So a private group of scientists plan to clone a human being within 2 years. I think media, film and television play a major part in our mis-apprehension of this new technology. In the same way we can only envisage extra-terrestrial beings as grey skinned, large eyed and bulbous headed little creatures, the layman’s mental picture of the cloning process tends to involve rooms full of incubators containing identical, fully grown human beings. Obviously, the reality of the matter isn’t quite so ‘sci-fi’ as this; DNA is extracted from the cell of a donor, which is then placed inside a human egg. The egg is then implanted into a surrogate mother and a baby is produced which is genetically identical to the original donor. Simply put, the cloning process is more a matter of artificially producing an identical twin, the difference being that cloned twins do not share the same mother and can be years apart in age. It seems that the scientists’ justification for their proposed human cloning experiments is that it will eventually benefit those who can’t bare children naturally. This process would put the DNA donor in a potentially strange situation – imagine walking along the street and seeing a clone of yourself as a child. This probably wouldn’t worry you if you were aware of the situation – that you willingly donated your DNA to create one child. But imagine if your DNA was passed on to others without your knowledge and you walk down the street and meet 20 clones of yourself. This is where the danger lies; not only can your personal information been taken from you [eg. addresses, medical information, bank account etc. via the Internet], but your entire genetic make-up could potentially be taken and sent round the world via the digital network – suddenly, you could become as ubiquitous as yahoo.com. So lets be sensible about it, and as zoologist Richard Dawkins writes:

“Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it’s a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its merits. We need less emotion and more thought.”

Related:
Human Cloning
The Ethics of Human Cloning
Human Cloning and Re-engineering
Human Cloning Foundation

On Ebay, you can usually pick up a Playstation 2 original box and receipt for only $425… of course, the Playstation 2 itself costs extra. More here.

Crazy audio/visuals at meta.am.

Who Would Buy That? – “Auction oddities from all over the web”

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Did life begin in deep space?

So Napster are going to charge money for their service. Surely the only thing that will happen is a ‘mass exodus’ to free peer to peer file sharing systems like Gnutella or other products that will no doubt appear.

Change is coming soon.

subsist.org [a site that has been on the back burner for a year and a half now] is going to be collaborative, jam packed with content, eXtensible [as soon I get my head round all this DOM, XML, CSS, PHP stuff) and anti-commercial. Over the last year or so, I’ve designed and re-designed almost to the point of completion and then given up. Version 1 of the design can be seen here [complete with usual DHTML scroller] and here are the beginnings of version 2 of the design [I was getting really ambitious with this one]. I soon realised the site was getting just too big for one person to manage… so I gave up and started doing this site instead [I also wanted to stop playing it safe with greyscale palettes and decided on this stupid yellow]. So… I’m in the the process of re-designing subsist.org yet again and this time I’m going to do something that is within my reach.

More A.I. [The Movie] related stuff:
http://redrival.com/movieventure/santini.jpg
http://www.anghus.bizland.com/AI.htm

OK… lets make it ‘official artificial intelligence day’ [all but one of the links have been shamelessly stolen from the site of Matthew Yee-King, so in return, I thought I’d plug his stuff on the Rephlex label]:

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Time for real intelligence

learning by imitation

HONDA “HUMAN” ROBOT movie

Neural Networks Source Code

MIT AI Lab: The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT

Robot Books.com – Robot Kits, Robotics, and Toy Robots

Robot Information Central

Shape Changing Robot Applications

Robot Battle

Internet Robotics Sources

Evolutionary Robotics Chapter 3

Kazuo HOSOKAWA

A Behavior-Based Multiple Robot System with Host for Object Manipulation

CSCI 599 - Mobile Robots and Multi-Robot Systems

Swarm Release

Multi-Agent Approaches in Robotics and Learning in Multi-Agent Systems

ICMAS 1995 Proceedings Contents

Mobile Robot Laboratory On-line Publications

Self-Organization in Large Populations of Mobile Robots: Review of Litterature

Linux AI & Alife Mini-Howto

Lynne Parker’s Publications List

Directory of /ai-publications/1000-1499/AITR-1465

Graduate students who is who in robotics

RoboCup Official Site

Beth and Alessio homepage

Meet AIBO

Kumbh Mela pictured from space

Is ‘A.I.’ going to be the next ‘The Black Hole’? Hit reload [3 images].

