Oddtag goes (almost) offline this summer, until Summer Bank Holiday (more or less). No travelling but hard work, sweat and sun. Have a look on the Venetian Writings (in italian), be good, have fun.
img: A coffee please - oddtag on flickr.com
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.video: The Scientific Method [blip.tv ?posts_id=710649&dest=-1]
Main Entry: con·sume transitive verb 1: to do away with completely : destroy: "fire consumed several buildings" 2 a: to spend wastefully : squander b: use up: "writing consumed much of his time" 3 a: to eat or drink especially in great quantity consumed several bags of pretzels b: to enjoy avidly : devour "mysteries, which she consumes for fun" — E. R. Lipson 4: to engage fully : engross "consumed with curiosity" 5: to utilize as a customer "consume goods and services" intransitive verb 1: to waste or burn away : perish 2: to utilize economic goodsvideo: George Carlin - Stuff - on googlevideo [googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8896213084482448693]
The word derives from Serendip, the old Persian name for Sri Lanka,[1] and was coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann (not the same man as the famed American educator), an Englishman then living in Florence. The letter read, "It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? [...] One aspect of Walpole's original definition of serendipity that is often missed in modern discussions of the word is the "sagacity" of being able to link together apparently innocuous facts to come to a valuable conclusion. Thus, while some scientists and inventors are reluctant about reporting accidental discoveries, others openly admit its role; in fact serendipity is a major component of scientific discoveries and inventions. According to M.K. Stoskopf[3] "it should be recognized that serendipitous discoveries are of significant value in the advancement of science and often present the foundation for important intellectual leaps of understanding".video: Words and Thoughts in RGB by Eduardo Morais - vimeo.com [vimeo 832162]
"I'm a net artist: It's a cartoon video with the voice of a net-artist, looking for attention. He explains what net-art is, and the problems he has in order to arrive to people and to be considered as an art maker"
"now come to Venice, meet the art, it's a honour"[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=hZQF6Q9ISzA]
Hi! This video always brings a smile to my face, so I hope it does the same for you. YouTube suggested "wisdom" as an appropriate tag for this video. I completely agree. Yes, the subtitles are in Swedish. Why? I don't know. This thing has been sitting on my hard drive since the Clinton Administration, I can't remember where I got it from. Some other frequent comments/questions about this video, and about the song and its origins, are answered in the Wikipedia entry -- check it out: Mahna_mahna Piero Umiliani
"The question is: what is Mahna Mahna?" "The Question is: Who cares?"Youtube Tags: muppets mahna kermit wisdom [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YevYBsShxNs]
Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial » [...] I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.