• BBC News – Glasgow surgeon using ultrasound to treat fractures
  Doctors in the Scottish city which pioneered the use of ultrasound to scan the body are now using it to heal broken bones.
  (tags:med tech )

I thought I posted this a few days ago, but apparently not. A sort of tribal floor-stamping technogothic. Which isn’t a very good description, but it puts you in the general district.

Water Borders – Harbored Mantras by WeGetPress

• Café Kaput: Ghost Box Study Series 07 – Pye Corner Audio & The Advisory Circle.
  Together for the first time. Pye Corner Audio and The Advisory Circle explore "Autumnal Activities". And we get to have a nice brown sleeve. Rev. Jim and Julian have really done us proud.
  (tags:music )
• phantom stories
  Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished. “Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”
  (tags:social )
• Japanese scientist unveils ‘thinking’ robot
  In a world first, Osamu Hasegawa, associate professor at the Tokyo Insitute of Technology, has developed a system that allows robots to look around their environment and do research on the Internet, enabling them to "think" how best to solve a problem.
  (tags:robots tech )
• New view of Vesta mountain from Dawn mission
  A new image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows a mountain three times as high as Mt. Everest, amidst the topography in the south polar region of the giant asteroid Vesta.
  (tags:space )
• Time reversal: A simple particle could reveal new physics
  A simple atomic nucleus could reveal properties associated with the mysterious phenomenon known as time reversal and lead to an explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.
  (tags:sci time )
• Une mixtape de Balam Acab | Vogue

  (tags:mixes )

And the problem with webcomics, as people said over and over again, was that there was no way to monetise them.

Way back in the day, in fact, people talked about how what the medium needed was an iPod for comics.  I, and probably others, countered that what was in fact needed was an iTunes for comics.  The delivery system, not the device.  Comixology, Graphic.ly, iVerse and all the others are in the business of trying to provide the iTunes for comics.  But, of course, with the iPad, we got the iPod for comics, too, the perfect device for reading them. 

(I am, for the purposes of this thought, ignoring the Kindle, and also Android tablets.)

But no-one seemed to have cracked the Season Pass yet.  I’ve talked to a few digital-comics services about this: if your service doesn’t allow you to buy a subscription that has your favourite comics automagically download to your device or your in-service locker, then I think you’re missing a huge piece of potential.

Of course, that function doesn’t strictly exist in webcomics.  For two and a half years I was doing this nearly every week:

And I think it was Tom Spurgeon who commented that the closure of my long-running email blast BAD SIGNAL meant that he wasn’t getting a notification in email every Friday that the new episode of FREAKANGELS was up, which made it the easiest webcomic for him to keep up with.

It occurred to me today – and my mind’s mostly been elsewhere – that digital comics and webcomics are not the same thing at all, and are not the same thing in ways other than the obvious.

There is no experience of broadcast in digital comics.  Digital comics are, in fact, the closest digital emulation of the store experience: they’re flung up on a virtual shelf.

Webcomics are broadcast.  From the moment they’re uploaded, they’re surrounded by an expanding sphere of URLs and shortcodes, of RTs and Likes and +1s, and are being opened on desktops and laptops and tablets and phones.

Yes, they’re hard to monetise.  Yes, you’ll probably have to sell something other than the comic, and hope that someone notices you and offers you a book deal of some kind, and that’s a high bar because chances are that you’re not as good as Hope Larson or Kate Beaton, and placing advertising is always dodgy (even Avatar Press, who funded FREAKANGELS, put Google Ads on the site in the last few weeks of the run.  And FREAKANGELS made a profit in print).

The focus is off webcomics right now.  People are looking at how to get into the digital comics services.  And quite rightly: they offer the possibility of bypassing the zero-sum game of serialising new and original material into the direct sales comics store market, a market that’s frequently been quite adamant about how it doesn’t want to sell new and original material.  If I had the ability to go into digital comics right now and attempt to access a paying audience for new work, I absolutely would.

(I’ve run out of both available collaborators and tolerance for the toxic shit of the business.)

But webcomics are where the reach is.  Webcomics are not the inferior option just because there’s not a payment system in place.  Webcomics, for some little time to come, are where you’re going to hear about new things first.  Not least because it’s tough to bit.ly or t.co into an in-app purchase.

(I can get you to Comixology’s webpage for CASANOVA: AVARITIA 2, but that doesn’t give me a buy link for the digital comic.  For that, I had to go into the digital-store website and do a search to find the comic’s digital-store page.  I’m not singling out Comixology: I use their service more than any other, in fact.  I’m just saying, this ain’t solved yet, even by the designers I like the most.)