A few days ago, I posted an entry about a spamming incident on the Rhizome list. Here’s what its creator has to say about it [mailed to the list a few minutes ago]:

” >> SHUT UP SPAM MAN

In this case, the man was a PHP script which sends an email
when a 404 error occur in x-arn.org website. The file that
contains the broken link is read by the script, and its URL
is linked in the email. So, in fact, the so-called spam is
the result of a global activity in the net, reflecting the
kind of disorganisation inherent to updating process, file
moving and renaming, as a network movement origin. “

http://www.x-arn.org

A still from A.I. [including Chris Cunningham inspired – created? – robots]

Microsoft Cement

Mark Knopfler. Rock Dinosaur. Literally.

So when is IE5/Win going to have full support for PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files? This format is far superior to the common GIF format because it generates smaller file sizes, renders more quickly on browsers and supports neato tricks like alpha transparency [which means you can create fancy ‘see-through’ graphics]. At the moment, PNG is the graphic format of choice for Flash developers as the Flash plugin has full support for this format. But for non-flash web designers, it’s not looking too good. Whereas Netscape 6* [for all platforms] and IE5/Mac does have full support for PNG, IE5/Win doesn’t – which means it will be a long time before PNG has its day [and it’s been waiting for about 4 years].
For more on PNG, read:

Whatever happened to PNG? [Webmonkey]
The Story of PNG [slashdot]

*OK… so Netscape 6 is particularly bug-ridden, but in my opinion, it is the second best browser out there after IE5/Mac.

Darn permalinks… they’ve inexplicably stopped working, so I’ve had to remove them until I work out what’s going wrong.

Stu reports on newvenue.com – “presenting the most innovative ‘new movies for a new medium’ to a world-wide media-savvy community”.

‘Wassuuup’ is perhaps the most annoying meme of the 21st Century so far. Now, I bring you the all new ‘eeeeehhhhuuuup’ meme. Got this via email attachment so I don’t know where it comes from or who did it. If anyone knows anything about it, let me know.

Create your very own Star Wars style light sabre effect! – requires a DV camera and Adobe Premiere.

living in, around, and with soft spaces – v-2.org

Fun with Amazon wishlists: George W. Bush’s most wanted items and this is what happens when your password gets into the wrong hands [thanks James].

Don’t know how long this has been online, but there is a teaser trailer for A.I.: the Kubrick film that never was. Spielberg might or might not make a pigs ear of it. [via Stu]

The case of the meta-infringement.

Finally got round to seeing Memento at the weekend. It’s one of those films that leaves you slightly disturbed for reasons you can’t quite pinpoint. The plot unfolds ingeniously though… I did attempt to work it all out but I gave up after a few minutes because my brain was beginning to hurt. If anyone has read any worthwhile interpretations, I’d be glad if you could email a few URLs.

Design tweak on its way.

Rik questions whether there are alien civilisations more intelligent than us. Well… according to this article at CNN, Stephen Hawking doesn’t think so.

Scientists make light stop, paving the way for Quantum computing. Aaah yes… I can see it now: the Apple G∞ Quantum Processor.

I think the only way we’re going to survive the apparent slump in the world wide web design industry is to lift ourselves out of this trend [we are just talking about front-end design here right? Surely some of the ‘back-end’ heavyweights, Yahoo, Amazon etc. are thriving]. On the surface, we are seeing an over-saturation of design for it’s own sake; sites so overladen in their own self importance that they forget the importance of the customer. The last few years has seen a huge appetite for this type of approach; clients are willing throw lots of cash to agencies who can come up with the sweetest eye-candy. It’s time to move on, but until the telecoms companies get their act together and a world-wide broadband network is in place, and the internet takes its next evolutionary step, things are going to continue to stagnate around here.

