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If you’ve ever sat in a cafe trying to wifi, you’ve probably noticed the often-witty names that people give to their wifi hotspots. (At the cafe near my place in the West Village of Manhattan, there’s a wifi node called “slut hut”.) Julian Bleecker, a technology designer, has come up with a brilliant idea for an art project: He’s going walk around New York with an application that will sniff wifi hotspots, read their names, and compose haiku from them. An example from his website:
gina network - piss
off, my girlfriend can snowboard
jeepyland, NetHome
If you’re in town on May 13 and 14, you can hang out with him while he roams the city! Check out details here. And while you’re at it, note that Julian’s project is part of the overall “psychogeographic” art festival happening in New York that week — filled with oodles of other projects that blur the boundary between data and the physical world.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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A long German word for "noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history"
