blacksundae

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.

On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces is a visualization of the edits Darwin made to the book over the course of six editions. This was created with Processing, something I’ve been meaning to try out. via Pharyngula

This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams - Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets - some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.

Link. Via http://waxy.org/links/

These monsters are result of my effort to learn Processing and encourage others to do so by showing the source code. Also, at the end, my plan is to do a short music reactive video using these monsters. So if you feel like you can make one too and be part of it, rules are simple:

Link!

SEVERAL years ago, I built a robot whose sole purpose in life was to create an even smaller robot just like himself… So much like himself, that this robot endeavoured to create yet another tiny robot, ad infinitum. This continued for a while until an extremely tiny speck of robot tried to endow purpose upon a cloud of molecules with ruinous result.

Link!