Warren Ellis's Blog, page 19

Was going through an old notebook, and found these notes for a talk I did at the AA – the first Thrilling Wonder Stories event, I guess.  See if you can decipher my handwriting while I attempt to write a new story for Thrilling Wonder Stories’ organiser Liam Young, as an element of the ongoing Under Tomorrow’s Sky project to imagine new iterations of the city.  You can learn more about Under Tomorrow’s Sky here, where there are lots of pictures and videos.

Delicate electronic tones in the middle of the night.  Like a 1970s science fiction computer trying to sing you to sleep from its basement home.

The Catalanian Tapes by Guenter Schlienz

Path’s Dave Morin on Circa, Mailbox, and the Secret App He Invented to Talk to His Assistant | Vanity Fair

“I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night. When the day phone runs out, the night phone takes over. I never have to worry.” Bigend-Packerism. Some even more awful quotes therein. He should have been prevented from giving the interview.

(tags:tech )
The Quietus | Features | Berberian At The Gate: Broadcast & The Death Knell Of Hauntology

“…’hauntology”s champions end up pulping their subject matter to feed their theory. Like the similarly détourned ‘psychogeography’, it deadens the senses to the qualities (you’d hope) it was intended to reveal. Both are cases of theory slipping into ersatz theology – fated attempts to capture elusive, unspeakable experiences in yards of self-referential explication guaranteed to stamp out their pleasures. There’s nothing wrong with men in their forties enjoying shared tastes and nostalgic triggers, but do they have to be so po-faced about it?”

(tags:hauntology )
IntiMate

“IntiMate is here to make you PLAY MORE with sex tapes by creating a SAFE SPACE to store and share them: 1.  Shoot tapes and pictures DIRECTLY from our app 2.  The app stores & protects tapes for you 3.  Share & COMPETE with COMPLETE STRANGERS”  (good grief. this can only end well)

(tags:app sex social )
Here & There back on sale! – Blog – BERG

Schulze’s wonderful weird projection map poster of NYC is back on sale.

(tags:art maps )
Original Australians numbered 1,000-3,000, study finds

“Australia was first settled by between 1,000 and 3,000 humans around 50,000 years ago, but the population crashed during the Ice Age before recovering to a peak of some 1.2 million people around five centuries ago, a study said on Wednesday.”

(tags:history )

By E. Paul Zehr

When I was writing the book “Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine” I took a real hard look at how Iron Man’s suit of armor could actually work with all that human biological hardware inside of it. The first step was was—in homage to Coleridge—to employ some willing suspension of disbelief—if the technology for Iron Man’s suit of armor existed, how could you link it up to a human body?

So I did a lot of thinking about Iron Man as a neuroprosthetic. The fanciest, jazziest, most ambitious neuroprosthetic ever conceived, in fact.

And that’s when I came across the Iron Man “Extremis” story arc that Warren Ellis penned and Adi Granov illustrated . I came across it and read it and I went all slack-jawed. Here was a comic book writer who had identified the exact way I had by looking at the problem through the lens of modern neuroscience. It was very cool. But at the time the problem with the concept was linking the robotic suit of armor to the nervous system of Tony Stark. How do you interface that with the brain and spinal cord?

At the time I looked at the problem in a very conventional way. Brain machine interfaces with the highest fidelity typical involve implantation of electrodes into the brain itself. So that’s how I conceived of it. An electrode array would be implanted into the brain and the spinal cord and then used to control the Iron Man suit. The trick is that to fully integrate the suit with the brain would mean many implants into the central (brain, spinal cord) and peripheral (nerves in arms and legs) nervous system.

This worked as a conceptual explanation but I wasn’t very happy with how this might work in practice. Recently, I was doing a talk for a group of high school students visiting campus, I thought about this again. I was using Iron Man as a metaphor for neuroscience and neural plasticity and suddenly realized a much better way to do this. A way that’s actually a lot closer to the Extremis interface itself.

The problem is how to create an interface between the suit of armor that will come in contact with the skin and the finely branching terminal projections of the nervous system that lie just underneath that skin? The answer is…enter the Mandarin! Umm, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, I mean.

Even though the term “tissue engineering” wasn’t used until 1987, Francois Berthiaume and colleagues at Rutgers in New Jersey suggest that this field began way back ~3000 years ago when skin grafts were performed in India. More recently, composite living skin was created in 1981. Now tissue engineering has impacted on skin, cornea, liver, pancreas, cartilage, heart, kidney, and, with particular relevance here, neurons.

The way to integrate the Extremis concept for Iron Man with modern neuroscience is to create an interface through the skin using the basic concepts of regenerative medicine. The gist of this is shown below. Tissue would be extracted from the person for whom the interface is being created, the appropriate cells (neurons in this case) would be isolated and cultivated. In vitro the process would continue with proliferation of the neurons but in a targeted way using a tissue scaffold to direct and shape the growth. After shaping by mechanical and electrical stimulation, these artificially integrated tissues would then be implanted back into the user.

