Recent posts (page 9)
Nate Harrison's audiovisual essays
A while ago I came across a widely-seen Youtube video about the history of the Amen breakbeat, which was a reposting of a recording of a 2004 documentary audio installation by artist Nate Harrison. It details the artist’s view of the rise of the break, as well as what this might tell us about the effects of intellectual property on cultural development.
Can I Get An Amen? — Nate Harrison (2004)
Cool Faith
Looking through a turn-of-the-century almanac of graphic design, I came across this absolute gem:
Hazel rule to delete ResearchGate pdf cover pages
I download a load of academic papers in as PDFs from ResearchGate, since that’s often the only place a free version of a paper is available. Unfortunately, ResearchGate prepend downloaded PDFs with a branded cover page, which I obviously don’t want.
On MacOS, it’s easy enough to manually delete pages from a PDF using Preview. But with a bit of help from Hazel, it’s possible to automate it.
Working as a postdoc at Lancaster University
I’ve just started a new job at Lancaster University, working as a postdoc in Louise Connell’s lab. I’ll be looking at the roles of linguistic representations and sensory simulations in human cognition. You can read more about the lab’s research aims on its website.
Update: Louise has now moved to Maynooth University, and the old lab’s page at Lancaster has ceased to exist. But you can easily find out the kind of things Louise’s colleagues worked on at her new page.
Slogans
Trying to decide which slogans are best for my sinister anti-Trump/May placards.
Curtain
Curtain is a short, powerful game by Llaura Dreamfeel, available on their itch.io page.
I won’t say too much about it, other than I played it about a year ago (after Danielle Riendeau recommended it on an episode of Idle Thumbs), and it’s stayed with me for a long time since then. I really recommend it, though take note of content warnings on the website.
Sacramento
Sacramento is a lovely little game by Dziff, available on their itch.io page.
It’s a little, quiet, dreamy watercolour space of sun, wind and wildlife to explore, with accompaniment by Glass Body.
It’s more than worth a dollar and 10 minutes of your time.
(via a Hannah Nicklin tweet)
OHBM 2016
Writing this report was one requirement of the travel grant which let me attend this conference. Having written and hyperlinked it up, I thought I’d post it in case it would be of interest to anyone. At least check out the videos!
2016 was the second time that I visited the Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, this time to present the poster 3682: Investigating human speech recognition: Reverse-engineering the machine solution with EMEG and RSA, co-authored by my colleagues at the Departments of Psychology and Engineering at Cambridge. The visit was generously supported by a Brain travel grant, for which I give my thanks.
The NSA are evil idiots
Everything about the subject of this article is mind-numbingly awful.
Ars Technica: The NSA’s Skynet program may be killing thousands of innocent people
The NSA have apparently built an artificial intelligence which sifts through mass-surveiled metadata of Pakistani civilians to compile a kill list, which is then executed on by America’s fleet of death squads and flying robots.
Embedding a Bibtex publication list in a website with PHP
Now that I have a more professional website, I wanted to include on it a list of publications. It took me a while to figure out a “good” way to do this, and many things I tried didn’t work, so here’s the solution I eventually settled on.
Maybe it can help you too!