actually works because I don’t see a way to get the pages that contain the links. Maybe I’ll ask Gary.

The post Advanced advanced Google search appeared first on Joho the Blog.

For the Captured project, prison inmates drew pictures of people they felt should be in jail instead, "the CEOs of companies destroying our environment, economy, and society". All 1000 books have sold out with the proceeds going to Bernie Sanders' campaign.

Tags: art   prison

*I’m an AI skeptic, but this article is quite worth reading, especially for its historical viewpoint on artist hardware. https://medium.com/@ArtificialExperience/creativeai-9d4b2346faf3#.ttdle2abc The post CreativeAI appeared first on WIRED.

1. Algorithm Identifies Tweets Sent Under the Influence of Alcohol (MIT TR) -- notable for how they determined whether a Tweet was sent from home. They made a list of phrases like "home at last!" and had MTurkers confirm the Tweets were about being home, then used those as training data for an algorithm to identify other Tweets talking about home.
2. Puzzle Game to Help Program Quantum Computers (New Scientist) -- Devitt has turned the problem of programming a quantum computer into a game called meQuanics. His team has developed a prototype to test the game, which you can play now, and today launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a fully fledged version for iOS and Android phones.
3. Deep or Shallow, NLP is Breaking Out (ACM) -- readable roundup of how NLP changed in the last five years, with a useful list for further reading and watching.
4. Firing and Being Fired (Zach Holman) -- advice for the fired, the firing, and the coworkers. All solid.

As part of the Moby Dick Big Read project, dozens of people collaborated on an unabridged audiobook of Moby Dick. Each chapter has a different reader and the readers included Stephen Fry, David Attenborough, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Tilda Swinton started things off with chapter one:

(via @sampotts)

Tags: audio   books   Moby Dick   Tilda Swinton

Twitter's killing "elevated" access to its streaming API  

short fiction, totally not written by Robin Sloan, about Facebook on Facebook  

A team of researchers at Stanford built a small army of tiny robots that pulled a car across a concrete floor.

With careful consideration to robot gait, we demonstrate a team of 6 super strong microTug microrobots weighing 100 grams pulling the author's unmodified 3900lb (1800kg) car on polished concrete.

As any good tug of war team knows, the trick was to ensure that the tiny bots all pulled together at the same time. (via ny times)

Tags: robots   video

Temperaturerne er på vej op, og det er tid til at vække bloggen af sit vinterhi. Jeg tør ikke lige love at Tveskov vs Classy genopstår, men hvem ved. Nu lægger jeg selv ud med et kort roundup.

The Trouble With Longreads

Jeg har det svært med de nye forsøg på kvalitetsjournalistik vi har fået på det sidste, og med modefænomenet 'longreads'

Alt for mange longreads er det ikke

Berlingske Business kalder gerne en tekst på et par tusinde ord for et longread. 2000 ord er en kronik i politiken eller et par sider i Ud&Se, det er ikke et longread. Zetlands singler var på vej derhen, men magasinet er også nede i de korte formater mellem 1000 og 2000 ord. Man får altså hver dag omkring 1-2 broadsheet avisside (så ca en halv tynd mandags-Information) at tygge på. 

Kunne vi ikke kalde det noget mere appetitvækkende?

Går du mest på restaurant, fordi der står 'STORE PORTIONER' på døren? Så er longreads måske til dig - mine gode læseminder er noget med de sjoveste interviews i Interview, de mest overskridende voldsomme reportager i Rolling Stone, det fantastiske essay om det fede ved landkort i Weekendavisen eller noget andet, der ikke bare er noget kedelig funktionel læsning. 

Lang er ikke en præstation

Forstå mig ret - kort er godt. Undskyld det blev langt, jeg havde ikke tid til at skrive kort, som Blaise Pascal skrev. Hvorfor skrive en roman på 500 sider, når ideen kan forklares på 500 ord, som Jorge Luis Borges spurgte. Hvis nu det er Tom Wolfe der går amok i Rolling Stone i Post Orbital Remorse - artiklen om USAs astronauter, der var så lang (50000 ord) at selv Rolling Stone splittede den over fire numre, og som senere blev endnu længere i bogform som The Right Stuff - så skal jeg nok læne mig tilbage og nyde rejsen. Men lad dog være med at prale med længden. Og lad være med at fortælle mig hvor mange minutter jeg har læst. 