Also, it’s a hell of a lot easier to take your time telling a story when you’re not charging people.

And, while there’s a smile in that comment, there’s also a degree of truth.  Compressing comics down to twenty pages, nineteen pages, probably eight or ten or twelve pages when people get to producing original material through digital comics services… while it’ll certainly make a nice change for a lot of people, after a decade of spacious and airy commercial comics, I’m compelled to point out that the crushed-in nature of commercial comics in the 1970s was one of the driving forces behind the big changes to the commercial medium that came in the 80s.  People were desperate for longer episodes and arcs that allowed them to tell stories more novelistically – and, in large part, they did that by using the then-new process of selling to the direct sales comics store market.

We’re all looking at compression techniques now, because we need them for commercial comics and we’re going to need them for digital comics.  Look at this Howard Chaykin page from AMERICAN FLAGG! in 1983, for instance:

In going back and studying this – for the millionth time since I bought this comic in 1983 – I found that I had somehow forgotten one thing about it.  This comic is 28 pages long.  The first 12 issues of AMERICAN FLAGG in fact form one graphic novel of some 330+ pages.  (And I’m telling you now, if you’ve never read AMERICAN FLAGG!, and you’re interested in comics and science fiction, then you need to sort that shit out, because this is the great lost commercial graphic novel of the 80s, and it should be racked with WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS everywhere.)

Some things work at a smaller page count.  FELL was 16 pages an episode, but those were just a string of little one-act plays.  People want to be able to do more than one-act plays in the medium.  People also forget that the Anglophone medium’s greatest graphic novel picaresque, some 6000 pages long, was serialised in monthly 20-page parts:

CEREBUS was a direct-market publishing phenomenon because, really, there was nowhere else Dave Sim and Gerhard could have done it.  The idea of the direct market supporting something like CEREBUS now is laughable.  The only place you could do something so massive and foolhardy would in fact be in webcomics: the lesson of the Foglios and the only comic sf fans seem ever to have heard of, GIRL GENIUS, now in its 11th volume, somewhere over 1000 pages in total by now.

AMERICAN FLAGG! is to digital comics – compression, jamming in as much material as possible to justify a purchase that still may not appear as valuable as an mp3 or a TV show episode while costing comparably much because people are fucking idiots – as CEREBUS is to webcomics.  CEREBUS, before many of us had seen manga, introduced us to new conceptions of pause and space.  It took its time, wandered and rambled (much as I am here, but I have the excuse of incipient senility).  Even then, the series’ audience was split into two overlapping sets: those early adopters who bought the book every month, and those who waited for the hefty “phonebooks” that collected the series every twenty-five episodes or so.  The entirety of FREAKANGELS would not quite fill two CEREBUS phonebooks.

FREAKANGELS’ audience came in three parts.  People who read it every week online.  People who’d come back to the site every few weeks to read a bunch of episodes all at once.  And people who didn’t read it online at all, and just bought the print editions every six months.  All of which allowed me to tell the story at my own pace – for the people who liked the pace and came in weekly, for the people who liked a bigger chunk, and for the people who wanted a sixth of the story all at once.  The free-broadcast to paid-print model let me tell a story any way I wanted.  There’s a degree of possibly unfounded trust that the nature of broadcast will allow the story to (eventually) find the people who like it, but we got away with it.

But, as I say, the focus is off webcomics.  Everyone seems to be eyeing the digital comics services, and I suspect that within six months it’s going to be a lot easier to get on to a digital comics shelf.  (Just as, right now, it seems to be very easy to get on to a Kindle.)  Which makes sense.  People like to be paid.  My concerns are that if you make it harder to look at something, then you’re making it harder to access the full set of people who might be prepared to spend money on it.  That, and…

…this is harder to make sense of, perhaps?  It may just be a weird personal tic masquerading as a concern, that is meaningless to everyone else?  But I always saw webcomics as the place where people could do huge, sprawling picaresques.  I thought webcomics had a great potential to be the place where you’d get graphic novels that read like Pynchon or Neal Stephenson or add your own discursive, meandering and circumlocutious author here.  And certainly some people got close to that – we could both write our lists of Really Good Graphic Novels Done On The Web here, although mine might have less of the “funny” stuff than yours.  But I have a feeling we may not see many more.

I’m sure it can be made a meaningless stat, but check out Wikipedia’s list of notable webcomics.  Look at the bulge, and look at how the list shrinks off by 2011.

I wished for an iTunes for comics.  And that was probably my first mistake.  For now I seem to have very few broadcasts to pick up for free on my iPod for comics, and it seems that there may be fewer by the day.  And I can’t help but think of that as another missed opportunity.

