20 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Portrait of Social Media Psychosis
A Muslim woman with her burqa on fire: like. A policeman using a baton to beat a masked antifa protester: like. Hillary Clinton looking gaunt and pale: like. A military helicopter armed with machine guns and headed toward the caravan of immigrants: like.
She had spent a few hours scrolling one afternoon when she heard a noise outside her window, and she turned away from the screen to look outside. A neighbor was sweeping his sidewalk, pushing tiny white rocks back into his rock garden. The s... 1 
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notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
All Play Takes Place in Temporary Worlds
All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course…. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an a... 1 notes
notes20 JUL 2017 by ideonexus
Old CRPGs are Unplayable for Modern Gamers
They had five days to play (Ultima IV), and I asked them to make as much progress as they could in that time. When we gathered to debrief in class, a few students explained how they’d overcome some of their difficulties, but the vast majority was utterly flummoxed by the game. As one of them put it, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” After removing the arrow from my chest, I asked them to explain why.
It mostly came dow... 1 notes
notes11 JUL 2017 by ideonexus
Engineering New Ways to Think About Things
One cluster looks, for example, for new ways of representing and understanding complex systems. A second cluster aims for more access to knowledge by undoing contemporary media’s restrictions (such as the restriction of the screen, which produces, with its peek-a-boo access to complexity, impenetrable forms of knowledge such as the trillions of lines of code, written on screens and then stared at on screens). A third cluster explores new forms of representing time, and a fourth one more eff...
1 13 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Humans Are Abstraction Masters
What distinguishes us from cavemen is the level of abstraction we can reach. Abstraction enabled humans to move from barter to money, and from gold coins to plastic cards. These days, what's left of "money" is often just an account record we read on a computer screen, and soon it could just be a line of code in a bitcoin ledger.
Today, abstraction is all around us — and math is the language of abstraction. In the words of the great mathematician Henri Poincare, mathematics is valuable beca...The level of abstraction we can master distinguishes us from other life.
22 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Save Species to Eat Them
The creativity behind social marketing can be alarming. A recent television ad depicted water disappearing into a storm drain as a voice warned that lawn fertilizer in the spring can wind up in the Chesapeake Bay. "No crab should die like this," the announcer opines. Later, the announcer appears on screen with a small tub in hand, exclaiming "they should perish in some hot, tasty melted butter!" This promotion by the Chesapeake Bay Program, a subsidiary of the U.S. Environmental Protection Ag... 1 notes
notesA different way to reach people concerning endangered species is to point out they will no longer be available as lunch.
03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Primitive Aliens Encountering a Laptop
“I have a suggestion,” said Scriber. His voice was slurred from the effort of concentrating over Scrupilo’s thoughts. “When you touch the four/three square and say”—he made the alien sounds; they were all very easy to do—“the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match the squares. I think we … we are being given choices.”
Hm. “The box could end up training us.” If this is a machine, we need some new definitions. “ … Very well, let’s play with it....Folksonomies: technology magic
Folksonomies: technology magic
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notesVinge describes a clan of alien wolflike being with mideval technology encountering a computer carried by a human alien visitor.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Can Predict Trajectories
1. If you show very young babies a video of a static Big Bird that then explodes into its separately defined parts, they won't be perturbed. Because all the parts had separate edges anyway, they may, for all the babies know. have been separate objects to begin with. But if you show them Big Bird moving first, so that they see that all the parts of the object move together, and then show them the exploding Big Bird, they'll look much longer and more attentively, as if they recognize that somet... 1 notes
notesIf an object moving at a trajectory disappears behind a screen, the baby will look longer at the other end of the screen if it does not reappear at the proper time and place.
07 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
When Babies Learn About Perspective
Alison and Andy designed an experiment to test this idea further. First they set up an imitation game: you give the toy to me and I'll give it to you; you put the sticker on my hand and I'll put it on your hand. Children are very good at this and love doing it. Then Alison and Andy put a screen on the table between the experimenter and the child. The experimenter hid a toy from the child by placing it on her side of the screen. Then she gave the toy to the child and asked him to hide it from ... 1 notes
notesBefore the age of three, babies learn that the perspective of other people differs from their own.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
Using Someone Else as a Sounding Board for Debugging
A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. the other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck: bobbing up and down in a bathtub). they do not need to say a word; the simple act of explaining, step by step, what the code is supposed to do often causes the problem to leap off the screen and announce itself. 1 notes
notesThere should be a Jargon File term for this. I have used this many times, and others have used me for it as well.