Being a fan of the work of Paul Auster [author of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan etc.], I was chuffed to discover that he has directed a film called ‘Lulu On The Bridge’. I waited patiently for the film to appear somewhere [either on the cinema screens or ‘straight to video’] only to discover that no-one was willing to distribute it [at least in the UK anyway]. This was probably because either a) It doesn’t have the mass appeal of mainstream pap or b) It was generally a bad film. Either way, I would like to see it on the strength of Smoke / Blue In The Face [two films which he wrote/co-directed with Wayne Wang]. At last, it looks as though something is happening, and as my good friend Stu [who originally got me into Auster’s writing] reports, a trailer can be found here. Let me know if you have seen this film and what you thought of it.

Don’t you just love receiving hilarious jokes via email? Yes… don’t we all, but do you know the history of it? If not, read: Before There Was Email: Forwarding Jokes Through History.

It looks as though there will be a total ban on fox-hunting, and about time too. I did some documentary photography work at a pro-hunting rally once and I can safely say that the hunt supporters I met there were – stereotypically – a bunch of useless arrogant toffs. Hard luck ladies and gents, I’m afraid you’re not going to have the enjoyment of chasing a defenceless fox around fields with a large pack of ill-treated dogs, only to watch as they eventually rip their quarry to pieces. Shame.

frownland.com is pleased to help drum up some interest in explodingfist.com. Speaking of classic arcade games of the 80’s, I was more of a Yie Ar Kung Fu fan myself.

Animate! – “If you have an innovative idea that can only be realised in a short animated film, and you are seeking production funding to make it, we would like you to send us a proposal”.

Thanks to Timo Arnall for emailing about this [he designed the site]. Check out his design agency at andorif.com and his personal site at elasticspace.com. Nice work.

Buy this!: Kings of Convenience: Quiet Is The New Loud. Two guitars, voice and cello… simple. The best thing I’ve heard all [er…] year! [Jim, where would I be without ya?]. The album is released on January 29th.

Thanks to James at One Day Soon for highlighting how various blogs [including mine] render on the WebTV browser. I downloaded the emulator the other day and I was expecting my site to be horribly mangled so it could be fit onto a PAL/NTSC resolution screen. Fortunately, the damage is pretty minimal; some of the table formatting is slightly messed up and the CSS defined table borders are missing but otherwise, it’s OK.

It / Ginger is finally revealed.

Read an opinion on the whole phenomenon at v-2.org.

An interesting article about the seti@home project, detailing how the system works and how successful it has been. [via SlashDot]

I concur with Powazek, plastic.com is gonna be big. I just registered as a user and everything about it seems pretty smart.

I’ve got 12 hours to teach a group of photography students on how to get a website up and running. Bearing in mind that most of them know little about web design [or computers in general for that matter], I think it’s going to be pretty difficult in the time I’ve got. I’m tempted to teach them how to create and maintain a weblog which would compliment an online folio of photography work. This would not only teach them the basics of HTML and FTP etc., but also, I think it would help to enthuse them about online culture in general and the importance of keeping a website fresh with content.

Termites on toast.

TV Swansong

This is just getting silly [watch out: pretty big download].

