Facebook Should Pay All of Us

Jaron Lanier, the author of “Who Owns the Future,” sees our personal data not unlike labor—you don’t lose by giving it away, but if you don’t get anything back you’re not receiving what you deserve. Information, he points out, is inherently valuable. When billions of people hand data over to just a few companies, the effect is a giant wealth transfer from the many to the few.

Source: Facebook Should Pay All of Us – The New Yorker

image

Within the visual realm, repetition encourages our eyes to dance. Controlling repetition is a way to choreographed human eye movement.

— Casey Reas, Chandler McWilliams: FORM+CODE

textures & power of 2

In the early days of OpenGL and DirectX, it was required that textures were powers of two. This meant that interpolation of float values could be done very quickly using shifting and such.Since OpenGL 2.0, and preceding that via an extension, non-power-of-two texture dimensions has been supported.Are there performance advantages to sticking to power-of-two textures on modern integrated and discrete GPUs?What advantages do non-power-of-two textures have, if any?Are there large populations of desktop users who don’t have cards that support non-power-of-two textures?

ANSWER: (2015)

power of 2 textures increase performance about 30% for any type of GPU not only old GPUs (30% faster is the difference between a high end GPU and an average one) they take 30% more ram but less vram is needed they increase quality by providing proper texture size for specific distance it works like anti-aliasing for textures dark line artifact should be handled by game engines and aaa engines handle them fine

Source: opengl – why would you use textures that are not a power of 2? – Game Development Stack Exchange

Line of purples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In color theory, the line of purples or the purple boundary is the locus on the edge of the chromaticity diagram between extreme spectral red and violet. Except for the endpoints, colors on the line of purples are not spectral. Line-of-purples colors and spectral colors are the only ones which are considered fully saturated in the sense that for any given point on the line of purples there exists no color involving a mixture of red and violet that is more saturated than it. There is no monochromatic light source able to generate a purple color. Instead, every color on the line of purples is produced by mixing a unique ratio of fully saturated red and fully saturated violet, at the extreme points of visibility on the spectrum of pure hues.

Unlike spectral colors (which may be implemented, for example, by nearly monochromatic light of laser, with precision much finer than human chromaticity resolution), colors on the line of purples are more difficult to implement practically. Cones’ sensitivity to both of the spectral colors at the opposite extremes of what the human eye can see is quite low (see luminosity function), so commonly observed purple colors do not achieve a high level of brightness.

The line of purples, a theoretical boundary of chromaticity, should not be confused with “purples“, a more general color term which also refers to less than fully saturated colors (see variations of purple and variations of pink for possible examples) which form an interior of a triangle between white and the line of purples in the CIE chromaticity diagram.

Source: Line of purples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Interface = relation

The interface, Hookway tells us, has always exhibited a ‘a tendency toward a seeming transparency and disappearance’ and this ‘illusory disappearance is an essential aspect of the operation of a user interface, in as much as an operator internalizes the user interface in the course of working through it.’

‘Control upon the interface involves a double moment,’ we are told, ‘where power at once confines and enables.’ We are at once augmented and reduced by our interactions, promised limitless powers but only if we may shrink ourselves to fit a machine-readable vision of the human.

‘[T]he surface refers back to a thing,’ Hookway explains, ‘and expresses the properties of that thing, while the interface refers back to a relation between things and expresses an action.’

— Branden Hookway, Interface (MIT Press, 184pp, £17.95, ISBN 9780262525503), via review31.co.uk

Modell 5 – Granular Synthesis

Kurt Hentschlaeger und Ulf Langheinrich have been working together as Granular-Synthesis since 1991

“from a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya to a frenzied exploration of the alter ego, any known context of meaning ends in the dissolved movements, is stalled in denaturalized redundancy, in machine pain. The semantic void is too loud to be amenable to meditative reception. The frontal images, the rhythmic structures generate contradictory emotions and great strain. Entertainment is offered and almost violently denied. At the highest level of energy, enjoyment reaches the limit.” Sample session performed by Akemi Takeya. Edited on various AVID Suites in England and Austria between 1994-96.
Produced by: Mike Stubbs, at HTBA (Hull Time Based Arts) in Hull England.
Co-produced by PYRAMEDIA Vienna.

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATWljMbvVTg

see also http://www.granularsynthesis.info

Curtis Roads, video interview

Philip K. Dick: We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality”

In the interview, Dick roams over so many of his personal theories about what these “unexpected things” signify that it’s difficult to keep track. However, at that same conference, he delivered a talk titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (in edited form above), that settles on one particular theory—that the universe is a highly-advanced computer simulation. (The talk has circulated on the internet as “Did Philip K. Dick disclose the real Matrix in 1977?”).

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently, and which may not exist all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore I’m free to say everything and nothing. I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.

Dick goes on to describe the visionary, mystical experiences he had in 1974 after dental surgery, which he chronicled in his extensive journal entries (published in abridged form as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick) and in works like VALIS and The Divine Invasion. As a result of his visions, Dick came to believe that “some of my fictional works were in a literal sense true,” citing in particular The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a 1974 novel about the U.S. as a police state—both novels written, he says, “based on fragmentary, residual memories of such a horrid slave state world.” He claims to remember not past lives but a “different, very different, present life.”

Finally, Dick makes his Matrix point, and makes it very clearly: “we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” These alterations feel just like déjà vu, says Dick, a sensation that proves that “a variable has been changed” and “an alternative world branched off.”

Did-Philip-K.-Dick-disclose-the-real-Matrix-in-1977.mp4 (via Open Culture)

 

processing applet on desired monitor

An example how to control on which monitor does processing applet (sketch output window) appear if you’re using multi-head setup: