Links & notes for this month

• • FIFA Earth | The Football Twitterverse | Football World
    Hmn. Visualisation of tweets about the word "FIFA" (do the maths there) and all games played of FIFA 10 - so you can see both which teams are doing well, and which countries have good FIFA gamers in them. There's little bits of stats-fluff, but it doesn't go nearly deep enough. It's lovely EA are doing this... but it could be, you know, useful, rather than just shiny? Bungie's statistics crown is still a long way off.
    (tags: twitter visualisation ea fifa games online integration statistics )
• • Guide to Getting Started in Machine Learning | A Beautiful WWW
    "Someone at work recently asked how he should go about studying machine learning on his own. So I’m putting together a little guide." Ooh, useful. Lots of starting points for machine learning in R.
    (tags: r datamining programming machinelearning statistics )
  • the-inbetween.com: [ Bleeping Beats, Chiptunes, and Hyperdub 5 ]
    "When you look at the dubstep scene you realize quickly that it’s a fairly young genre. Not in terms of its own existence as a named thing, but as a measure of the age of many of its prominent musicians. They’re of the generation that doesn’t know a world before the Nintendo Entertainment System and a lot of the music reflects that... If you had a giant Venn Diagram of dubstep and 8-bit chiptunes, you’d see a large overlap between the two. Why dubstep is particularly prone to this, more than other electronic styles, I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with its relatively lo-fi, home studio feel of the genre? ... There’s a hidden, untold history there, but it’d be best told by someone that knows the genre, and its players, better than I do. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying it until it’s pillaged and destroyed for all its worth." Mike on the overlap between dubstep and chiptune culture.
    (tags: music dubstep chiptunes hyperdub 8bit games overlap crossover )
  • Unrealart Computer Generated Art by Alison Mealey
    "All artworks have been created using data from the game "Unreal Tournament". Each image represents about 30 mins of gameplay in which the computers AI plays against itself. There are 20-25 bots playing each game and they play custom maps which I create. Each map has been specially designed so that the AI bots have a rough idea of where to go in order to create the image I want. I log the position (X,Y,Z) of each bot, every second using a modification for the game, I also log the position of a death. I then run my own program written in Processing to create printable postscript files of that match."
    (tags: games art visualization generative ai )
• • notes.husk.org. On noticings.
    "I’ve always taken pictures of street furniture, signs, adverts, shop fronts, and other such trivia. I always felt a bit strange about posting them, but noticings seems to thrive on such things. I worry a little that I’ve annoyed people who liked irregular, but “better”, photographs, but hopefully there’s value in noticings, too." Paul is nice about noticings. I "get" his points about feeling like it's interrupting your photostream, but I enjoy the new things I discover more than I care about the disruption, and I hope other people feel that way, too.
    (tags: flickr noticings games play cities )
  • Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Small Bridges (to Proximate Spaces)
    "Maybe it’s just me (I don’t think so) but this is precisely the sort of thing we always hoped people would build on top of the Flickr API." Gosh, thanks, Aaron. Although: everything else in this post is also awesome. Aaron has a wonderful way of building segues, and not only from topic to topic, but from idea to code to idea and so forth.
    (tags: flickr noticings places apis underground donutholes )
• • gRaphaël—Charting JavaScript Library
    "gRaphaël’s goal is to help you create stunning charts on your website. It is based on Raphaël graphics library." And that's what I've been looking for.
    (tags: javascript raphael charts graphing graphics library visualisation )
• • AI Ruby Plugins
    "This page will maintain list of AI related libraries for the Ruby programming language." Some interesting stuff here, although it's all in varying degrees of maturity...
    (tags: ruby ai machinelearning collectiveintelligence algorithms software libraries gems )
  • Imagining Ruricomp « Neuromantics
    "What data can we wring out of the rural environment that might prove of use to it’s residents and visitors? What embedded processes should have APIs opened up to the wider community?" Lovely lovely lovely design of little bits of Ruricomp and what they might look like from the lovely lovely Paul Pod (who was in the studio a week or two ago, and a joy to work with and around). The twitterbots are especially good.
    (tags: ruricomp ubicomp rural countryside country computing ambient awareness messaging )
  • noticings: the blog - Flickr machine tags + more fine features
    "We’ve been working with the fine folks at Flickr (thanks Aaron!) to add Noticings to their third party machine tag services. What on earth does that mean? Basically, a badge on the sidebar of your Flickr photos linking to Noticings..." Ding! Rather excited about this. Lots more to come (especially from my half of the deal) on Noticings soon, but this bit is super-exciting.
    (tags: noticings games flickr integration webservices )
• • D Nye Everything: Messing with your HUD
    "The voice in Dear Esther doesn't tell you where to go - it only reads, at set moments, from a random selection of letters to Esther as you wander over a deserted and increasingly disrupted Scottish island. The letters are randomised, so no playthrough is the same, and a fragmented narrative of a car crash, a grieving man and a stolen library book is glimpsed but never resolved. When I asked Pinchbeck whether this strictly constitutes a game, he said that it was a game engine, a nice distinction in both senses." Dan fills in his Wired piece on Dan Pinchbeck with some supplementary material. It is very good.
    (tags: danpinchbeck dangriffiths dearesther games halflife mods mechanics )
• • Kosmograd: Branding the boroughs 2
    "John Leighton's hexagonal map only extended about 6 miles from the centre of London, but it's a relatively process to extend more concentric rings of hexes, turning the Great Wen into a setting for a boardgame, Settlers of Catan or Squad Leader re-imagined upon London." Wargaming/Catan pretty much leapt into my mind, too. I like this.
    (tags: london maps cities hex grid identity branding )
  • GameSetWatch - Sound Current: 'An Indie Game Composer Chat: Penny Arcade Edition'
    Nice interview; some particularly good stuff on generative music, and a generation that grew up on iMuse wanting to do more with game music than just churn out Red Book Aduio.
    (tags: games indie independent music imuse generative )
• • mattberther.com » puts vs print in ruby
    "...the print method buffers the output. The easiest way to get around this (for a situation like the above) is to set the sync property on $stdout." Aha. That's where I've been going wrong!
    (tags: ruby puts print stdout unix )
  • Guardian gagged from reporting parliament | Media | The Guardian
    "The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found. The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret. The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations." Oh, I'm looking forward to the next Private Eye.
    (tags: carterruck journalism politics uk law parliament censorship guardian media )
  • cabel.name: The Best Fast Food Receipt
    Receipt as information design. Cabel is right: why do you get this *after* the meal? Other than that: an interesting move, and good use of space.
    (tags: health food information design informationdesign nutrition )
• • The ghost in the field – Blog – BERG
    "Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollenating with data as I travel the city." More wonderful stuff - both in terms of imagery and writing - from the BERG/Touch collaboration.
    (tags: berg berglondon touch rfid video images design interaction radio hertzian )
• • You are Here
    "The physical act of moving around a window into the greater world makes your spatial relationship to the globe profoundly more tangible. The experience of being oriented to a larger context creates an unforgettable sense of wonder."
    (tags: ar augmentedreality map device space wonder totalperspectivevortex tangibility )