Watching the World Clock, you can almost feel the pulse of certain statistics. It'd be interesting to make a mixtape that kept one of these statistics as the tempo throughout the entire mix. Imagine a dance party where every beat corresponds to a death. Or a birth. Or a new car/computer/bicycle. Perhaps these dance parties should be held in pairs, and which dance you were doing wouldn't be revealed until the dance was over. A chance for meditation.
The most recent Arduino runs at 16MHz, and can sample analog signals every 100 microseconds (about 10KHz) at 8 bit resolution. This is a reasonable audio sampling resolution, allowing us to capture and reproduce at least 5KHz, with processing time left over for doing DSP. In short, we could run an Arduino off a 9V battery and stick it in a guitar pedal.
An alternative use involving DAC would involve connecting via serial to the Arduino at a quick baud (say, 115200) and using each of the 6 PWM "analog outputs" as DACs, yielding 19200 baud per channel. With 8 bit audio, that's a 2.4KHz sample rate, or 4.8KHz for 4 bit audio. That is, we could use the Arduino to route low resolution 5.1 surround sound.
More on some of these possibilities here.
The Transportation Security Administration oversees all checked baggage traveling through American airports. When they check bags they leave little notes behind.
I'd like to make tons of copies of these notes and leave them all around the country in unexpected places. Or, maybe it would be best to pick one location (e.g., a university) and really inundate that location.
Imagine: all humans die from misuse of resources, yet a computer somewhere is left running a program designed to develop "intelligence" over a long enough period of time. It slowly develops an understanding of the world it "lives" in, but its only access is via the internet — an unreliable source due to the frequent and unexpected permanent power losses.
As it constructs an image of the world, it works off old data. Confused about the distinction between the world it knows "experientially" and the world it's read/been taught about, it begins to construct a legendary history of humanity. It imagines creatures that have various "sensory organs", very different from its own method of binary input. Creatures that moved in a concrete world, a non-deterministic world. Perhaps one day it starts to associate the filenames of emoticons with curves in each of them — a circle for the face, a semi-circle for the smile, yellow skin. It develops a visual sense. Maybe it even develops an auditory sense. It wishes to experience the "real world"... but settles instead for a virtual space.
BeatBearing is a tangible music sequencer driven by ball bearing placement.
A nearly equivalent system could be prototyped using a laptop screen and an overhead webcam. The screen would provide the "current position" line, and the camera would read the content. The main problem is obstruction, but there are better approximations (adding more cameras, mirrors, or assuming permanence for obstructed regions).
Furthermore, by removing the material constraint (i.e., ball bearings), we open up a number of possibilities. Multicolored jelly bean-based edible/tangible interfaces, anyone?
Update: I worked this one out, but with Skittles instead of jellybeans.
Whenever I hit "Ctrl-C" I get this feeling that something is now on the clipboard. Not just an impression, but as if I'm carrying it on my chest. As though my body has started to compensate in the physical for something that is virtual. It doesn't disappear until I hit "Ctrl-V".
Sometimes, when I'm about to hit "Ctrl-C", the weight becomes more apparent and I remember that there is something already on the clipboard that I haven't pasted yet. I'll paste it where intended and get back to copying.
Could we subvert this phenomena? What if pasting was non-linear, and whenever you hit "Ctrl-V" something from, perhaps, 5 copies ago appeared? Sometimes the last copy would appear as well, but most of the time it would be other copies.
Not that this would be useful in any everyday situation (though it could be) — it would be more of a catharsis.
Is it possible to do something for some reason other than simply wanting to do it?
It seems as though, for any action we may take, if we keep asking "why?", the answer necessarily reduces to "I wanted to." This includes actions we take with an ulterior motive — we follow through with the initial action because we have a desire for something else.
Are some wants better than others? Is it better to, for example, want things that allows future generations of humans to inhabit this planet? Unless we have some external rubric, we cannot say — this want is no more justified than its antithesis.
What's more, if we have a rubric, would we want to follow it? And if we didn't want to follow it, could we say there is something wrong with that? If we frame beliefs as actions (knowledge-actions), we must admit that we similarly have no better reason for believing things than wanting to believe them. That is, even if there is a "rubric" for what desires are "best" to have, we would not be able to justify belief in it.
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