Luckily, ideas don’t die.  They just cycle around and come back again, like nineteen-page comics and doing things the way we did in the 1970s (when comics were shit).

If you made it this far, I apologise for how much closer you are to your death from old age now.

Ólafur Arnalds created and released a new song, one per day for one whole week, recorded and filmed live in the living room of his Reykjavík apartment and released instantly for FREE as streamed videos and MP3 downloads. Living Room Songs.

• parainfrastructures – mammoth // building nothing out of something
  "Let us suppose for a moment that the “Parainfrastructures” which Quaderns #262 concerns itself with are a class of things, that object-parodying helium balloons hovering around Heathrow Airport to block its expansion, inflatable “instant cities” powered by air compressors, “geodesic domes, parachutes, spray-foam dwellings, zomes, space frames”, “indoor built and ephemeral complexes” colonizing the open floor plans of abandoned airports, and architectural systems of “air control” can be read as a category of architectural objects called “parainfrastructures”."
  (tags:cities architecture taz )
• Engineering team heads to Antarctica to explore hidden lake
  "Next week a British engineering team heads off to Antarctica for the first stage of an ambitious scientific mission to collect water and sediment samples from a lake buried beneath three kilometres of solid ice."
  (tags:eco )
• Paralyzed man uses mind-powered robot arm to touch
  "It wasn't my arm but it was my brain, my thoughts. I was moving something," Hemmes says. "I don't have one single word to give you what I felt at that moment. That word doesn't exist."
  (tags:med tech cyborg )
• russell davies: 2screen presentation – pointing at video
  "Clearly, our homes/lives are going to be drenched in screens. It's not just going to be two."
  (tags:comms screens )
• HOW TO…do sigils | Bearded Eloise
  nice easy guide
  (tags:magic )

Drawing on the rapidly developing alliances between cognitive psychology and aesthetics, in the work of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, for example, she presents reading as an activity where, as we go back and forth between the text and our everyday surroundings, we can view the world through the borrowed lens of the book, and also, if we wish, reshape our lives in harmony with the writer’s vision as imparted through his style.

Note: a life irradiated by fiction:

Textures
in the Literary Criticism section of The Times Literary Supplement
by MICHAEL SHERINGHAM

See this item on Amazon.com

Shared on October 9th, 2011 from Kindle

So DC Comic’s media-blitzed massive relaunch of its entire line in September got them this:

A half-point lead in dollar share over Marvel Comics (who had one high-profile launch in the September frame).

A five-point lead in units sold over Marvel Comics.

But all those units DC sold are returnable.

Thank god all those DC execs told everyone they weren’t interested in market share.  Otherwise someone might have come away with the notion that DC really intended to give Marvel a fight in the marketplace and make Marvel sort their own shit out.  What a stroke of luck for everybody.

• polis: Night and Day
  "The city of Paris has a deputy mayor of the night. It is hard to think of a bureaucratic job title with more global cool cachet, even if large parts of the job involve overseeing sanitation, street repairs and other decidedly unromantic and underappreciated nighttime activities which make cities functional places to exist."
  (tags:pol cities )
• Iranians Bristle as Banking Scandal Widens – IPS ipsnews.net
  "A banking scandal, identified by Iranian authorities as the "largest embezzlement in the country's banking history", has further shaken confidence in the government whose legitimacy was already under question after the contested results of the 2009 presidential election."
  (tags:money pol crime )
• Decline Watch: Malnourished muppet to appear on Sesame Street | FP Passport
  "A new poverty-stricken Muppet will highlight the issue of hunger struggles on an episode of "Sesame Street", the show said in a statement on Tuesday. Pink-faced Muppet Lily, whose family deals with food insecurity, will join Big Bird, Elmo and other favorites on a one-hour prime-time special featuring country star Brad Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams Paisley called "Growing Hope Against Hunger," to air Oct 9."
  (tags:media pol dooooom )
• Did a comet hit cause an explosion on the sun?

  (tags:space )

And you can buy it here at an absurdly reasonable price.

In an otherwise interesting and incisive piece by James Bridle, I find this:

Added to the velocity of the new text is its sociability, its connectivity. Social reading, whether of the Kindle highlights, Kobo Dashboard, Instapaper, Findings or Readmill flavour, adds depth to the text without diminishing it. When I write about the reading experience, I’m talking about a deep engagement with text, an active, intelligent, two-way conversation between reader and writer

James, have you never read a comments thread in your life?  I’m sure you didn’t mean this to sound like the entitlement of the fan reader to tell the author exactly what the reader thinks of them, and to have the author respond on bended knee.  But do you really think that a writer is going to open the commenting function on an ebook and find something other than LOLWUT U CUNT?