A few years ago, my Grandmother [who turned 90 this year] gave me an old Kodak Folding Camera. It had been sitting in a cupboard gathering dust for years and I decided that it was finally time for it to be used again. Back in the 1920’s, she took it with her on seaside excursions, taking pictures of her family, friends and fashions of the time. Along with the camera, she also gave me some original negatives, many of which have never been printed. So, off I went to the darkroom with the negs and a fresh box of Ilford paper to see what happened. What I found was a snapshot history of my Grandmother from when she was a teenager up until when she was married [and presumably when the camera was consigned to gathering dust in the cupboard]. One picture I printed was a ‘Jezebel’s Mirror’ type of shot; my Grandmother with the camera, looking down into the viewfinder, and to her right her sister gazing into the lens. It was amazing to see this and realise that experimentation while snapshooting [lomography, wristcam style imagery etc] is nothing new – it was something that came along with miniaturisation of cameras and hasn’t gone since. In 1998, hoping that it still functioned, I decided to do some work with this old camera. At first it was difficult because it’s not possible to get the type of roll-film for it anymore [an out-dated imperial measurement], but eventually I worked out how to use a standard roll of 120 instead. With the mirror-shot that my grandmother took in mind, I took a picture of myself in the reflective window of a 1960’s office block in the centre of Newcastle. The picture was difficult to print as the film had fogged severely [due to holes in the camera bellows]. But I got a decent picture anyway, and here it is displayed at Friends of Jezebel’s Mirror, shown alongside my grandmothers picture taken 70 years earlier with the same camera. Thanks to Heather for uploading it – the mirror project is top notch.

Aesthetic Management – internet artwork by Patricia Reed.

Recent musical purchases: Cinematic Orchestra’s Remixes album [check out their website], and Squarepusher’s Budakhan Mindphone [both on vinyl in an attempt to make my record collection into more that just a load of old charity shop records]

CPP | 2000 – a half-finished greyscale dhtml site by me.

I can’t really see The Incredible Hulk battling gracefully in leafy tree-tops, can you?

Today, one my students told me that her parents are about to buy her a Mac, but she’s not sure which one to get. She didn’t know about the G4 Powerbook until I told her about it, so guess what she is going to ask Mummy and Daddy for now? Makes you sick, no?

According to Corey Eisman [toegristle], you can download a WebTV emulator from
here. Thanks Corey.

art-of-work.com is an online recruitment agency recognising that “artists are a valuable human resource in the new work paradigms of open office architecture and new management techniques”.

Happy Birthday Jeffrey, and thanks for the link!

Another Matt Jones weblog [Creative Director of news.bbc.co.uk no less]. Although I think the BBC News site is excellent and I read it regularly, I have one quibble: why don’t any of the articles contain hypertext? I would have thought a public service organisation like the BBC would be the first to maintain web design standards that help make the Web what it is. Presumably, the reasoning is that people might click on a hyperlink to another site, not like what they see and think to themselves ‘I’m not paying my licence fee for this rubbish!’, hence the list of related links to the right with a disclaimer underneath.

A browse through the technical stats for this site shows that I’m getting a few visits from people using WebTV. I haven’t got a clue what this page looks like on WebTV, so if you’re one of these visitors, please let me know if this site is readable or not (especially if you’re 6 feet away from the TV sitting on a comfy chair eating your dinner). I’m also getting a few visits from users of a browser called ‘SpaceBison’ – if only all web browsers had such cool names as this.

The product code-named ‘Ginger’ will be an alternative to products that “are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities.” Maybe it’s an ultra-sleek titanium Sinclair C5 with an ‘in-car’ 15.2 inch flatscreen LCD monitor, Internet access and slot loading DVD burner.

Apparently, it is possible to create a hyperlink straight into a Napster search (if you have Napster installed that is). I don’t know how cross platform/browser compatible it is though. So far, I’ve only got it working on IE5 for the Mac. [cheers Phil]

a href=”nap:search?artist=name&title=name”

