Taxonomy, ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies

“These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that from a long way off look like flies.“

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”
Why do I blog this? Simply because it’s a fascinating quote for a Sunday afternoon. Working on a course about qualitative analysis, it’s intriguing to have such example of taxonomy.

Mushroom meme circulation: physical digital physical

The real-world, a classic mushroom encountered in the mountains in the French Alps.

A digital representation in Super Mario Bros by Nintendo.

Back to the physical world with mario-like mushrooms spotted in San Francisco, next to Union Square.

Why do I blog this? sorting out some pictures of Flickr lead me to wonder about how meme circulate from the physical to the digital and the return to the physical.

Flea market electrogear

Seen at the flea market last week end in Geneva. It’s fascinating to see how such electro-devices are more and more common in this kind of place. Electronic gear used to be common but I see a surge recently in second-hands shops. Why is that intriguing to be blogged? simply because the prominence of electronic artifacts is so important that it starts leaking into more and more places. And the fact that they’re not covered with this gloomy black boxes makes it even more curious.

concise information visualization

Indications of numbers of participants + gender compositions of scenes with basic representations (no other species from the animal kingdom).

Sensors in condoms

Found here, a new vector in ubiquitous computing:

“A musical condom designed to play louder and faster as lovers reach a climax is to go on sale in Ukraine. Grigoriy Chausovsky, from Zaporozhye, said his condoms came fitted with a special sensor that registers when the condom is put on. It transmits a signal to a miniature speaker in the base of the condom which play a melody.

He told local media: “As the sex becomes more passionate, it registers the increased speed of the movements and plays the melody faster and louder.”“

Why do I blog this? Wacky ideas are always weird, yet they often mean something. In this case, it’s maybe not the proposed use of sensors that is important, nor the fact that you can use the condom context (but who knows?).

It’s rather that it attests that sensors are so small and cheap they can be integrated in very thin membranes. It’s a bit like the challenged that Violet wanted to achieve. Violet is the french company which does the wifi rabbit Nabaztag: their point was that “if you can connect a rabbit to the Internet, you can connect anything”. So maybe here it’s more relevant for people who want to develop health applications or disposable devices.

Using Nokia model # as terrorist messages

Some of the curious codes used by terrorists are described in the Washington Post (in an article by Craig Whitlock):

“In September 2005, a British court convicted Andrew Rowe, a Jamaican convert to Islam, on terrorism charges after authorities found a secret code book in which he gave double meanings to the brand numbers of Nokia phones. Pretending to be a traveling cellphone salesman, Rowe would use “Nokia 3310″ to refer to money, “Nokia 3410″ to signal potential trouble from the police and “Nokia 3610″ as code for weapons. Rowe received a 15-year prison sentence, even though prosecutors and police said his precise plans remained a mystery.“

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards random facts about codes used by terrorists. A new usage of Nokia phone model names.

Kid book about why owning a server

Via, I payed close attention to the screenshot capture of thisincredible book by Microsoft called “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? helping understand the Stay-At-Home Server”. The book basically describes how a server “is a funny looking-box” who “makes friend with computers” which are generally in “boring offices” but sometimes can go to your house (“some servers aren’t boring, they don’t go in offices, they go in houses”), especially when “a mommy and a daddy loves each other very much the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift”.

In essence, it describes the advantage of owning a server: sharing content, accessing it remotely, being regarded as a nerd, looking at blinking lights

Why do I blog this? …

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets

Enrico pointed me to this curious empirical study of the effectiveness of aluminium foil helmets conducted by MIT people (Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, Noah Vawter). Their point was to examine the efficacy of different aluminum helmets often employed by paranoids who want to protect themselves against invasive radio signals. They actually examined 3 configuration using a $250,000 network analyser.

Here are the results:

“we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
(…)
The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ”radio location” (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites. The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.“

Why do I blog this? found the project weird enough to be spotted, especially as it shows the irrationality of the aluminum craze.

Mechanical TicTacToe

An intriguing Tic-Tac-Toe game played by a robotic system constituted of two mechanical arms, designed by Guillaume Stagnaro:

Digital/physical interlinkage

“Copier coller” in french means “Copy paste”.

Digital actions that spilled over the material world, seen in Lyon at lunchtime.