Jeg kan ikke få de nye medier til at hænge sammen, hverken for dem eller mig

Hverken Føljeton eller Zetland eller for den sags skyld POV eller hvad de andre kalder sig. Det udgivne materiale har altså ret beskedent omfang. På en uge får man i Føljeton eller Zetland end ikke én sektion af en gammeldags avis. Indrømmet - det er mindre end en kop kaffe 12.50 for Føljeton om ugen og 25 for Zetland; men staffagen, at der virkelig er substans i det her, rubs me the wrong way. Det er liiige før man ville være bedre orienteret med Metro Express. Og så havde man også fået en masse emojis og horoskoper.

Digitalt og dyrt

Det stærkt sekteriske udvalg i de nye medier ender med at blive et rimelig dyrt alternativ til avisen. Zetland ender med at koste 1000kr om året for en kvart Weekendavis eller mindre hver uge. Jeg kunne have købt en hel for kun det dobbelte. Eller Information, der udkommer dagligt med markant mere stof - selv om mandagen hvor avisen praktisk talt ikke eksisterer.

Hvad koster det egentlig at lave den slags?

Zetland og Føljeton ligner hinanden i omfang. Zetland udgiver '2-5 artikler på hverdage' - så vi sjusser det til 750 artikler om året. Zetland skal have 14.500 abonnenter for at være 'bæredygtig', hvad det så betyder. Det er noget med 14 mio kr til at publicere 750 artikler for, eller tæt ved 20.000kr per styk. Hvis bare halvdelen af det beløb kan holdes tilbage til redaktionen, er det fjollet med fastansatte. Freelancerne ville flokkes omkring Zetland for at få opgaver. Der er ingen, der betaler så meget. Føljeton har nogenlunde de samme ambitioner, men oplyser mere beskedent at breakeven er ved 8500 betalende abonnenter. Føljeton er billigere, så det bliver til 5 mio kr istedet for Zetlands 14 mio. Der skal hustles på Føljeton for at få dét til at hænge sammen. 

14.500???

Jeg vil tro, der er en eller to, der arbejder med digital omlægning af de gamle medier, der ryster på hovedet når de hører om Zetlands 14.500 abonnenter. Det virker som et rent fantasital - navnlig med så smalt et produkt. Det er noget med at være bybo i 30erne, midt eller midt-højre, og have vildt meget lyst til en superkort netavis. Så måske 20% af den danske twittersfære og ikke så mange andre end dem. 

Abonnerer du selv, Claus?

Nej. Det kan jeg lige så godt tilstå. Prøvede Føljeton, men det fængede bare ikke. Fidusen ved en omnibusavis er at den har 40 artikler - en af dem handler om noget du vil læse. Sådan er det ikke når der kun er 3. Så det er mere ligesom at have en lidt for snakkesalig sidemand i bussen, end som at sidde med et medie man selv har valgt. 

Ugens store begivenhed indenfor kunstig intelligens

Googles AlphaGo har lige vundet det 5. parti mod Lee Sedol og sejren 4-1. Men det er ikke ugens største revolution i maskinlæring.

Det er derimod min Discover-playliste fra Spotify. Den er perfekt tunet. Rare groove, men også classics. Originaludgaverne af både omkvædet fra M.I.A.s 'Sunshowers' og Warm Leatherette. Der er et Simple Minds-nummer på, men det er pre-stadion, cool Simple Minds. Der er alt fra Velvets og Warren Zevon til Electronic og The Orb. Der er Kurt Vile og fabuløs funk med Ghetto Brothers. 

Alt det er fantastisk. Hvis jeg var faldet i snak med en på en bar, og han eller hun havde sagt "hey - du skal ha det her mixtape. Tror det lige er dig" så var vi bedste venner nu. Eller kærester. Og så er det endda slet ikke det bedste. Midt i det hele, i Colin Blunstones 'Misty Roses', højst overraskende, en fin lille sats for strygekvartet - som det naturligste i verden. Det var som at få en meget fin og særlig betænksom gave af en kær ven. 

I Korea omtalte kommentatorerne og Lee Sedol Googles Go-robot frygtsomt - som noget fremmed og uudgrundeligt, men uhyre stærkt. Lee og flere kommentatorer, var slået ud af maskinens spil. Mødet med denne nye maskinelle kraft var ikke kærligt, eller glædeligt, men skiftevis vagtsomt og imponeret. Spotifys playliste er ikke optimeret for styrke, men for likeability. For præcis den reaktion jeg havde på ugens playliste. 

