June 2012
162 posts
China Mieville at arcfinity.org
arcfinity:
This week, multiple award-winning writer China Mieville discusses Railsea, his delirious homage to Herman Melville.
This is, effectively, China’s second “sea story” for Arc: in our launch issue, we arranged for him to visit Wood’s Hole biological research station in Massachusetts. to meet cephalopods and the men and women who study them and attempt to measure their strange, alien...
WatchLatour needs you: Untitled (by christophe leclercq)
Technological Maximum (as defined by Karl Schroeder):
You hit the technological maximum when you have systems that can rapidly perform natural selection on technological designs. As one of the characters puts it in my novel The Sunless Countries, “Everybody’s equally able to evolve new devices because everybody has the same, perfect physics model. Once you’ve got that model, and fast enough calculation, nobody in the universe should be able to come up with a machine that you can’t duplicate. You just select for it and its design eventually pops out. So there’s a technological stalemate everywhere in the universe.” This is analogous to the biological stalemate that pertained on Earth prior to the evolution of human beings.
The Rewilding (as defined by Karl Schroeder):
The Rewilding, by contrast, is simply a vision of what happens when you erase the distinction between the natural and the artificial. Some cognitive studies, for instance, suggest that the human brain offloads difficult calculations to the physical environment whenever it can. When catching a pop-fly in baseball, for instance, the brain does not attempt to do the calculations necessary to predict the trajectory of the ball; instead it gets you to run backward while occluding the ball with your glove and keeping a fixed angle between your arm and the horizon. This replaces the calculations. Such ‘partial programs’ mean that you’re not required to process all information internally; you use your ambient environment as part of your thinking apparatus. In The Rewilding, we have a world of physical partial programs. Why build a water treatment plant when you can use the local wetlands for the same purpose? In The Rewilding, we establish mutually beneficial relationships with physical and ecological systems while not compromising our ambitions; if you need a nuclear power plant, you still
build a nuclear power plant, but if there’s a partnership with some natural system that will provide the same result, you go that way.
“What is the ontology of the digital, or post-cinematic, audiovisual image, and...”
– What is the post-cinematic? « The Pinocchio Theory
WatchComposite (by James Alliban)
Five Lessons for Creating Tablet Experiences
When creating experiences for the iPad (or tablet platforms in general), developers, designers, and product managers should keep the following lessons in mind: The iPad is viewed as more of a small computer than a big iPhone, so apps should be designed to provide a fast, intuitive, and full-featured experience that is fun to use, and that beats the Web.
People use their iPads as extra-portable laptops, but don’t necessarily bring them with them everywhere. This means that in the iPad’s current state, location-specific experiences are secondary to core functionality. However, look for this to change as the proliferation rate of mobile broadband increases in the coming years.
When browsing the Web, users expect to access the full version of websites, so ensure that your site is optimized to deliver a great experience on the iPad in addition to on traditional computer platforms. For example, input fields should include the appropriate HTML5 tags to streamline information entry on the iPad by serving up the appropriate iPad keypad.
The fact that the iPad serves as a shared device (without iOS support for multiple users) presents unique challenges, so be sure to consider how features and use cases (e.g., one-click purchases) may be affected by multiple users sharing a single device.
Security is a major concern for iPad users as many are still unfamiliar with the platform. Plan accordingly and be aware that users may be less likely to log in or enter their personal information when using a tablet device.
“It once occurred to me that, sooner rather than later, the only way London...”
– Warren Ellis
“People prefer big objects to small ones, round forms to sharp ones and complex...”
– Thinking by Design: Scientific American
