Books

T.

The History Of The Two-Party Presidential Vote Mapped

By In Blog, Books, Visualization0 Comments

Cloropleths vs Isarithmic: Voting within or without boundaries

There have been two major ways to understand populations and their territorial distribution. In one kind, typified by choropleth maps, the density or degree of a feature is mapped in pre-given political units.*

Cloropleths Map of the Presidential Vote 2008
Cloropleths Map (c) David B. Sparks

As second kind of map, known as isarithmic mapping (…), shows change varying continiously over space.*

isarithmic map of the presidential vote 2008
Isarithmic mapping (c) David B. Sparks

Where chloropleths maps produce a sense of populations as contained within boundaries, isarithmic mapping emphasizes continual variation and gradual change without clear differentiations.*

References

G.

Glitch Art – The Beauty of Imperfection

By In Art, Blog, Books, Technology0 Comments

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” (Marilyn Monroe)

In a technical sense a glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. The term is thought to derive from the German glitschig, meaning ‘slippery.’ Glitches are mostly a result of miscommunication or mistranslation when transferring data in software, video games, images, video and audio. The term glitch came to be associated with music and visual arts in the mid 1990s to describe a general aesthetic of the digital age.

Iman Moradi, the first official glitch theorist, has written extensively on the subject of glitch art beginning with his dissertation for the University of Huddersfield (PDF) until the publication of his recently released book Glitch: Designing Imperfections.

Moradi divides glitch art in two categories: The first is the pure glitch which is the result of a malfunction or error, an unpremeditated digital artifact. The second is the glitch-alike which is the result of an intentional decision on the user side.

All those who didn’t see the beauty in category one glitches yet should definitely consider reading this eye-opening book to brighten up their life: losing all the data on your hard drive eventually becomes art next time.

All category two artists trying to create there first own glitches should open WordPad on a Windows PC and follow stAllio’s short introduction.

Related post: IOgraph – Everyone is an artist

C.

Crossing the Universe on a Logarithmic Scale

By In Blog, Education, Science, Visualization1 Comment

Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames.

“Powers of Ten”, a 1968 short film by Charles and Ray Eames, is a quite impressive application of the logarithmic scale. The film is an adaptation of “Cosmic View”, a 1957 book by Kees Boeke. Both the book and the film deal with very short and very long distances and the relative size of things in the universe. Although Einstein wouldn’t agree with the trip, because very soon the camera travels faster than the speed of light, you should have a look at what it means to cross the universe on a logarithmic scale. Every ten seconds you will add a zero to your distance and stride away from earth by the factor ten: from meters, to 10 meters, 100 meters, 1000 meters and so on. Some minutes later and lightyears away you pass the nearest star. The way back is even faster and leads you through the skin and the DNA to the subatomic scale. Impressive! Enjoy the trip!

Cosmic View by Kees Boeke

www.eamesoffice.com

A.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

By In Blog, History, Technology0 Comments

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, talks to Mike Wallace in an interview on May 18, 1958. His views on freedom, technology and bureaucracy provide some interesting parallels to our life in the era of the internet. Happy Birthday Mr Huxley and welcome to the Brave New World of Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Co.! Nowadays, hierarchies are called networks, subordinates have become users and the organizations are bigger than ever.

As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations, and incidentally the advance of technology is being accompanied by an advance in the science of organization. It’s now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than it was ever possible before, and so that you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracies, either the bureaucracies of big business or the bureaucracies of big government.

You can find a trancription of the interview here.

B.

Books + Internet = ?

By In Blog, Books, Culture, Education, Technology0 Comments

With more and more books digitalized, with Kindles, iPads and audio-books, will printed books become an endangered species? Not if you turn the idea the other way round: How can printed books benefit from the internet and its networking features?

One idea is Ubimark Books that links paper books, such as “Around the World in 80 Days” to the web. This happens rather seemlessly through 2D code. Have a look:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5Ch4NnVu0

Another brilliant idea is BookRenter. The service enables students to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester. The system is simple: a student searches for a book on the website using a title or ISBN, and places an order by selecting a rental period and delivery option. The books are delivered complete with return UPS labels for easy shipping.

Rent, read, return. (c) www.bookrenter.com

The bookstores at the University of Texas at Austin, the North Carolina State University, the University of Memphis, the City College of San Francisco, and the University of San Diego already offer a textbook rental store on the BookRenter platform. Alternative book rental services are provided by Chegg and Barnes and Noble.

(Thx @techcrunch and @swissmiss)