Life As A Human Likes is a weekly feature of fascinating, enlightening, fun or perhaps just odd blogs and websites that enliven the experience of being human. This week, we feature visuals and consciousness.
Mind and Machine
#1 Kurzweil: Accelerating Intellegence
I am a regular visitor to futurist Ray Kurzweil’s site. He presents collections of incredible stories in human and machine interface technologies and artificial intelligence. Given that life as a human is ever moving closer to life as a machine, this is the place to check that trend. I read Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near when it came out (the movie should be awesome). Kurzweil’s site is filled with amazing scientific advances and is well worth trolling around day after day.
Something to Take Your Breath Away
I stumbled across Di Fruscia’s site a while back and have a peek in every now and again when I am looking for intensive landscape photographic inspiration. The photos are simply stunning. Timecatchers.com, of which Di Fruscia is a member, says he is “Constantly searching for these rare magical moments where the ‘Perfect Light’ embraces Nature in all it’s glory, you can rest assure that this is only the beginning of Patrick’s long and amazing quest for nature’s immortality.”
Something to Keep Your Breath
#3 1x.com
Here’s another photo site which has some absolutely stunning images that will make you pause. I find viewing the work of other photographers on the Internet to be one of technology’s magical gifts. Prior to this ability to share our art, it took a life time sometimes to have one’s work seen by a thousand people, but now it can happen in a day. The ability to have one’s vision available to the world so easily is unprecedented in our history and one wonders about the marvels to come with technologies like augmented reality.
Study What Just Happened to You
#4 OCW Search
Life long learning is a a great thing, they say, but the proverbial they often don’t mention the costs associated with advanced education. Given that governments do not seem educated about the value of education for all, educational institutions the world over are taking up the challenge and beginning to open up their courses and offer them free over the net. If you ever thought you’d like to study Media Technology and City Design and Development or Global Climate Change: Economics, Science, and Policy well now is your chance. Or maybe you fancy Systems Optimization: Models and Computation or something more difficult: Studies in Poetry: From the Sonneteers to the Metaphysicals. Institutions like MIT, Stanford Engineering, Yale and The Open University UK are offering up hundreds of courses where you can download lectures, notes and lessons over the net and study them at your own pace for your own ends. Knowledge needs to be free and it is crawling out from the shackles of policy and elitism and becoming accessible to all. This is a great trend so please check out OCW Search for open university programs.
And now, to Put It All Together
This site is just kind a weird, but I like it as it represents something of the beginning in an interactive system of enlightened nodes.
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1x is a daily stop of mine. It’s been a goal of mine for the past few months to get a photo published there. Thus far, no dice. But while that’s been disappointing, it’s also pushed me to improve my photography.
It is definitely an awesome site for sure and very inspiring work. Keep pushing it and I’m sure they’ll pick up on one of your images soon.