Latest Entries
Amazon Recommendation Networks
Christopher Warren created a program for visualizing Amazon recommendation networks (Windows/Mac/Linux). Jill Walker Rettberg points out that it’s an excellent guide for deciding what to read next in an area.
[via jill/txt]
The Aesthetics of URLs
The Wall Street Journal stands firm against the tendency toward simple, readable URLs. Here’s an example, the URL to an article on the apparent Japanese obsession for appropriating, transforming, and then perfecting products from other locations (bomber jackets, sweatshirts, espresso):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204542404577157290201608630.html
It’s not just an article issue, though. Here’s how WSJ handles sections, in this case US Business News:
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-business-us.html?mod=WSJ_topnav_business_main
For comparison, here’s the URL to a post from my weblog, a picture of a creek near Fort Jackson, NY titled, unsurprisingly, “creek, fort jackson“:
http://www.johndan.com/workspace/2011/10/creek-fort-jackson/
And here’s a link to articles tagged “design“:
I guess it’s arguable whether URLs need to make sense to users. I think there’s not a good argument for not making them cleaner and simpler given that the process of creating them can be automated. Maybe that’s just me.
Postmodernism, DeLillo, & the Trance State
In “A Different Kind of Delirium” at the NY Review of Books, Charles Baxter has an interesting analysis of subjects struggling to come to grips with their relationship to reality in the works of Don DeLillo.
Increasingly, DeLillo has turned his attention in his recent books to trance states that have little or no actual content but for that very reason have become central to the story. In his most recent novel, Point Omega (2010), the main character finds himself at MoMA viewing Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. Hitchcock’s film, slowed down to near immobility, startles the correct sort of amateur semiotician into a dazed disquiet:
In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.
Note that the “array of ideas” isn’t paraphrased. How could it be? If the array could be paraphrased and reduced to verbal units, the trance might be broken; we would enter the fallen world of meaning. To be transfixed in that twilight condition signals the presence of postmodern awe, emptied of its traditional attachments to divinity but with some shreds of religiosity still hanging on. Having retreated into namelessness, the condition correspondingly empties out all thought, resulting in a kind of mystical opacity verging on enlightenment but never arriving there. Enlightenment remains eternally on the other side of the door.
This is akin to Jameson’s “cognitive mapping,” the futile attempt to gain critical distance or to situate the self into some larger, objective reality. That trance state as the user clicks link after link, compulsively/convulsively.
Here are some pictures of unicorns.
[via The Millions]
Very Large Array
Douglas Koke’s Signal to Noise is a stop-motion video featuring the Very Large Array, located outside of Socorro, New Mexico. I was surprised, when I was there in early 1990s, to find out that the radio telescopes move extraordinarily slowly, to the point that their motion is almost imperceptible.
Credit Cards, RFIDs, and Fraud
At a recent conference, security researcher Kristin Paget showed how to create counterfeit credit cards by sniffing RFID info from a volunteer’s existing card. As Forbes reports:
With a Vivotech RFID credit card reader she bought on eBay for $50, Paget wirelessly read a volunteer’s credit card onstage and obtained the card’s number and expiration date, along with the one-time CVV number used by contactless cards to authenticate payments. A second later, she used a $300 card-magnetizing tool to encode that data onto a blank card. And then, with a Square attachment for the iPhone that allows anyone to swipe a card and receive payments, she paid herself $15 of the volunteer’s money with the counterfeit card she’d just created. (She also handed the volunteer a twenty dollar bill, essentially selling the bill on stage for $15 to avoid any charges of illegal fraud.)
Paget notably doesn’t need to actually swipe the card to grab the data; the RFID chips can be read at short distances without the cardholder knowing. As the Forbes article points out, there are about 100 million RFID-equipped cards in circulation, including MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay.
[via Slashdot]
