Visual prosthetic patent issued

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/17/139696563/the-last-word-in-business And our last word in business today is a big number: eight million. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued patent number eight million yesterday. It went to Second Sight Medical Products for an invention the company says enhances visual perception for a certain kind of blindness. RENEE MONTAGNE, host: The product is called … Read more

Flexible computers, paper thin

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/paper-thin-computers-can-be-rolled-up.html

In Praise of Typewriters photo essay

From Life Magazine. http://www.life.com/gallery/42822/image/3240645#index/0

Text analysis tools + games

I ran the backstory through the hyperpo app… it’s a linguistic analysis tool inspired by Oulipo techniques. In addition to the jobs that corpus linguists do, like word frequencies and other statistical analysis of texts, the Hyperpo tool can look for anagrams and palindromes, create fill-in-the-blanks for certain word forms such as verbs or nouns, … Read more

backstory-character’s backstory

The main character is a scholar and most of the images I’m generating are first-person with a few establishing shots. She is a media archeologist and is a historian of writing technologies. Her current research is on the typewriter which is really interesting for all kinds of reasons that I can enumerate if you wish–gender … Read more

backstory-what we need to show in the interface

Notes sent to Janet: For now, here are the basic functions of the interface that we need to show. The first four make sense in sequential order… the last two can be determined within the context of the story. 1. analyzing/reading/interpreting a digitized version of a print document in multiple layers–part forensics, part close reading … Read more

“we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”

It’s the centennial of McLuhan’s birth. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/books/marshall-mcluhan-media-theorist-is-celebrated.html?_r=1

Study shows we use internet as transactive memory

Abstract:  The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip … Read more

S/T interface – b/w reference

Here’s a load of op art images… not so interested in the trippy aesthetic or Escheresque thing… more how b/w can show dimensions and complexity.

Geodesic dome images

This might be a good 3-D model for an interface that is 360 degrees like the Space Shuttle cockpit VR.