we say "shapah!"

translating information from one sense into another, especially sound to image, is one of the things technology does well

case in point is Close Encounters of the Third Kind

is this captivating? in the case of Close Encounters it is. however, personally, i can only say that in other cases, such as the one below, watching the patterns go by while experiencing the familiar audible sensations of this music is sometimes satisfying and sometimes not. it surely depends on multiple factors. sometimes my eyes want to be free of this structure, preferring to let the imagination wander around and let the sound just be it’s own thing. sometimes yes, sometimes no

the idea of translating the input of one sense into or through another…hmmm…

brings up questions. sometimes, though, my own nature seems to want to focus on just one complete sense or at least in bursts of intensive focus. for example, to the music and let the other senses waft the in-between moment in

senses can be wrestled. this meditation is about giving each attention with care, rather than throw jumbled mass at them all without consideration. that’s sure easy enough to take for granted, too

cheers to Kurt Vega for the link:

cheers to @drwave for turning me onto this:

was turned onto this today via @edtechleader:

[Showing at the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota now through August 23th, 2009]

Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause.

This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.

James Burke has the storytelling powers of the immortal. Here we can listen and see him discuss the thinking behind his work. Groovy, indeed.

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Earlier this morning, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about this research published in the NYT and I am so completely fascinated and thus fixated on it today:

Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint — Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.”

After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,” she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.”

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

Why do some worker ants lean on their shovels and let the rest of the workers do all the work? “It’s like students living together — you’ll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all,” she said.

It’s amazing it took us so long to figure this out – what with all the ant farms we’ve been watching for years and years. No one seemed to notice the slackers until now. Perhaps, they’re there for their personalities, for keeping morale up, or maybe for some other brutally apparent reason that we won’t notice for another hundred years?

Maybe they’re just slackers.

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