This story from the Mirror claims snipers in Afghanistan are using a cheap iPhone app, downloaded from the internet, to help hit their targets. Someone from BAE, who are using processors from the PS2 to power the next wave of military engineering designs, is quoted as saying;
“Historically the military have invested in developing technology to meet their specific requirements. This technology has then filtered down to everyone else. But, increasingly, modern consumer gadgets are so powerful and so highly competitive that they’re often ahead of the game – and much cheaper to buy in and adapt.”
Anyone can download BulletFlight, which was developed from games software for military use. It costs £2.49 for a basic version or £18.78 for the full program. It is one of dozens of iPod Touch and iPhone apps endorsed by the US military for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, including maps, survival books and tactics guides.
This is brilliant- a web site that’s a YouTube video with buttons within the image. The only slight niggle is that it isn’t possible to stay embedded when clicking on any of the buttons- since it takes you to a different video. Great though.
Update: This was uploaded a few months before the BooneOakley.com video- YouTube Street Fighter;
Here’s a collection of the excellent work of District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. Bladerunner was the first movie to take sci fi into cigarette-butt-floating-in-styrofoam realism but Blomkamp’s sensibility adds a further twist, with documentary style footage used in conjunction with excellent CGI. The setting of some of his work in South Africa also adds something really interesting. The familiarity of the environment from news footage and the careful placing of the narrative within that world create a very authentic feel;
Alive in Jo’Burg (the short that led to District 9);
The objects and situations Höller has created are bewildering in their variety. His work since the early 1990s has encompassed buildings, vehicles, slides, toys, games, narcotics, animals, performances, lectures, 3D films, flashing lights, mirrors, eye-wear and sensory deprivation tanks. This diversity not only defies all formal categories of art-making; it also blurs the lines between what it means to be an artist and what it means to belong to a whole range of other professions, even in an era when the Postmodern slogan ‘anything goes’ has become a cliché. The job descriptions Höller’s work calls to mind include zoologist, botanist, paediatrician, physiologist, psychologist, occupational therapist, pharmacist, optician, architect, vehicle designer, evolutionary theorist and political activist. Most of these belong to the scientific sphere, which reflects Höller’s own educational background, to post-doctoral level, in phytopathology and agronomic entomology. (By the late 1980s, when he first began making art, he was specializing in insect communication.)
For Höller the problem with science is that the profession forces you down the route of ever-increasing specialization. Contemporary art, by comparison, represents a wide-open field. Since his unusual career shift Höller, as much as any of his contemporaries, has been responsible for making that field even wider. Ironically, much of this has been done by transforming devices and techniques originating in different areas of scientific research into various forms of participatory sculpture and installation.
I’m in London at the moment and this ad is on TV all the time, or at least a shorter version of it. I can’t remember the last time I saw a perfume ad that I thought was really good!
In a Wall Street Journal op ed, James Franco claims that his appearance in the daytime soap “General Hospital” was subversive performance art;
Performance art is all about context. “If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you’re a baker.” Likewise, when I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in “Spider-Man 3,” I’m working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up… It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction, along the lines of what I’m doing on “General Hospital.” I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain-and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate.”
I love his self determined and self reflecting portrayal of the spaces that he’s describing, and his idea that his celebrity as an actor gives him authenticity. And what bold aims! I guess soap fans everywhere are applauding his efforts. Although, by his own definition, the world of Spider Man 3 is capable of cloaking his “authenticity”, whilst the world of General Hospital is too flimsy to contain it. I’m confused.
It’s making me wonder what would happen if James Franco appeared on a subway platform as The Goblin. I mean, not for that long because it’s obvious what would happen- people would assume it’s a publicity stunt. When a dead animal was washed ashore in Montauk, people thought it was a publicity stunt. Or when a guy was stabbed outside of a store where people were queuing for the release of GTA 4, they assumed it was a publicity stunt. There was even a case recently in London when an unusually pink cloud appeared in the sky and was photographed by large numbers of people. The fact that many people thought it was a publicity stunt, rather than a natural phenomenon is, truly, stranger than fiction.
Researchers from the university of Montreal, conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users, stumbled at the first hurdle when they couldn’t find a man who hadn’t watched porn. “We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.” On average, the men they interviewed first started watching it when they were 10 years old. They also found that 90% of them used the internet to access porn. None of which is that surprising- what is a little surprising, is that they made a point of saying that none of their sample group had a pathalogical sexuality (the sample group was 20 people).
According to Tony Bartel of Gamestop; “By all indicators, we anticipate Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time. As of today, the number of pre-order reservations we’ve taken for the game is the highest for any title we’ve ever sold in our 6,200 store network”.
UPDATE: According to Activision, the game broke the record for single-day sales of an entertainment property, earning $310 million in North America and the UK alone in it’s first 24 hours. That equates to 4.7 million copies sold. The previous record was set by the GTA 4 launch in 2008, which took around the same figure world-wide. By way of comparison, The Dark Knight’s opening day was $67 million…
“Language for exact number is a cultural invention rather than a linguistic universal… number words do not change our underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality…” So says this report on the language of the Amazonian Piraha tribe, who have no number words in their vocabulary. Numbers are a cognitive technology for memory. Or at least that’s what they evolved out of. Years ago one of the authors of the report, Daniel Everett, tried to teach members of this tribe to learn to count. In an article from a few years ago in Spiegel, he explains what happened;
Over a period of eight months, he tried in vain to teach them the Portuguese numbers used by the Brazilians — um, dois, tres. “In the end, not a single person could count to ten,” the researcher says.
Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. “The language is created by the culture,” says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: “Live here and now.” The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. “All experience is anchored in the presence,” says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn’t allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past — limiting the language accordingly.
Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don’t appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: “Everything is the same, things always are.” The mothers also don’t tell their children fairy tales — actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.