Da Joseph Weizenbaum i sin tid opfandt Eliza, den psykologiske samtalerobot, bad hans testpersoner - som var helt klar over at de talte med en ganske ubegavet automat, hurtigt Weizenbaum om at forlade lokalet når de talte personligt med robotten - så den reaktion er ikke en der bor i teknologien men i os. Det er mig, der reagerer på playlisten, ikke omvendt. Men Spotifys playliste er helt bestemt et eksempel på noget vi kommer til at se meget mere til i den allernærmeste fremtid. Fatisk teknologi - teknologi designet til at nå sociale mål, relationelle mål bliver helt centrale i den kommende AI og samtalerobotrevolution, som er lige om hjørnet. Eliza er blevet til Siri, og er meget langt fra alene. Webmediet Quartz eksperimenterer med forme nyheder i artikelformat om til samtaler - lige præcis ham den påståelige sidemand i bussen jeg snakkede om ovenfor - og min ven Mortens liste over samtaleteknologier og services bare vokser og vokser.

Så mig og Spotify vi får nok snart nye venner. 

1. MacroBase -- Analytic monitoring for the Internet of Things. The code behind a research paper, written up in the morning paper where Adrian Colyer says, there is another story that also unfolds in the paper – one of careful system design based on analysis of properties of the problem space, of thinking deeply and taking the time to understand the prior art (aka "the literature"), and then building on those discoveries to advance and adapt them to the new situation. “That’s what research is all about!” you may say, but it’s also what we’d (I’d?) love to see more of in practitioner settings, too. The result of all this hard work is a system that comprises just 7,000 lines of code, and I’m sure, many, many hours of thinking!
2. Survey of Commenters and Comment Readers -- Americans who leave news comments, who read news comments, and who do neither are demographically distinct. News commenters are more male, have lower levels of education, and have lower incomes compared to those who read news comments. (via Marginal Revolution)
3. The Empathizing-Systemizing Theory, Social Abilities, and Mathematical Achievement in Children (Nature) -- systematic thinking doesn't predict math ability in children, but being empathetic predicts being worse at math. The effect is stronger with girls. The authors propose the mechanism is that empathetic children pick up a teacher's own dislike of math, and any teacher biases like "girls aren't good at math."
4. Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read (NYT) -- On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5% of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75% of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25% to 50% of test readers finished them. Business books have surprisingly low completion rates. Not surprisingly low to anyone who has ever read a business book. They're always a 20-page idea stretched to 150 pages because that's how wide a book's spine has to be to visible on the airport bookshelf. Fat paper stock and 14-point text with wide margins and 1.5 line spacing help, too. Don't forget to leave pages after each chapter for the reader's notes. And summary checklists. And ... sorry, I need to take a moment.

Jellybooks is an analytics company that evaluates how people read book, in a similar fashion in how a company like Netflix evaluates how customers watch shows.

Here is how it works: the company gives free e-books to a group of readers, often before publication. Rather than asking readers to write a review, it tells them to click on a link embedded in the e-book that will upload all the information that the device has recorded. The information shows Jellybooks when people read and for how long, how far they get in a book and how quickly they read, among other details

The charts above show what percentage of readers finish chapters of books, with chapters on the x-axis. There’s a quick drop-off for the beginning parts of the book, but it’s like once people reach a certain point, they’re like, well, might as well finish it.

Although I suspect there’s some averaging or smoothing. After the drop, it looks really flat. Or is reading behavior really that predictable?

Tags: Jellybooks, New York Times, reading

James Gleick, author of The Information, Chaos, and Genius, is coming out with a new book this fall called Time Travel. William Gibson has given it his thumbs up. Really excited for this one (it comes out on my birthday!) and curious to see how liberally he treats his subject...for instance, cameras are time machines.

Tags: books   James Gleick   time   time travel   William Gibson

1. The 2016 Car Hacker's Handbook (Amazon) -- will give you a deeper understanding of the computer systems and embedded software in modern vehicles. It begins by examining vulnerabilities and providing detailed explanations of communications over the CAN bus and between devices and systems. (via BoingBoing)
2. More Exoskeletons Seeking FDA Approval -- The international group of exoskeleton providers with various FDA or CE certifications is growing and currently includes: Ekso in the US; Cyberdyne in the EU and Japan; ExoAtlet from Russia; and Israel’s ReWalk. Other providers are in the process of getting approvals or developing commercial versions of their products. My eye was caught by how global the list of exoskeleton companies is.
3. Dirigible Spreadsheet -- open source spreadsheet that's not just written in Python, it exposes and IS python. See also Harry Percival talking about it.
4. Everything You Know About AI Is Wrong (Gizmodo) -- an interesting run-through of myths and claims about AI. I'm not ready to consider all of these "busted," but they are some nice starters-for-ten in your next pub argument about whether the Matrix is coming.