The coverage of the Embassy World Darts Championship on BBC television is really something to admire. Never have you seen so many lager swillin’ Darts fans under one roof; that Lakeside venue seeming to stretch into smoke-hazed infinity. But it’s the camera work and direction that I respect most about it; the way in which the screen is split down the middle, the board on the left, the thrower on the right, eyes fixed like those of a hawk on that treble 20 bay whilst beer gut hangs poised over low trouser line. Then there’s the mental strain of mathematical calculation as the decreasing tally approaches zero, a double to win. These guys have spent years sweating in front of the dart board, the physical strain offset by the glory of attaining “One Hundred and Eiiighty” infront of a frenzied audience. Watch as the camera expectantly zooms in when 2 darts have landed in the treble-20 bay – after that it’s death or glory, although 140 is a respectable 3 dart score. Then there’s the work of the Director, trying his or her best to convey the excitement of The Lakeside to the viewers at home. Between darts, the camera cuts to friends and family in the audience, revealing the tension and excitement on their faces. Often, someone will be wearing an ingenious silly hat in the hope of drawing the camera’s attention and getting on the TV, or they’ll be displaying banners in support of their man. Back in the studio, the sovereign ring laden cockney arrow master Bobby George gives his insightful opinion on the current match as relegated BBC sports presenter Dougie Donnelly pretends to be interested. Of course the BBC darts coverage was never quite the same when Sid Waddell left to commentate on that other ‘mickey mouse’ darts championship on BSkyB. That was a big loss, Sid was the ‘voice of darts’.
I recommend that next time you see the Embassy Darts coverage on TV, don’t change channels, watch and look out for all the things I’ve mentioned. You won’t regret it.

Cheers to James at infinitemonkeys.co.uk for the poem type thing.

iTunes – digital music for your mac

It’s now the end of the day, and I still can’t get the phrase ‘Eduardo Kac’s Transgenic Glowing Rabbit’ out of my mind [re: earlier post]. Such is life.

I’m currently trying to get hold of replacement parts for an old turntable I bought from the classified ads a few years ago. I found this website for the tonearm manufacturer – SME Ltd – and couldn’t help noticing the way in which the website itself looks as if it pre-dates the Internet by about 30 years. Check out the V-Dub vans outside the factory. Classic.

This from Stu:

“Do a Napster search for “Paranoid Android” by Brad Mehldau. It’s a very nice cover version of the Radiohead track, and it kinda shows how good their music is…”

This guy’s is definitely one for the Amazon wishlist

Eduardo Kac’s ‘transgenic glowing rabbit’ – now that’s art

furtherfield.org – “colluding with artists, critical poets & net nomads to re-invent the worlds that straddle earthly & digital zones”.

SublimeTV – “an online digital festival dedicated to the exhibition and promotion of digital filmmaking and digital video art”. Nice idea. Cool URL. Shame about the poor design of the site.

I’ve had a few enquiries about the ‘colab’ section and when it will be on-line. Well… unfortunately the answer is ‘not for a while’. I think I was a bit ambitious when I put that there, hoping that I’d have time to get something sorted out. Things are just a bit too hectic at the moment as I’m leaving my current job and starting another in a few weeks. So I’m not going to be able to afford much time on it over the coming months. In the meantime, you can be confident that I’ll be posting loads of [hopefully] interesting stuff here.

Jeffrey Zeldman wins the award for ‘how much hair you can stuff under a small blue hat’.

After all the hype, the xbox looks like a disappointing piece of product design.

The Celebrity Atheist List contains many people who have enriched our society with scientific ideas, writing and music; showing that thinking independently and rationally is the key to moving humanity forward. But then there is also Barry Manilow on the list.

A quote from the information overload that is the Rhizome list:

“Resistance to the corporate infiltration starts with the cleansing of the cyber pollution of flash. For animation is opium for the intoxicated masses…”

There is something fundamentally wrong with Jakob Nielsen’s argument in his latest alertbox and I’m having trouble pinning down what it is. I agree that mobile phones are poor devices for viewing online content and that their ‘form factor’ does not lend itself to interfacing successfully to the Internet. But he goes on to suggest that the future of mobile voice communication is through hand-held devices – primarily for Internet use – which have an ear/microphone arrangement for phone calls. I’m sure that if Jakob was to do a survey of mobile phone users, the percentage of those asked would prefer to speak into a small brick-like object than through a microphone on the lapel. This is simply to do with the fact that – in my opinion – people prefer to look as if they are on the phone speaking to someone rather than walking around seeming to speak to themselves. Mobile phones are annoying enough and I certainly don’t want to see a future when everyone in the street is speaking into the ether rather than to each other.

