Category Archives: Snippets

this third eye extracted from the abdomen

‘I feel a very sincere admiration for all those people who march around Spain and Italy laden with bags, cases, telemeters, extra lenses, pose—meters, thermocolorimeters (“for taking the temperature of colour”) and who, never losing the smallest clasp from their bags, or the tiniest roll of film, advance with great strides into the ‘Leican era’. […]

The Variability of Vision

LATE IN 1967 a book was published in England which is as charming as it must be fascinating to all who are interested in the theory and practice of interpretation. Its principal author is the Dutch naturalist and ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who combined with a friend and artist to photograph the tracks left in the […]

Every contact leaves a trace.

Both questioned document examination and computer forensics belong to a branch of forensic science known as “trace evidence,” which owes its existence to the work of the French investigator Edmond Locard. Locard’s famous Exchange Principle may be glossed as follows: “a cross-transfer of evidence takes place whenever a criminal comes into contact with a victim, […]

Deep addressability

[…] deep addressability would allow for the identification not only of things with mass but also of relations between things. Once again, each letter in the sentence you are reading right now could have an address, but your act of reading of each one of them, those immaterial relations between two things, it and you, […]

If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct

From Perl, the first postmodern computer language, by the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (Perl)‘s creator, Larry Wall. “Or think about shell programming, and reductionism. How many times have we heard the mantra that a program should do one thing and do it well? Well…Perl does one thing, and does it well. What it does […]

R-G-B. Peter Campus

If we are to avoid the problem of creating a visual system that will reduce the capacity of the eye, it is necessary to disassociate the video camera from the eye and make it an extension of the room. Peter Campus Video as a Function of Reality, 1974

A Brief History of ‘Pixel’

Figure 1. The first appearance of picture element, in a news item in Wireless World and Radio Review, about a demonstration by Ives at Bell Labs of a 50-by-50-element television system. A few RCA researchers, notably Albert Rose and Otto Schade, continued to use picture element to examine the theory of imaging, but with differing […]

In the cage

It had occurred to her early that in her position–that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie–she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively–though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity […]

Emotion and intelligent artifacts

“In a footnote Pickard reports that in lab experiments with students playing the computer game Doom, signs of stress came less with the appearance of a new deadly enemy (the intended site of emotional affect) than during times when students were experiencing difficulty configuring the software.” in Suchman, L. (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations. Cambridge University Press, […]