Missiverna #39
Hoj-hoj!
Jo, jag tänkte börja skicka ut såna här veckobrev igen, och hoppas du fortfarande vill få dem! Jag fortsätter lite i samma stil, dvs minst 10 länkar till grejs jag tyckte var intressant under (ca) veckan som gått.
Jo, jag tänkte börja skicka ut såna här veckobrev igen, och hoppas du fortfarande vill få dem! Jag fortsätter lite i samma stil, dvs minst 10 länkar till grejs jag tyckte var intressant under (ca) veckan som gått.
- Mosaic skriver bra om hur Alan Turings utvecklingsbiologiska teorier från 1950-talet återigen har blivit aktuella:
Like all the best scientific ideas, Turing’s theory was elegant and simple: any repeating natural pattern could be created by the interaction of two things – molecules, cells, whatever – with particular characteristics. Through a mathematical principle he called ‘reaction–diffusion’, these two components would spontaneously self-organise into spots, stripes, rings, swirls or dappled blobs.
- Också: Ed Yong - "How Did You Get Five Fingers?"
- Andrew Sorensen programmerar musik live (YouTube).
- Maryam Mirzakhani har i veckan uppmärksammats som den första kvinnan att vinna en Fields-medalj i matematik. Quanta Magazine har en fin artikel om hennes gärning. Utdrag om hennes metod dock:
As she thinks about mathematics, Mirzakhani constantly doodles, drawing surfaces and other images related to her research. “She has these huge pieces of paper on the floor and spends hours and hours drawing what look to me like the same picture over and over,” Vondrak said, adding that papers and books are scattered haphazardly about her home office. [...]
Doodling helps her focus, Mirzakhani said. When thinking about a difficult math problem, “you don’t want to write down all the details,” she said. “But the process of drawing something helps you somehow to stay connected.”
- Med A Better Queue kan du hitta saker att se hos Netflix utifrån Rotten Tomatoes-betyg.
- "p5.js is a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today's web."
- "Blopboard is a place to ask and answer questions and see real-time visualizations of everyone's answers."
- Filmaren Adam Curtis skriver då och då långa artiklar hos BBC (ofta med materialet från deras TV-arkiv) på ett obstinat sätt och om egensinniga ämnen, nu senast om något slags rötter till den moderna övervarkningssamhället.
- The New Yorker om Salman Rushdie-arkivet vid Emory University, som bl.a. innehåller några av hans datorer med innehållande digitalt material. För att kunna utforska dessa har man utvecklat en emulator så att man kan rota runt på dem med hjälp av en modern laptop (dock bara på plats). Utdrag:
The experience of poking around an early computer environment, with its block fonts, file icons, and backdrops, can inspire a special sort of nostalgia, especially for those nerdy and old enough to remember their own first computer. Rushdie’s digital archive, in its old Mac setting, contains the usual ephemera of his life: bank statements, newspaper articles, drafts of stories, at least one screenplay, and even folders called “NAMES FOR NEW CHILD” and “Puppet Motel Folder.” These digital things come with their own form of marginalia, some of which have presumably been collected in the “STICKIES 1999” folder. There is even a “Games” folder, so you can see what Rushdie was playing while working under a fatwa.
- ...och apropå det så tipsade Simon (tack!) om en längre artikel av Matthew Kirschenbaum - "Software, It's a thing" - som handlar om vad mjukvara är och kan vara, och hur man kan/bör tänka för att bevara det för eftervärlden. Utdrag:
Software is no less expressive of the environment around it than any object of material culture, no different in this way from the shards collected and celebrated by anthropologist James Deetz in his seminal study of the materiality of everyday life, In Small Things Forgotten. In the end one preserves software not because its value to the future is obvious, but because its value cannot be known.
- Wired om Stewart Butterfield, grundare av Flickr och Slack. Utdrag om det oundvikliga faktumet:
He admits that if the right offer comes along, the kind of offer that only three or four companies in the world could come up with, he would have to jump. But what is that? Five billion? Seven? Ten? It’s hard to know, because in Silicon Valley today, money has lost all meaning and value. It is an abstract construct that can be exchanged for homes and Teslas and handmade selvedge denim jeans flown in from Japan, but nobody really has any idea what constitutes “a lot” anymore.
- Om du inte känner till Slack så kolla den här reklamfilmen.
Vi hörs nästa vecka!
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Erik Stattin
erik.stattin@gmail.com
@mymarkup
@missiverna
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