randomWalks

Wired News: Burning Man Never Gets Old

It was just one of those moments when you feel like everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be. You just had to be there. - John Perry Barlow

Modern windows is a new topic of discussion in the dwell forums.

Among the millions put out by the power loss last week were the nearly 600 designers and students attending the Industrial Designers Society of America's annual conference. When the hotel closed on Thursday because emergency generators had shut down, people who head design departments at corporations like I.B.M. and Motorola were put on the street for the night—at the mercy of their own designs, their consciences as professionals and whatever impromptu designing they cared to do.

Dear Nest Products. I'd like to place an order for the Herb chintz fabric.

The Memory Hole: White House Alters Webpages About Iraq Combat. [via BookNotes]

We were all there, for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists. After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was accident.

I think I want this one.

The Work of Charles and Ray Eames (Library of Congress Exhibition), via Coudal’s MoOM.

Most folks were good natured, but hot. The breeze over the water seemed to disappear with the electricity. Merchants were selling water at gallons a minute, and at normal prices, too. More than a few people looked like heat stroke candidates: puffy red faces, clothing entirely sweat-soaked, a staggering, erratic walk. I bought two bottles of water, but I looked like I'd been fished out of the East River: covered in sweat, wet clothes, and the marks of pollution from where I'd climbed over barricades and up on bridge partitions to beat the crowds and take pictures.

There's a thing there that's got all the outside and it's got the momentum and it's going to move and it's going to demand certain forms and it's totally not embodied at all. There's no material to it yet and you feel absolutely that you're about to embody that, whatever your material is. I think painters feel that too. I remember Philip Guston talking that way. In fact he and I used to talk about paint and words to the extent that we weren't talking about paint and words anymore, we were talking about art, I mean, making that thing where we use all whatever materials we've been given to make it with. I remember some nights talking with him where we felt like it's absolutely up there somewhere and it's not paint and it's not words.

dwell forums: Why is it that people tend to choose traditional style homes over modern, contemporary homes?

artnet.com: Tripping on the Wall “Since the late 1980s, the New York artist Fred Tomaselli has been celebrated for visionary artworks made of intricately collaged images clipped from magazines and nature guides and also including, somewhat more notoriously, marijuana leaves, pharmaceutical pills and other literally mind-altering substances.”

Do you know who in the Bush administration is an ex-con? Or who never graduated from college? Can you guess the cabinet member who had an oil tanker named after them? Do you know whose nickname is "Scooter" and whose nickname is "Yoda?"

originally posted by beXn

LIFE Interview: Allen Ginsberg

Kerouac was all-American if anything. Neal Cassady was an all American kid, foot warts and all. But it really was Americana and Americanist, something in an older literary tradition that runs through Whitman and William Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson. There was that old Americanist tradition of recognition of the land and the people and the gawky awkward beauty of the individual eccentric citizen. Or as Kerouac said, "the old-time honesty of gamblers and straw hats." His 1959 [Playboy, June] article on "The Origins of the Beat Generation," that's his statement on what he intended, a kind of yea-saying Americana which was interpreted as some kind of negative complaining by the middle class who were themselves complaining. So yes, we were, or I was quite aware of the [cultural] impact. But so was Kerouac in "Origins of the Beat Generation" and in The Dharma Bums. He predicts a generation of long-haired kids with rucksacks. He predicts and asks for it.

Random Walk Generator

Humans have seemingly always been fascinated by random phenomena. Randomness is a pervasive component of our everyday lives. It characterizes the patterns of raindrops, shape and location of clouds, traffic on the freeway. It describes the selection of winning numbers in the lottery and day-to-day changes in the weather. The science of chaos says that everything began in pure randomness and will end that way.

The computer provides a means for the systematic extended study of randomness and pseudo-randomness that is impractical using simpler methods such as flipping coins or rolling dice. A graphics-oriented computer and a simple algorithm such as a two-dimensional random walk is ideal for the visual display and exploration of random principles. The random walk decision procedure, like the eight queens and knight's tour problems, predates computers. In one college finite math textbook (Kemeny et. al. , 1962) it is described in the context of an absorbing (i.e. terminating) Markov chain process wherein, at each decision point, only the most recent decision is considered when making the current one. Variations of the random walk method are currently used with computers to simulate systems in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, statistics, marketing, population dynamics, and others. A bit of Internet prowling will unearth information on many current applications. An Alta Vista search on the key "random walk" generated 2988 hits, many of them redundant, but containing at least one hit for most of the current applications of the method. Sourcecode for various implementations is freely available on the net in languages ranging from Java to C to Lisp.

Stereo Images - Time for Space—“Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animated gif.” [via MetaFilter]

"If I were to guess the drug trajectory of you and your friends," he says between bites of a burger in a cafe in New York City's East Village, "I'd say it was marijuana, acid, mushrooms, Ecstasy, coke, and/or speed."

Pretty close. Yet this wasn't the trajectory on which my largely middle- and upper-middle-class friends and I envisioned ourselves. Our organizing drug principles were more organic. Pot and 'shrooms were natural. Even acid, though made in a lab, seemed to be more about the mind than the body. We didn't do nasty, "dangerous" drugs like coke or meth or heroin. That shit was evil. Deadly, even. But E was different.

“This compilation of soldiers words, as published in the Christian Science Monitor, Evening Star, Los Angeles Times and several other publications, provides another side of the story of Occupied Iraq.”

I would like to cement this to the front of our house. Do you think someone would call the cops or something?

Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed by Grant Barrett is a fantastic read.

“Naropa University is pleased to announce the inauguration of a low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. The program reflects the standards and qualities of the residential Writing & Poetics programs offered at Naropa since 1974, when The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at the (then) embryonic Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.” Naropa: MFA Creative Writing Online.

I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -- maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

Ginsberg in the 50s

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility.  Businessmen are serious.  Movie
producers are serious.  Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

America, Allen Ginsberg. (Re: Allen Ginsberg on Time Magazine.)

Time magazine on Allen Ginsberg?

Meditation on the cover of Time magazine.

Before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more important goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to three-month vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and Republican platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a week in the 1920s. The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations had one, and recommended legislation. But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the United States and Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways.

Europe chose the route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the other -- no statutory protection and voluntary paid leave. Now we are the only industrialized nation with no minimum paid-leave law.

Matador is a Spanish-English machine translation system implemented following the Genereation-heavy Hybrid approach to Machine Translation (GHMT). What languages do you speak?

We started making a list of all we had to do to extricate ourselves: Sell our house. Sell our car. Find homes for Sarina's pet bird, rabbit and frogs. Pack up all of our furnishings and store them in a warehouse. Buy airline tickets. Cancel our Internet service, cell phone, DWP, gas, telephone, security, newspaper and other services. Find out about schools and pediatric medical care on Rarotonga.