Archive for June 10th, 2013

It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

Monday, June 10th, 2013

Actually, it’s a big sort of bird-like object. And DARPA apparently used it as the basis for a model aircraft back in the mid-1980s.

northropi

(Quetzalcoatalus northropi, Texas Memorial Museum, Austin, Texas.)

Posted in Birds, Geek, Museums, Photography | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 10, 2013.

Monday, June 10th, 2013

LAT obit for Iain Banks.

As best as I can tell, there has been no mention of Banks’s death in the NYT yet.

At dinner Saturday night, Lawrence, Andrew, and I were talking about how bad the Marlins (and Astros) are. I remembered that someone on FARK posted a link to a site that provides updated win-loss projections for each MLB team, but I was unable to find that site in my history, on FARK, or in Google.

“DeWayne Mann” on FARK was kind enough to respond to my inquiry with three links, which I provide here for bookmarking purposes:

CoolStandings, which currently projects Miami at 106.9 losses and Houston at 103.1.

Baseball Prospectus, which has Miami at 102 losses and Houston at 99.5.

FanGraphs, which has Miami at 104 losses and Houston at 99.

(As Dewayne notes, all three sites use a more sophisticated model than (winning percentage * 162). Based only on that calculation, the Marlins project out to 115 losses, and the Astros to 106. For comparison purposes, the 1962 Mets lost 120 games and had a .250 winning percentage. The 2003 Detroit Tigers lost 119 games, and had a .265 winning percentage.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Clippings, Loser, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#37 in a series)

Monday, June 10th, 2013

Back in 1995, an artist named Douglas Davis created an Internet-based work called “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”, which…

…functioned as blog comments do today, allowing users to add to the opening lines. An early example of interactive computer art, the piece attracted 200,000 contributions from 1994 to 2000 from all over the globe.

Now we’re in 2013. The Whitney Museum of American Art wanted to bring back “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”. But:

…the art didn’t work. Once innovative, “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence” now mostly just crashed browsers. The rudimentary code and links were out of date. There was endlessly scrolling and seemingly indecipherable text in a format that had long ago ceased being cutting edge.

This raises some questions about the nature of digital art. If you change the code to make it work on newer hardware, are you changing the art itself? Could the Whitney have run the code on an emulator? Would that change the nature of the art as well? And even if you run the code in emulation, what do you do about broken links?

“We’re working on constantly shifting grounds,” said Rudolf Frieling, a curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has been at the forefront of sustaining online art. “Whatever hardware, platform or device we’re using is not going to be there tomorrow.”

“Frankly speaking,” he added, “it’s a huge challenge. Not every museum is set up to do that. It takes huge technical expertise.”

More:

After much deliberation, the curators decided on a nearly unheard-of artistic solution: to duplicate Mr. Davis’s installation and present it in both original and updated forms.

One version is the frozen original, with broken code, pages of oddly formatted, garbled text and instructions for users who wanted to fax in their contributions (including the number for the Lehman College gallery, which first showed the piece). Links were redirected, through the archiving site the Wayback Machine, to their 1990s counterparts.

Noted:

In 1995 Mr. Davis’s piece was shown in a biennial in South Korea attended by the celebrated video artist Nam June Paik. It has hundreds of comments in Korean, but the code for the characters was so degraded that Mr. Fino-Radin was stumped. If other viewers fix it, he said, seeing those messages “will be a first for Western audiences.”

Dear digital artists: this is why it is important to make your code Unicode safe. (Yes, yes, I’m aware that Unicode 2.0 didn’t come along until 1996. This is a note to the future.)

Posted in Art, Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed