21 NOV 2017 by ideonexus
Inversion of Information and Attention
What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an in...
1 30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Barcodes in Nature
I have used the barcode as a
symbol of precise analysis, in all its beauty. Mixed light is sorted into its
rainbow of component colours and everybody sees beauty. That is a first
analysis. Closer detail reveals fine lines and a new elegance, the elegance
of detection, of the bringing of order and understanding. Fraunhofer
barcodes speak to us of the exact elemental nature of distant stars. A
precisely measured pattern of stripes is a coded message from across the
parsecs. There is grace in th... 1 
notes
notes27 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Sensations are Related in the Brain
Production of speech is seen as a pure motor act, involving muscles and the neurons controlling them, while perception of speech is seen as purely sensory, involving the ear and the auditory pathway. This parcellation of the systems appear intuitive and clear, but recent studies [beginning with Taine 1870!] ... suggest that such divisions may be fundamentally wrong. Rather than separate processes for motor outputs and individual sensory modalities, adaptive action seems to use all the availab...
1 Speaking involves not just motor functions in the brain, but auditory, suggesting sensory inputs for the brain are not segregated.
23 APR 2012 by ideonexus
Why a Machine Cannot Fully Imitate a Man
I specifically paused to show that, if there were such machines with the organs and shape of a monkey or of some other non-rational animal, we would have no way of discovering that they are not the same as these animals. But if there were machines that resembled our bodies and if they imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means for recognizing that, none the less, they are not genuinely human. The first is that they would never be able to u...Folksonomies: artificial intelligence
Folksonomies: artificial intelligence
Descartes reasoning sounds like a precursor to the Turing Test.
31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Music Lessons Teach Children Emotional Nuance
10 years of music lessons
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry. The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all t... 1 notes
notesChildren who begin music lessons before the age of seven have a greater ability to detect emotional nuance than children who do not.
03 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Carl Sagan on the Audacity of John F. Kennedy's Moon Miss...
Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system, for a few years. Then we hurried back. why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?
The scope and audacity of John Kennedy's May 25th 1961 message to a joint session of Congress on "Urgent National Needs" -- the speech that launched the Apollo program--dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking shemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to an unknown world--a world not yet...Sagan describes his reaction to Kennedy's speech to a joint session of Congress asking for funding for the Apollo program.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
Who Profits from "Free"?
So everyone agrees these days: Hooray for pirates! Art and culture (or, more discouragingly, "content") should be free. Techno-utopians of the left and right envision a future in which everything ever made is accessible, at no cost, with a click of a button. Those who think "free" as in speech envision a new digital order offering an inclusive cultural commons and mass enlightenment through access to information; those who think "free" as in beer merely see a cheaper way to get rich. "Just be...Folksonomies: creative commons
Folksonomies: creative commons
1 notes
notesCapitalists love all this free stuff online, they get to make so much money off of it. I do appreciate the irony of me attempting to do the same with MemexPlex.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
How do We Fix Spelling?
...it can be argued, perhaps, if they wish, that it's a question of style and beauty in the language, and that to make new words and new parts of speech might destroy that. But they cannot argue that respelling the words would have anything to do with the style. There's no form of art form or literary form, with the sole exception of crossword puzzles, in which the spelling makes a bit of difference to the style. And even crossword puzzles can be made with a different spelling. And if it's no...Folksonomies: phonetics
Folksonomies: phonetics
If we can write words with letters from the English alphabet to phonetically reproduce words in other languages, like Mandarin or ARabic, then why can we not rearrange the letters in our own words to phonetically match the way they sound when we speak them?
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
The Content of Any Medium is Always Another Medium
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.
...Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that ...Folksonomies: new media
Folksonomies: new media
1 notes
notesMediums are object-oriented, with one extending from another, inheriting from the parent.
