I make things on the internet
Wugazi is combination of Fugazi and Wu-Tang Clan, created by Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy. The album, 13 Chambers is available to download from their site.
Dan Solomon interviewed the pair and discussed how the album came to be. For the technically minded, Joe Gross offers a track-by-track breakdown of the album.
It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub.
In Ulysses, James Joyce mused that “a good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub”. No-one’s really sure if it was possible, and Dubliners have always felt proud that it was not straight forward. The traditional Irish way to ‘solve’ this puzzle is to walk across Dublin, and call into every pub in the way and have a pint. This way you never actually pass a pub.
What problems can’t be solved by the internet?
The Internet Archive is now archiving physical copies of books.
As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.
Recognizing that a book is just another device is important. It’s way too easy to make all sorts of cute analogies and comparisons between books and the digital world, so I’ll avoid it. How our society consumes words and images is bound to shift, but the book will still be here in fifty years.
How to pronounce scotch names, just in case you were wondering (via tbr). I’ve definitely got a few of these wrong in the past.
I saw this commercial for IGA air during the 2nd Stanley Cup playoff game. I’m pretty sure the kid says “fail” at the end. It has to be one of the most mainstream applications of the fail meme that I’ve seen. There’s also a French version of the commercial.
Update: I realized after the post, that it was a certain kind of mainstream. Honestly, there’s a relatively small Anglo population watching CBC in Montreal, but the commercial aired… so a reasonable number of people must have seen it.
Möbius Ship by Tim Hawkinson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. But will it float?
In general, the search for popular is wildly overrated, because it corrupts our work, eats away at our art and makes it likely we’ll compromise to please the anonymous masses.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have found that rejection hurts, and not just in a metaphorical sense. The study found that “social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain” (via nyt). Maybe artists, musicians and poets have been on to something all of these years.
Michael Eisen found a good example of algorithmic pricing on Amazon which resulted in two booksellers pricing a book on fly genetics at almost $24 million (via yewknee).
On the day we discovered the million dollar prices, the copy offered by bordeebook was 1.270589 times the price of the copy offered by profnath. And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again. So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price. I continued to watch carefully and the full pattern emerged.
Once a day profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times bordeebook’s price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook “noticed†profnath’s change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath’s higher price. The pattern continued perfectly for the next week.
I’m waiting for the algorithmic pricing that messes up in the other direction and nets me a Gutenberg bible for pocket change.