Just had a listen Rob Ellis’ album, Music For The Home [he’s PJ Harvey’s original drummer]. It’s pretty minimal instrumental stuff, but it’s a bit too ‘cranky’ if you see what I mean – much of it seems to be flurries of random notes played on piano, synth and other crazy instruments. It’s obviously Eno inspired [hence the album name] with a bit of Morton Feldman thrown in there as well. Not sure about it, I think it’s going to take a few more listens.

Oops… just accidentally deleted the last two [manually posted] entries now that Blogger is up and running again. The first one was a link to this, and a second one was a link to this.

010101 – Art in Technological times

One day, I went out with a broken Kodak camera… the focus didn’t work. I didn’t really care, I just went to see what happened. It was about 9pm and as the sun was dipping below the horizon, it draped an orange light over the beach. I walked past a chalet with a plastic chair and a red litter bin outside, a bored kid wandering aimlessly, just as I was. I was photographing for the sake of it, for the pleasure of just taking pictures. To the right, grass covered sand dunes blocked my view of the sea. Instead, there was a red lamp-post and another red litter bin, so I photographed them. I wanted to see the sea, so I walked towards the dunes and took another picture. People had walked my route before, the grass worn down to the sand as they zig-zagged their way up the incline and closer to the water. People like to look out to sea, I’m sure there is a unique part of the human brain solely geared for responding in some way to the sea. It makes you want to take a picture. Once over the dune, I looked back to see two figures as the sun disappeared behind them. I wasn’t aware of them at the time, I only realised they had been there when I looked at the image. I walked away from the beach and onto the road where there was another red lamp-post and something unknown that was blue, so I photographed what I could see. There is no conclusion to this story, only a kind of moral; that sometimes it is best to give creative control to ‘chance’. This works well with the medium of analog photography, because there are so many unknown variables, but I’ve been thinking about ways in which this could be applied to web design and how designers might free themselves from formulaic designing by working in this way.

They’re here

The Alternative Museum – “a global forum where all nations celebrate and embrace their artistic and cultural differences”.

rowenadugdale.com – some really nice illustration work using photomontage.

Just got back from spending New Year on the Island of Skye. Due to some tricky driving conditions and some poor navigating on my part, it took us a grueling 9 hours to get there, but it was [mostly] worth it. My only disappointment is that we didn’t see enough of the island, we just didn’t have enough time. Well actually, there was plenty of time, but we’re such an unorganised bunch that by the time we’d faffed around with breakfast, then sat around for a bit… then finally managed to put our walking boots on, it seemed to go dark (about 2.30pm). We needed someone there to say ‘Right. Tomorrow, everyone is going to arise at 9pm, eat breakfast then spend the rest of the day walking’. Unfortunately for us though, there wasn’t anyone as organised as this and we ended up doing very little. Although we did – rather drunkenly – go sledging down the steep garden at the front of the hostel… which was fun, it even had a ‘jump’ half way down which caused many sore arses. New Years Eve/Day was spent partying all night although I was disappointed that I didn’t quite make it to watch the sun rise on the dawn of 2001… it was rubbish anyway apparently [very overcast and dreary] . The return journey was 2 hours quicker than the outward one because we realised that going through Glasgow is much faster than going round it… plus it was great to see the fabulous Highlands of Scotland (which we missed on the outward journey because we travelled through the night). It was a good trip, I just wish we used our time there more effectively. Ne’ermind.

Anyway, Happy New Millennium!