Ratchet Up

SineClock: Telling Time By Sound

've always been attentive to time-topics as they thread their way through the news. Many, many years ago I did a lot of work on the philosophy of time, particularly in relation to still photography. And several months ago the Ratchet had a contest to find conceptual clocks. Mix in the notion of time as a sonic signature, time as audio-but-not-music, and you have an irresistible formula.

“Wristwatches are the most precise way to tell time, but they're not the only way. Indeed, we frequently judge the passage of time by a bunch of imprecise, ambient cues in our environment: The pace of our breathing, the changing noises of the street, how long it takes a cup of coffee to cool. That's why we can often be quite good at knowing ”how much time has passed“ even when we're not near a clock.

Conversely, this is why torturers -- and many prisons -- put their captives in rooms (or hooded cowls) that seal them off from any of the environmental markers of time. It drives them crazy: Without any external markers of the passage of time, the world takes on a troubling sense of unreality. Hell, that's why cubicle-farms in many corporations are so maddening. When you're shoved into one of those anonymously beige bins, so deep inside the building that you can't see out a window, you live in a completely inert environment. No wonder time seems to stand still! Hence the obsession of salarymen and GenX wage slaves -- so regularly reflected in comic strips and movies -- of glancing up at the clock every five minutes. They're not doing it merely because they want to leave work. They're seeking reassurance that the entire universe hasn't ground to a halt.” [Clive Thompson at CollisionDetection]

“Ever since man put a price on time, Timepieces have been judged for their horological or decorative values, but rarely for their aural experience, that is, until the much recent rise of the quartz movement. Ask any watch aficionado today about their mechanical collection, and they won’t fail to mention the sound and feeling they get when they wind up their mechanical watch. [...]

'There are three sounds, low, medium, and high. Each one is pulsing at a certain speed. The low pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one minute, the medium pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one hour, and the high pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one day, so if you sit and listen to the low sound for a minute, you’ll hear its pulse slowly speed up for thirty seconds, then slow down for another thirty seconds. Then it starts again.'” [WristFashion]

Sine Clock

Fimoculous On Video Games

Question: Does the image below picture a handcrafted Japanese fabric...or the party around the top of the Cheeze Whiz jar sitting next to Rex Sorgatz' keyboard?

Sorgatz' blog Fimoculous is back on duty and feeding on the internet and new media once again. The site is now nicely redesigned, although it still looks like some creepy pixilated petrie dish. [I don't recommend letting your on-screen pointer linger over-long in that dark stew of nasties on the right.] Rex' previous--and much admired--format was to skim a couple thousand blogs and post his faves, along with his own saucy commentary. He's now working more long form, as you'll see in this meditation on game culture:

"Every night over the last week, I've sat in a room with a computer and TV, playing the recently-released The Sims 2 and watching late night talk shows. Something important changed last night: I turned off the TV and started watching the show that my Sim character was watching on his television."

Pixel Moon, A Nice Place To Live

I'd love to live on pixel moon. Here's how. [Via Metafilter]

Mid-Life Cyborgs

It seems like the cyborg idea has arrived at something like middle age. An increasing number of those once-sveldt Schwarzenegger-like man/machines theorized in the '90's are now taking up aerobics and attending to a healthy breakfast with more fiber and an extra squirt of WD-40:

Nonetheless, I'm more than ever a believer that our technological extensions project the real us into spaces extending well beyond our saging bags of flesh. And so does William J. Mitchell whose "Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City" is chock full of wonderful writing about the new ++ in us:

"Now the body/city metaphors have turned concrete and literal...My reach extends indefinitely and interacts with the similarly extended reaches of others to produce a global system of transfer, actuation, sensing and control. My biological body meshes with the city; the city itself has become not only the domain of my networked cognitive system, but also--and critically--the spatial and material embodiment of that system."

If you want a more vivid taste of the Mitchell and this book, try this video of a talk he gave at MIT when the book first came out. [Won't play? Try here.]

[I'm sorry, but I don't have a reference for the creator of the graphic above; although I'm responsible for reddening him up.]

Don't miss the response to this post from Cody Brown at the left. His great link to the guy above reveals all--too much actually--and makes it clear that Tron guy lives just 11 miles from my home. Oh my, Ollie, we're in trouble now.

Jared Tarbell

ared Tarbell's computer graphic works have something of the Old School feel of computer plotter prints from the 1960's. But now with new sophistication and the very contemporary addition of an applet that lets you watch each image being drawn realtime in your browser. Aye, the pleasure's in the makin'.

If you want to check these out:

Expand your browser window to fill your screen.

Then click here [a good starting image], and be sure to launch one of applets at the bottom. Live large, choose the 900 x 900 pixel one on the right if you have broadband.

Then just watch the thing grow.

You'll find lots of these images as you explore his site. They'll give your computer a chance to do some heavy-lifting computation; each image revs up all the fans on my G5 while while it's being drawn.

The Real City of God

f you have seen the film "City of God" [and you must], then you'll have a particular interest in this link. Nat Friedman recently traveled to Rio and distributed disposable cameras to children living in the "favela" of Rochina. They made their own City of God. [Be sure to click on the picture of each child. It will take you to the images they made.]

Prairie View

Prairie View
Originally uploaded by Lightstruck.

This is a test post. I'm uploading this image directly from within my Flickr.com photo collection. It's a picture of the Carleton wind turbine being built about a mile from my home, and scheduled to spin any day now. Such a clean, beautiful shape. As for this post, everything looks good but for the line spacing.

The Billion Pixel Camera

They're actively developing the Gaia camera now, and planning for deployment from French Guiana in 2010. With aspirations to be the most powerful astronomical camera ever, the Gaia-cam will be composed of 170 separate image sensors whose component images will be digitally stitched together on the satellite. The result will be something close to a billion pixel camera.

All of which promises to make it "the most successful discovery machine in the history of astronomy."

[ESA Space Science]

Eatin' Flies & Beepin' Data

"I may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous.

To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity.

So what is the downside? The robot will most likely have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted from human excrement.

Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations. Sensors on the robot feed a data logger that periodically radios the results back to a base station."

One could easily imagine marketing these to find and save parking spots, too.

[New Scientist]

Ignite...comings...ratchet...stirrings...interject

With fall coming, and the start of school, I'm looking for good omens. Rhizomes of renewal and energy.

In case you've been wondering, "ratchet" is the 31,901th most common word in the English language. But that's not all I learned from WordCount. This graphically pleasing program also showed me the company it keeps. Which is where the omens come in.

WordCount is "an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is. WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet."

In the graphic below, "ratchet's" lexical neighbors come from WordCount, but the fire is all mine:

[To light my fire, please click.]