08 JUL 2016 by ideonexus

 The Deletionist

The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. [...] The Deletionist takes the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet that automatically creates erasures from any Web pages the reader visits. A similar method has been used in Ji Lee's Wordless Web, which removes all text from Web pages, as well as applets that turn web...
Folksonomies: new media
Folksonomies: new media
  1  notes
 
21 APR 2014 by ideonexus

 God Gets Smaller as Knowledge Grows

“The progress of religion is defined,” writes the early-twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “by the denunciation of gods.” Gods become fewer in number until there is only one—or a Father, Son and Holy Ghost adding up to one. And the qualities of the lonely God that is left are also denounced. He loses His home: God is no longer to be found inside a temple or even, after airplanes, enthroned atop a cloud. He loses His physical form: His beard, His voice, perhaps H...
Folksonomies: science religion
Folksonomies: science religion
  1  notes

From many to one, from personification to invisible.

24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 There is a Cloud Floating in a Sheet of Paper

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. . . . “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. W...
Folksonomies: connections
Folksonomies: connections
  1  notes

A wonderful passage on the interconnectedness of all things.

15 NOV 2013 by ideonexus

 The Internet as a Superorganism

If the cloud is a vast array of personal computer processors, then why not add your own laptop or desktop computer to it? It in a certain way it already is. Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer. The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual compu...
Folksonomies: intelligence emergence
Folksonomies: intelligence emergence
  1  notes

Built from a gazillion chips coordinating to distribute content, memes, calculations.

12 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Geometry Seems Disconnected from Reality

Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.
Folksonomies: complexity geometry
Folksonomies: complexity geometry
  1  notes

It deals with orbs and squares, but clouds and trees are much more complex.

25 APR 2012 by ideonexus

 Life Can Go On for Billions of Years

I believe that life can go on forever. It takes a million years to evolve a new species, ten million for a new genus, one hundred million for a class, a billion for a phylum—and that's usually as far as your imagination goes. In a billion years, it seems, intelligent life might be as different from humans as humans are from insects. But what would happen in another ten billion years? It's utterly impossible to conceive of ourselves changing as drastically as that, over and over again. All y...
Folksonomies: evolution progress
Folksonomies: evolution progress
   notes

Freeman Dyson quote about the future of humanity.

03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Digital Culture Turns Everything into One Book

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, ther...
  1  notes

If we are allowed to mashup everything into newer expressions so that the original sources are lost and we cannot reference anything, then we essentially have only one book, just like North Korea.