randomWalks

I didn’t want to come off as trying to do some D’Angelo stuff, but I can’t think of any other album that’s been so influential. D’Angelo left such a wealth of unexplored territory musically.

We live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis dine at the White House regularly. The idea that the government felt it so essential to insist that this behavior be marked as a felony is just unfathomable.

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infinity-imagined:

City lights photographed from the International Space Station and Neurons imaged with fluorescence microscopy.

Source images; Cities (1) (2) (3) (4) (5), Neurons (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

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spackerdave:

All Watched Over
by Machines of Loving Grace

by Richard Brautigan

I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
   (right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
   (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

We would collect a bundle of sticks in the local wood, sell them to a neighbour for a penny, then walk two miles to to the local picture house to see Charlie [Chaplin], it was silent films in those days, talkies weren’t invented then.

With that said, Kwanzaa-hating has always struck me as the most bougie and snobbish of holiday traditions. It’s that cool that Jonathan Safran Foer thinks that “no one is quite sure what Kwanzaa is,” but I’m not sure “what Hanukkah is.” And for most of my life, no one I knew was quite sure either. I’m only barely sure “what Christmas is.” (Celebrating the birth of your savior with an orgy of consumption?) It’s just seems bizarre in America, of all places, to stand on vintage. Has there ever been a more mongrel, more made-up, country that this one? Have there ever been two more “made up people” then the “white race” and the “black race?” This country is a mongrel mess — and its traditions are, too. That’s the whole charm of the thing. No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up.

So often when I’m out and about I find myself in desperate need of some random numbers!

An increasing number of Americans have found that when legal strictures and open discrimination are stripped away they are left not with the reprehensible, but with neighbors, friends, and family members whom they love, and see loving each other. Little wonder, then, that two-thirds of those under thirty support same-sex marriage.

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sosuperawesome:

Off the Grid

“There are growing number of people
who have decided to live light on the earth
to not be a part of problem anymore
I spent the last few years with four of them
striving for harmony with nature
in the most pristine corners of United States.”

Eric Valli

The only people in the world who get to act like race and gender don’t matter are white men. I’m a white man myself. And let me tell you: It is amazing. No joke. And if I shave and put on a suit? You would not believe it.

In response to the specific example of Nicolala liking Walmart, Facebook insists it really did happen: “We show that the Like happened on 10/01 at 6:46 p.m.,” the spokesman says.

www.youtube.com/watch

"Every time we have intense, saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week" Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe 25/03/09

It’s really the first time online-native writers have been given a tool they understand how to use with a hook into the App Store’s ecosystem.

When people look us up in the App Store, we’re confident that the first 12-15 apps are going to represent us very well. Our platform is only as good as the people using it. Compared to what publishing has been going through, programming is pretty easy.

They understand that healthy publishing businesses are built from the ground up, not from ‘vast amounts of cash’ on down. There is no ‘moving into profit mode later’ for healthy publications. So 29th Street is making top-notch tools that allow publishers of ANY size to find their fit — and publishers don’t have to burn money that isn’t theirs making delivery vehicles like these.

For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity. Comparing the unique pattern of the frequencies on an audio recording with a database that has been logging these changes for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year provides a digital watermark: a date and time stamp on the recording.

shanio:

a tweet from a friend

Waiting anxiously for @shani_o’s story on the teleology of favoriting. I have a work email thread that I need to fave my way out of.

short version: we should be able to visibly fave emails so we don’t have to reply.

To be on the Newsstand you have to program an iOS app. The tech hurdle is high, and hiring isn’t cheap. iOS programmers are in extremely high demand. Now is a great time for another Movable Type. Writers would love a way to push serialized content straight to tablets, and the experience would be a boon to readers. Tablets are the best way to read, and Newsstand is the equivalent of RSS for non-geeks.

Few people know this, but Community Chest is real; there are real cards, drawn in secret by the powerful and the occult — in darkened living rooms in penthouse apartments — in small clearings near running water — behind certain colonial buildings in the coastal northeast — cards whose instructions and gifts are printed in blood and considered mystical bonds.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

How about I build something that buys me things completely at random? Something that just… fills my life with crap? How would these purchases make me feel? Would they actually be any less meaningful than the crap I buy myself on a regular basis anyway?

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If Buy Nothing Day gets you down — forget about Buy Nothing Year — how about a more positive crusade: Buy More Stuff!

Previously: create something day (randomWalks, 2002)