observations and reports

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (via Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds)

SonicScoop – Creative, Technical & Business Connections For NYC’s Music & Sound Community

SonicScoop is a pioneering online destination that provides New York City’s thriving music and sound production community with a vital central hub. A comprehensive media company, SonicScoop was founded by two of the music industry’s leading technology journalists — Janice Brown (EQ, Mix, Pro Sound News) and David Weiss (NYC Editor, Mix) — and web + audio specialist/CTO Mark Kondracki (OutLoud Audio,JumpNYC).

SonicScoop is sharply focused on covering and connecting area production/engineering talent and facilities with the thousands of artists and projects that make NYC a leading creative center for music and sound.

SonicScoop is constantly launching new creative, technical and revenue-building opportunities for its users, as its audience comes together online, at sponsored events, and via their own projects.

Driven by world-class multimedia reporting, SonicScoop’s content is bolstered by a dynamic Opportunities Marketplace that provides artists, engineer/producers, and audio facilities with connections to available jobs, equipment, studio space and much more.

The ideal merger of regional focus and global appeal, SonicScoop is designed to be a premier music and sound production resource.

If you’re gonna dedicate your life and livelihood to projectors, you’d better be able to deliver something beyond the same old, same old. That said, Projectiondesign — who’s offered up devices for “harsh environments” and 3D in the past — has clearly outdone itself with the FR12 Remote Light Source (RLS) projector. This bad boy places the lamp and cooling fan in a rack-mounted enclosure, which you can then put someplace safely out of the way (and easily accessible). The light source is then free to be mounted on the ceiling somewhere, where it’s fed images via 30m liquid light guide (similar to a fiber optic cable, but, you know, with liquid). No longer will you have to grab a ladder when it comes time to change a bulb! No word yet on price or availability, but you can expect to get all that at the big reveal during ISE 2010 this February. (via Projectiondesign’s Remote Light Source projector puts the lamp in a cool, faraway place — Engadget)

Alan Kay: “The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer.” (via SPACEWAR - by Stewart Brand - Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. )

Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one’s grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive (“You killed me, Tovar!”). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful.

Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:

1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
2. It encouraged new programming by the user.
3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.
4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
5. It was a game.
6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).
7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
8. It was delightful.

In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spaccwar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things … like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction … of sentient interaction.

Iran