In a series of witty punchlines, Patrick Chappatte makes a poignant case for the power of the humble cartoon. His projects in Lebanon, West Africa and Gaza show how, in the right hands, the pencil can illuminate serious issues and bring the most unlikely people together.
This is a brief overview of the TOTeM: Tales of Things and Electronic Memory research project funded by the EPSRC. TOTeM will allow people to record and preserve personal histories through mobile and Web 2.0 technologies. It will develop a network between objects and people, enabling communities to share common histories.
Cinemin Slice is a portable pico projector that docks and connects to your favorite multimedia devices, splashing your movies, videos, photos, games, and slides on to walls and ceilings, and caressing these enlarged images with rich stereo sound.
More info at cinemin.tv
Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.
What is Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Why do we use it?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32. The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham
How can I get some?
There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.
Also generate Lorem Ipsum here
Fractal Fetishes: Essays on the organization of the system of information, is a philosophical investigation, by Constantine Andoniou, of the nature and organization of the system of information. The book argues that digital technologies have brought about the genesis of a world in which the global system of information constructs unchallenged conceptual misrecognitions and logically unjustified receptions of social knowledge. The book contends that as fractalized information establishes new relations of meanings and understandings of the world, we need novel ways of thinking in order to survive in an informational ocean of lived illusions and lost meanings. Our priority should be to reset collective and individual standards in a redefinition of the content of available bodies of social knowledge in a global context. The discussion focuses on the concept of information and leads to a series of theoretical proposals regarding the structure and organization of the system of information. It is argued that social knowledge implodes towards states of genuine fractal infogramic formations and mutates to digital illusions, altered states of reality which dominate our so-conceived real and conceptual imaginations through daily communication practices and experiences.
Purchase on amazon.com
Read more on the FractalFetishes blog
This video discusses how cities may change in the face of uncertain future food, energy and water supplies. It is presented by Christopher Barnatt, Associate Professor of Computing & Future Studies in Notingham University Business School, and the author of explainingthefuture.com
technoliterati 