Technically, You Would Only Need One
Apr 30, 2005 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
Some folks at MIT are holding a time-traveler convention. The idea is to make it so famous and so widely-known that even thousands of years in the future, people will still know exactly when and where this time-traveler convention went down, and will all come travel to it at some point in their illustrious time-traveling careers.
Yeah, like they’d all want to come to the party in the 21st century. There won’t even be any frigging butter pie!
The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) East Campus Courtyard, MIT 42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)
10 Pieces! A HeadPerformance Record!
Mar 8, 2005 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
Cute? Yes. Cruel? Unclear. His owner says this:
Oolong is so calm and patient — he never gets angry when I take pictures of him. When I put various objects on his head, he stays still for a minute. This is just a result of an intimate relationship between me and Oolong. The main theme of my site is not to show these ‘headperformance’ links, and it’s not my hope to propagandize nothing but the strangeness of his headperformance over the world. Oolong’s headperformance– many foreigners seem to feel it ‘crazy’, but Japanese people feel it just cute and funny. It is the difference of international feeling.
Hmm.
A Warning Shot
Sep 18, 2004 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
Just a reminder that tomorrow is a very special day. Now last year, we did alright, but things got a little confused, Soce got into the grog, and well, let’s just say it got a little crazy from there.
What I’m trying to say is that tomorrow is like the best holiday ever, so, um, like don’t fuck it up.
Talk Like A Pirate Day
Sep 18, 2003 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
Thanks to Etan for letting me know that tomorrow, September 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. So don’t ye be forgettin’ now, me beauties, or I’ll swab the decks with all of ya. Aar.
People – There’s Just No Stoppin ‘Em
Aug 10, 2003 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
An excerpt from Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast. There’s a Sandman story about this, but I always thought Neil Gaiman just made him up.
“By far the best known of all San Franciscos queer characters, however, was the Emperor Norton, whose real name was Joshua A. Norton. He was born in England in 1819 and at the age of thirty came to San Francisco with forty thousand dollars, with which he established himself as a real-estate operator and broker. Within ten years he had increased his fortune to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all of which he lost in an unlucky investment.
“The financial disaster unbalanced his mind, and on September 17, 1859 he sent to the newspapers an announcement that the California Legislature had chosen him Emperor of the United States, and that henceforth he must be addressed by his proper title. For a while he also called himself Protector of Mexico. For nearly thirty years he was one of the best-known men in San Francisco. Each afternoon he promenaded the down-town streets, graciously greeting his subjects. He wore a blue military uniform with tarnished gold-plated epaulets, which had been given him by the officers at the United States Army post, the Presidio, and a beaver hat decorated with a feather and a rosette, and he always carried both a cane and an umbrella.
“When his uniform began to look shabby, the Board of Supervisors, with a great deal of ceremony, appropriated enough money to buy him another, for which the Emperor sent them a gracious note of thanks and a patent of nobility for each Supervisor. He ate without paying at whatever restaurant, lunch-room, or saloon took his fancy; and whenever he wanted cash, he issued bonds in the denomination of fifty cents and sold them to his subjects. He also drew an occasional check for that amount, and it was invariably honored by the San Francisco bankers and merchants. On January 8, 1880 the Emperor died, leaving an estate which consisted of a two-dollar-and-a-half gold piece, three dollars in silver, a franc piece of 1828, and 98,200 shares of stock in a worthless gold mine.”
Thinking of this man seems to provide some kind of lifelong comfort. When things get rough, we all have the capability to get through them. Crazy or no, at least he was happy.
Artbots
Jul 13, 2003 greatThingsThatPeopleDo
I went to see Artbots today with a couple of good friends. It’s an annual robot talent show at the Eyebeam Gallery in Chelsea, for art made of robots, and robots that make art. The “guidelines” are very broad: “No firm rules exist on the types of work that can participate; if you think it’s a robot and you think it’s making art, then it’s an art-making robot.”
The robots ranged from very functional to totally esoterically artistic. Some of my favorites were the Guitarbot, consisting of four strings rigged up to extremely sophisticated computer-controlled picking mechanisms that play beautifully, and Robots like H20: Photosynthesis Perpetual Motion Machine, a little cart with two plants on it at different distances from the incoming sunlight, whose movement was fueled either by the difference in the direction of their phototropism, or by their different weights due to difference in quality of photosynthesis. We couldn’t really figure out which one of those it was, but either way, like whoa.
Max/MSP was everywhere, making me miss the days when university resources let me use 500$ software for whatever dumb shit I wanted to put together. The perils of interactivity also reared their ugly heads – many of the robots involved some user input (noisemaking, petting, dancing, sending e-mails, choosing what kind of house you want, playing an organ, the shape of your face, etc.), but only the best ones made it clear exactly how that input was being transformed into the flashing lights, drawings, or turntable scratching coming out of the robot. That kind of complexity leading to confusion has the tendency to leave even a die-hard interface junkie like myself a little cold.
All in all, it’s always amazing to see people doing totally different kinds of work – just coming up with ideas and putting them together out of wood and circuitry. My love for this shit is undiminished by its failings – I’ve been thinking of applying for a one-day-a-week internship at Harvestworks to maybe get into something like it myself. Well, we’ll see.
