tirl twirl

death and wage slavery

2010-04-23T16:04:10Z

Historically, as we have seen, ages of virtual, credit money have also involved creating some sort of overarching institutions – Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place some sort of controls on the potentially catastrophic social consequences of debt....

For much of human history, systems of virtual money were designed and regulated to ensure that nothing like capitalism could ever emerge to begin with – at least not as it appears in its present form, with most of the world’s population placed in a condition that would in many other periods of history be considered tantamount to slavery.

Alexander Rose writes a fascinating post over at the Long Now Foundation about the history of debt, and its relationship to violence and slavery.

A world less entirely pervaded by violence would rapidly begin to develop other institutions.... Thinking about debt outside the twin intellectual straitjackets of state and market opens up exciting possibilities. For instance, we can ask: in a society in which that foundation of violence had finally been yanked away, what exactly would free men and women owe each other? What sort of promises and commitments should they make to each other?

Taipei

2010-01-26T21:28:45Z

I was invited to attend this year's SCU+MIT workshop, an annual collaboration between MIT and Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. SCU flew 18 MIT students out to Taipei and put them up for 10 days of intensive work designing interventions for three different sites in Taipei (the Shilin Night Market, the Meiti Riverside Park, and the Taipei metro).

Our flight there went via Tokyo; the JFK -> Tokyo arc took us right over Canada and Alaska, titillating my obsesssion with taiga.

Denali from the airplane

Meandering streams

Sunset glow under clouds

The perpetual sunset lasted us for the last half of our west-bound trip, concluding with a dramatic wash of color over Mt. Fuji as we landed in Tokyo.

The workshop was a flurry of activity, 10 days crammed with intensive struggles at communication, decision making, brainstorming, and critique. A rapid introduction to the architectural crit process (rapid design towards frequent presentations with whithering critiques) combined with a lesson in cultural differences in expectations for faculty/student hierarchy (professors who were given special treatment, insulated from contact with students, and engaged in critique by making assertions from high rather than engaging in mutual discussions).

On my team, I was the only one ignorant of Chinese, but also the only one with strong English (everyone spoke a bit of English, but struggled at times). Since the workshop was conducted in English (a fact that felt a bit uncomfortably colonial to me), I had the awkward position of being the spokesperson of the group while also having some difficulty in engaging and communicating fluently with the members of my team. Gracious efforts in accomodating language and frequent tireless translation work by the team members with better English helped us to talk, and we even managed to get something approaching a consensus decision making process going.

After several stumbling starts, my team settled chose to develop an intervention for the Meiti Riverside Park. Our final concept was for a large scale public art installation consisting of thousands of lights placed across the park and river. The lights contain motion sensors, and respond to people or vehicles passing, affecting a simulation of fish swimming around the light field – lights turning on and off representing the position of flocking fish. My task was writing a fully functioning simulation of the entire installation.

The simulated fish are of 3 different types: pushers, chasers, and schoolers. The schoolers flock together, and run away from disturbances, and can be seen dancing through the grassy fields or swarming over the water. The pushers act like logs, and don't move unless you bump into them. The chasers are attracted to disturbances and follow you around if you get close enough to one.

Our final presentation:

All of the presentations are available on youtube. A big thank you to SCU and especially my group members Sky, Lisa, Shuo, Amy, Cicada and Chloe for showing me a wonderful time.

A couple scripts short of an omniglot

2010-01-05T03:19:35Z

Here are two small but potentially useful python scripts I've recently written:

getzips, a utility to scrape the USPS website to get all current zip codes, and the addressable cities within them.
coldcaller, a utility to notify you when the weather forecast temperature drops below a threshold, to warn you when the pipes might freeze.

smoggy SLC

2009-12-20T14:42:37Z

Smoggy Salt Lake City. The red light in the second photo is atop the tallest second tallest building in town.

We are building a tower...

2009-12-15T17:28:33Z

Aren't tiny url's an odd evolutionary adaptation in the Internet? Intricate structures that solve an immediate problem caused by technological choices (web developers who use very long URLs and query-strings, application developers who impose limitations on message lengths, email implementations that cause links to get split over long lines).

The result is a surprisingly brittle solution, where millions of URLs per day are run through redirection services. The growth of affiliate and marketing campaign tracking has spurred a small industry around shortened URLs. But what happens when one of these businesses goes under? The meaning behind millions of tweets gets lost (the horror!)?

An Internet Archive-sponsored consortium called 301works.org (301 is the HTTP code for a redirect) has formed to ensure that the links of its members can be preserved for all eternity.

To try it out, lets' see if this carefully crafted tinyurl can resolve: http://tinyurl.com/yd87aoj.

The url is the result of 10 redirections:

    http://tinyurl.com/yd87aoj =>
    http://to.ly/H33 => 
    http://tiny.cc/FSlc4 => 
    http://kl.am/5D53 =>
    http://snipr.com/tpb27 => 
    http://is.gd/5oJbd => 
    http://short.to/10qyt => 
    http://u.nu/3tw84 => 
    http://ur1.ca/hwxf => 
    http://bit.ly/190EZI => 
    http://301works.org

Constructing it turned out to be difficult, since several of the major shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im) blacklist major known url shorteners to prevent spammers from using redirect chains to obfuscate URLs. Fortunately, there are abundant URL shorteners to choose from, many of which are not so scrupulous, and many of which are not yet known to the major shorteners. I also avoided shorteners such as ow.ly and su.pr which add annoying frames (which are preserved through redirect chains, but which crush each other).