thingsmagazine: This Must be the Place, Roy Lichtenstein, 1965

“

“Loop through the text and make a Dictionary, meaning key - value container. And put all pair of words as keys and the word following as a value. For example: if you have a text: “a b c a b k” you start with “a b” as key and “c” as value, then “b c” and “a” as value… the value should be a list or any collection holding 0..many ‘items’ as you can have more than one value for a given pair of words. In the example above you will have “a b” two times followed fist by “c” then in the end by “k”. So in the end you will have a dictionary/hash looking like this: {‘a b’: [‘c’,’k’], ‘b c’: [‘a’], ‘c a’: [‘b’]}

Now you have the needed structure for building your funky text. You can choose to start with a random key or a fixed place! So given the structure we have we can start by saving “a b” then randomly taking a following word from the value, c or k, so the first save in the loop, “a b k” (if “k” was the random value chosen) then you continue by moving one step to the right which in our case is “b k” and save a random value for that pair if you have, in our case no, so you break out of the loop (or you can decide other stuff like start over again) When to loop is done you print your saved text string.

The bigger the input, the more values you will have for you keys (pair of words) and will then have a “smarter bot” so you can “train” your bot by adding more text (perhaps chat input?). If you have a book as input, you can construct some nice random sentences.”

”

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How do Markov Chain chatbots work

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People :

Presented at UX Brighton 2010 by Harry Brignull 

The Apple icon garden.

“Did Google Kill this Donkey?” asks Jalopnik. The answer is no:“Because of the way our 360-degree imagery is put together, it looked to some that our car had been involved in an unseemly hit and run, leaving the humble beast stranded in the road.

As our imagery below shows, the donkey was lying in the path - perhaps enjoying a dust bath - before moving safely aside as our car drove past. I’m pleased to confirm the donkey is alive and well.”

“We live in a time when the loneliest place in any debate is the middle, and the argument over technology’s role in our future is no exception. The relentless onslaught of novelties technological and otherwise is tilting individuals and institutions alike towards becoming Engineers or Druids. It is a pressure we must resist, for to be either a Druid or an Engineer is to be a fool. Druids can’t revive the past, and Engineers cannot build technologies that do not carry hidden trouble.”

- “The Coming Fight Between Engineers And Druids” by Paul Saffo, in Edge: What should be we worried about?.

From Regine Debatty’s review of Bad Graffiti by Scott Hocking.

Why do I blog this? I’m fascinated by bad art/naive production and the sort of effect they produce. When it comes to graffiti, I’ve always been intrigued by the way ugly throw-ups, bad drawings and paint stains form a curious urban texture.

Knight Rider’s red light interface. According to the Wikipedia:

KITT’s scanner is similar to that of Cylons from the science fiction series Battlestar Galactica. Glen A. Larson, the creator of both Knight Rider and Battlestar Galactica has stated that the two shows have nothing else in common and to remove any fan speculation, he stated in the Season One Knight Rider DVD audio-comments, that he simply reused the scanning light for KITT because he liked the effect.

Why do I blog this? I’m currently in a seminar with design students and we are discussing interface from science-fiction pieces, their meaning and their implications. This example popped out as relevant.

“Where did the Future Go?” by Alice Framis.

Via wtbw:

(via Unique Headphones for Studying Birds Hearing | I New Idea Homepage)

: Tbh I find this whole url culture Tumblr’s formed to be less annoying...:

cokekitty:

Tbh I find this whole url culture Tumblr’s formed to be less annoying and more interesting. Like it’s just totally mind-blowing and genuinely fascinating to me that urls have developed their own barter system in the Tumblr community. People hunt down urls and keep them to themselves, and trade them for urls of “equal or greater value”. What determines value for a url? On what scale is it being measured, if any? Do people with lots of hoarded urls have more value on Tumblr than people like me who only have the one(s) I use right now? This is really cool I’m kind of excited I’ve finally got a window into this Tumblr black market, I’ve always had glimpses at it before but this is the first time I’ve ever really gotten into the nitty gritty of how it works.

Why do I blog this? Yesterday I found this term “URL culture” while browsing and I find it clearly encapsulates something intriguing about our current culture. “hoarded URL”, that sounds great.