Voila. You now have the makings of an interface that could be used to link to the user. Of course you then have to add the autonomous robotic Iron Man suit of armor, ensure that the tissue continues to grow in a targeted way to connect to the natural nervous system of the user, and hope the biotech interface you created is accepted by the immune system of the user. Oh yes, and do a bunch (years) of training.

But those are considerations for another day. For now, when you read an Iron Man comic book or graphic novel, or watch the latest installment of big screen Iron Man, just marvel that the real science needed to connect that tech to human biology is rapidly advancing. The future really is now.

SUNN 0))) have a Bandcamp page.  That alone is something that should be disseminated.  But it’s worth noted that their page is so complete as to include their fascinating collaboration with Nurse With Wound, which you may not have heard.  So it’s tonight’s Night Music.  And if, like me, you’ve already heard it, then you know it’s worth listening to again.  G’night.

The Iron Soul Of Nothing by SUNN O))) meets NURSE WITH WOUND

The latest Jonathan Keats emanation | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com
"The dozen canvases at Team Titanic are all painted with pheromones instead of pigments. The pheromones are produced by the artist in his studio, collected from his pores while he watches the news on TV, and labeled for their emotional content based on how the news makes him feel. Suspended in linseed oil, they’re mixed on his palette to make a blend of feelings such as anxiety and elation. He then trowels these olfactory paints onto his canvases so thickly that they might take centuries to dry: an aromatic impasto from which the pheromones gradually disperse."
(tags:art )
the hauntological society;: The Films of Patrick Keiller
"The visual material consists of static camera shots: images of urban decay and other socio-economic signifiers, road sign clutter, glowering skies – a landscape sharing some territory with the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings and the Free Cinema film-makers, but framed and cut with a sharper, more avant-garde edge."
(tags:film )
Rhizome | Xul Solar’s Possible Futures
"Only collective inventions have any real value, Xul Solar once told his close friend and fellow Porteño Jorge Luis Borges, trying to convince him (unsuccessfully) to write in Neo-Criollo, one of the two languages he had invented and the one he himself preferred to use for writing and conversation.  Such was the importance to Solar of friendship, sodalities esoteric and otherwise, and cooperation.  These days the artist, who died 50 years ago this month and whose close friendship with Borges is at the heart of an ongoing exhibition at the Americas Society in New York, is remembered less for his hermetic, often illegibly coded mystical watercolor paintings than for the collective séance that he made of his particular corner of Buenos Aires' cosmopolitan avant-garde of the 1920s and the decades that followed."
(tags:witers writing weird )
Open the Future: Bots, Bacteria, and Carbon: My Talk at ENSIA
Jamais Cascio: "The talk I gave earlier this month at the University of Minnesota is now viewable at the Ensia website, on YouTube, and embedded below. It runs about 36 minutes, and covers three different scenarios of a sustainable future."
(tags:future )
Albion Dreaming | Larkfall
"Among the wide range of articles, I found the one on The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui most interesting, since it contains a number of notes and sources on how our environment may potentially incline people to experience the sensation of a ‘presence’ in their midst…"
(tags:hauntology )
soundcloud.com
FACT mix 379 – Grouper (Apr '13)
(tags:music ifttt soundcloud )

The Status Board is an iPad app from Panic.  It emulates a huge screen that’s been in their office for a few years.  The app will suck in information from various feeds and produce auto-updating panels, tables and graphs.  Mine is simple.  Here’s a screenshot I took for Rich Stevens last night.  The blurred panel on the left is the email panel.  The photo panel in the top right is a cycling Instagram viewer, showing a new photo from the people I follow there every 15 seconds or so.  I think the visible photo is a shot of some new weird cheap phones taken by Kevin Slavin.  I blurred out some stuff in my calendar on the bottom, too, because you don’t need to see me scheduling my bowel movements.

There are many Status Boards, but this one is mine.  My iPad lives in a stand next to my laptop, as a second screen.  Set up like this – and this is a very simple implementation, no graphs or tables or CSV or JSON data feeds – it’s actually an excellent glanceable information radiator.  I could put a couple more feeds into the RSS display panel (I only have three in there right now, as a churn test), but that might make it more demanding than the quick snapshot I want.

At USD $10, it’s probably quite an expensive intangible toy, especially if you don’t have as defined a use case for it as I do.  Mind you, when I said that to Chief Mechanic Ariana last night, she said, “um, besides pretending I live in a command center?  Maybe I like pretending I am Mission Control.”  So there’s that, too.

Despite its kinda-weird semiotic payload and the things it probably says about me, I love this damned thing.  It’s extremely well-designed, both practical and playful in its intent, and, for me, very useful.  It turns the volume way down on ambient informational awareness for me – Gmail gets switched off, MetroTwit gets switched off, everything I need is up on Status Board  — without switching everything off altogether.  Which, for me, is like trying to work without music on.  Not going to happen.