A curious and relevant overhead slide — lovely for its low-tech — seen at the recent “Everyday Digital Money” symposium at UC Irvine. Absent the usury virus, economics looses lots of fluff and gets back to basic human fundamentals for living in the world. By itself, the graph tells a rather vague story — never got t…

Okay, an algorithm for creating conceptual train wrecks. Think of something that normal humans do. Add a hyphen and then the word “computing.” Wait for lots of new devices and ideas to appear that require batteries, a USB cable or network jack, a deployed call center in Bangelore and few new entries in Wikipedia. Hi…

Redundancy norms here for restricted access areas, using variations in human language, which is just good to CYA, plus English twice, just in case.

The Julianipedia entry for “New/Interactive Media Art” has been finalized by the guys and gals on the editorial floor here at the Near Future Laboratory officeplex. After several years of review, discussions with leading experts and practitioners we’re finally ready to release our conclusions. And what better place…

Timo et al Mediamatic have created a superb physical instantiation of safety in an era when the network leaks rather perniciously into the physical world. Their RFID safe enclosure protects your near-field communication objects from being scanned by faulty equipment or data muggers discretely consuming the swarms of…

Drift Deck. For Conflux 2008, NYC confluxfestival.org/conflux2008/.

Lift Asia will be happening in a couple of weeks and I encourage you to attend if you are at all able to. (I promised myself Ars Electronica this year, which conflicts, unfortunately.) The line-up is a fantastic list of creative all-stars, as well as what sounds like a great queue of “locals” from Korea. This is an…

Next step, testing the PCB edition of the PSX. I’m back to using a slow, low STK500 to do some debugging. Now that the firmware is fairly well squared away, most of the debugging is either a poorly solder-pasted pin (knock-wood).

My UCSC Grad Program, History of Consciousness, is hiring, Associate or Full Professor level. It’s the only interdisciplinary program of its kind, with a strong reputation for critical thinking both inside and outside of academia. This is the first hire since I was there from 1993-95, when I served on the graduate s…