Suzanne Treister: Amiga Videogame Stills.
In the late 1980s I was making paintings about computer games. In January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots.
Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine.
The BNT162b mRNA vaccine has this digital code at its heart. It is 4284 characters long, so it would fit in a bunch of tweets. At the very beginning of the vaccine production process, someone uploaded this code to a DNA printer (yes), which then converted the bytes on disk to actual DNA molecules.
On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring.
(…) philosophers often don’t do a good job of discussing utilitarianism. They traffic in astounding thought-experiments – is it right to harmlessly kill your newborn infant if it’s screaming a bit too much? Should you take drugs that make you a better, more caring parent? – that can produce shocking answers. Some critics of utilitarianism take these outlandish ideas as a victory: any ethical theory that countenances infanticide must be wrong. But ‘gotcha’ answers to ethical enquiries about how to raise, or not raise, kids are a triumph of a philosophical style that prioritises aggravation over moral substance. Those who offer them are not engaged in good-faith philosophical debate. They’re engaged in what I call ‘moral shit-stirring’.
Fraidycat – follow from afar.
Feeds (RSS, Atom or JSON Feed). This is how Fraidycat reads blogs, Tumblr, Medium, Mastodon, micro.blog, Wikipedia, Kickstarter or Stack Overflow. If only every network used RSS!
How Claude Shannon Invented the Future.
(…) Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave.
Relevant: The Bitplayer.
Modern culture blames parents for forces beyond their control.
For the adult child, estrangement is governed by powerful narratives of autonomy, individuality and the pursuit of happiness – of righting wrongs and pushing back against figures from one’s oppressive past. For the parent, there is no upside to estrangement. It’s all downside: shame of failing at life’s most important task; grief from the loss of adult children and grandchildren; the constant undertow of guilt, sorrow and regret.
This is probably the dumbest project I’ve worked on all year but it’s been fun, I’ve learned about Steganography, memfd_create, binfmt_misc and played a little more with Rust.
Relevant: PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.
“How and why I stopped buying new laptops.”
We need another economical model, in which we build all laptops like pre-2011 Thinkpads. As a consequence, laptop sales would go down, but that’s precisely what we need. Furthermore, with today’s computing efficiency, we could significantly reduce the operational and embodied energy use of a laptop if we reversed the trend towards ever higher functionality.
Shape language: Duolingo's art style.
Our artists wield a couple of tricks for making designs that simultaneously entertain and educate. This is a glimpse into our visual toolbox!
Women and news: an overview of audience behaviour in 11 countries.
The men, and they were usually men, spoke of social cohesion and a need to act selflessly and responsibly. The women, and they were usually women, who took on the greatest burden on housework, childcare and responsibility for ageing parents, sighed, took a deep breath and got to work.