Clare Townhill

Internet of the Afterlife

What does it mean when the internet is not just real but is also an icon, and a symbol? Five thought provoking global stories of the internet as a place you drive to, asynchronous occasion, as an intermediate destination without keyboard, interface or electricty, that comes to you, the internet as an imagined space and last but not least the internet as an offering to the afterlife. Wonderful.

Immersion

Stumbled across this on one of my many wanderings down the back of the internet.
Robbie Cooper is an interactive artist. His exhibition ‘Immersion’ explores the changing relationship between humans, screens, identity and image. Inspired by watching teenagers absorbed in computer games in Chinese internet cafés, Cooper’s portraits capture everyday people as they become immersed in different types of media. Shooting through the screen, these images are single frames taken from high-definition video footage. Filming long periods of video helps Cooper’s models to forget they’re being photographed and results in natural moments of unguarded behaviour.
More here: http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk

 

Virginia's iPad

I just love this. I've struggled several times to try to teach my 90 year old Grandma Joan to use a computer: the mouse is a very tricky object for shaky, arthritic hands to manage, let alone the less than intuitive OS that is Windows. The ancient computer in my Grandad's office/'glory-hole' may as well be miles from the warm, comfort of her favourite chair by the telly. This fills me with hope, it also reminds me very much of Jeff Han's TED talk on using touch interface rather than legacy laptop OS for education in developing countries. 

The Next Big Leap: Psychic Computer Shows Your Thoughts on Screen

Things are going to get very weird and very noisy:

Scientists have discovered how to “read” minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing images of what people are seeing — or even remembering.

Researchers have been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling.

The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.

The possibilities of creation, perversion and imagination are just mind-bending. 

TheTimes

3D Printers and Symbiosis

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Counting Down to the End of Moore's Law

 The capacity of flash chips has doubled 14 times in 19 years. That’s faster than Moore’s Law — the observation by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the capacity of semiconductors doubles roughly every two years.

“We’re looking at a brick wall five years down the road,” says Eli Harari, the chief executive of SanDisk,

In 1990, when SanDisk shipped its first generation of flash memory — the sort that can remember information even after you turn off the power — each chip stored four million bits of information. Today, the biggest chip SanDisk makes holds 64 billion bits.

SanDisk and other flash memory makers have figured out how to cram even more information into that tiny cell. Until a few years ago, each of those cells worked the way most computer memory does — it represented either a zero or a one. Now the chip can actually count how many electrons are in a cell, and depending on the number it can write and read up to 16 states (recording a number between zero and 15, or four bits to a computer).

Let’s stop for a second to take stock of the wonder of all this. The last flash memory card I bought for my camera held two gigabytes (16 billion bits). It cost me $6. And somewhere inside it is something that is counting electrons 40 at a time. An electron has a radius of 2.8179 × 10⁻¹⁵ meters. In layman’s terms it is pretty much the smallest thing you could ever count.

BITS: Counting Down to Moore's Law