This sounds like you believe your money buys you an exchange with the author.  I’m sure you didn’t mean it to sound like that.

(Some things are going to remain one-way broadcasts for a little while yet.  Books are one of them.  The alternative is crowdsourced literature, echo-chamber writing and the transcription of a focus group session.  And if you want that?  Television already exists.)

• India to launch $45 tablet computer

  (tags:comp )

• Twitter / @justinpickard: With FB, we might yet be a …
  "Weaponized social stenography?"
  (tags:web mad future neologism )

Idle thought:

Surely (niche) newspapers for cities, or big gatherings that want to accrete more people, would have modular content, and would easily tear down into handbills?  Content on one side, slogan/image/information on the other.  Each module having its own discrete web address (shortcode) printed under the article.  And a bit of the last page would tear down and then fold into notepaper.

/random

Putting this here in case it’s useful to anyone else.

Opened Gmail this morning in Chrome (Win7) and got a flash message across the top of the browser: “This page has insecure content.”  With options to load it anyway, or not to load.  Blearily, I pressed “do not load,” and things were fine.  What is up with this, I thought?

The Rapportive extension had been a wee bit flaky lately, so I disabled it, closed everything, then relaunched Gmail in Chrome.  Same thing.  So I went looking.  And, lo and behold, I found the answer on a Google support forum.  Which, in my previous experience, had been a wasteland.

Credit for this solution comes from the kind folks at Baydin, makers of Boomerang for Gmail. They don’t really provide tech support for this kind of thing but they went above and beyond the call of duty on this one. Instructions below:

1. Right-click anywhere on your Gmail page and click “Inspect Element”.
2. A debug window will take over the bottom half of your browser. Click “Console” at the bar at the top of this window.
3. Search for the words “insecure content” in the console (search bar at the top-right of the console). This line will reveal where the insecure content is coming from.
4. Disable the plug-in that is creating this message. In my case it was Zemanta, which neither one of us realized was even a gmail plug-in.

Chrome is getting stricter about insecure content on secure pages. You can contact the maker of your plug-in if you want to continue using it w/o receiving this warning message.

In my case, it was actually Zemanta that was throwing the error. Disabled the extension, all was back to normal. Reading around, I see that a lot of people have been getting this error and not knowing why. It seems that, going forward, more and more extensions may cause the error. Now you, like me, can find out which ones and kill them.

This has been brought to you by “If I don’t write this down I will forget how to fix it next time this happens.”

• Dream is over for Virgin Galactic space tourist
  ""Everything in aerospace always takes longer that you originally think," he said."
  (tags:space )
• shitscape
  "“Shitscape” describes “the making of an entirely functioning landscape built from human excreta”. It proposes to accomplish this by recovering “the ‘soil’ from the settlements while extracting the beneficial flora from the forest and, in turn, utilize both as a generator for a new and evolving landscape”."
  (tags:eco cities )
• Wildlife Incursions into Modern Cover Design – 50 Watts
  "books from an invented intellectual history concerned with the study of invertebrates and other animals as they relate to architecture and psychology."
  (tags:covers books design design+fiction )
• The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music: Article
  "Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, is launching a zine this autumn titled Cool Drool. Cool Drool Volume 1: Our Drool & Why features written and visual contributions from Jon Rafman, Megazord, Cory Arcangel, Laurel Halo, Taylor Richardson, Dominic Fernow, Robert Beatty, and Pan's Bill Kouligas. The Wire's Derek Walmsley has also contributed a written piece on the early 90s Amiga demo scene, where coders hailing primarily from Northern Europe released AV material on floppy disc."
  (tags:magazine )
• Co-Founder of Siri: Assistant launch is a “World-Changing Event” (Interview) | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence
  "…it appears that Apple is getting ready to reveal what it has done with Siri over the past year and a half (we were actually expecting it at WWDC).  Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event.  I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event.  Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go.  Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago.  This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language."  
  (tags:comms comp iphone voice )
• Enceladus weather: Snow flurries and perfect powder for skiing
  "Global and high resolution mapping of Enceladus confirms that the weather forecast for Saturn's unique icy moon is set for ongoing snow flurries. The superfine ice crystals that coat Enceladus's surface would make perfect powder for skiing, according to Dr Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute"
  (tags:space )

I’m on Leyland Kirby’s subscription list, so I got to hear this sublimely beautiful and melancholy summoning of memory some weeks ago. Now you can pick it up on Bandcamp for five quid by clicking through, and listen to the whole thing for free right here: