ISSUE 1.14

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Glitch Art Is Dead

A real, live, in-the-USA glitch art convention, virtual utopias, space, the next step after humans.


Glitch Art Is Dead: Minneapolis

Holy crap, it's glitch art in real life! In Minneapolis there's gonna be a glitch art exhibit and general hang-out times, and I'm going. Over 90 international artists will be on display, and a number of those artists are coming in to town as well to hang out. If you're around, you should check out the exhibit, and if you just want to support glitch art in general, you can throw a couple bucks to the project's fundraiser. Heck yes!


First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual Utopia

A great cultural look at the role Second Life in the world of users with physical disabilities. This one in particular focuses on an 89 year old woman playing and creating in SL. Of course, it's not just people like her who call a virtual place like Second Life home - I've got many fond digital memories of roleplaying in World of WarCraft, clanning in shooters with friends when I didn't have many in real life, and finding others with specific niche hobbies. (Like people who like glitch art. Weirdos.



OK, can you imagine anything possibly more bizarrely cyberpunk than this? A woman was tricked into spraying Kim Jong-un's half brother with a lethal liquid after doing it multiple times to random men with water as part of a purported game show.


No one knows the best way to stop a drone

Drones - cheap, fast, multiplicitous, and potentially deadly. The military complex doesn't quite know how to deal with it yet, but most of their ideas seem to resolve around nets. Pretty fascinating, and if you're into weird futuristic military robotic tech, this article sets your mind on fire a little bit.


The Post-Human World

". . . you ask the scary question: What happens to welfare in a future where government no longer needs people?" That... that is a scary question. Robotics, apps, happiness, algorithms, individualism, and more in this interview.


How Space Weather Can Influence Elections on Earth

A "single event upset" is "the fallout of an ionizing particle bouncing off a vulnerable node in the machine's register, causing it to flip a bit", which can then cause accidental programmatic errors to occur in programs, including voting machines. In space, you actually have to build incredibly fault-tolerant systems to the point of just having multiple redundant copies of software, that fact-check each other and check for cosmic ray-induced errors. Have I mentioned how much I hate space, and that it wants to kill us?


Raising the American Weakling

This isn't "futuristic" per se but it's fascinating - apparently human grip strength has a strong correlation with all kinds of things like expected mortality, loss of muscle mass associated with aging, and declines in cognitive performance. This article covers what it means for us as a society as we continue to get weaker, and possible interpretations on that fact. The futuristic part is the futurist conclusion--space travel, self-augmentation with exoskeletons, us fighting wild animals on alien planets... OK, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But speaking of alien planets....



Holy shit, NASA et al discovered a dwarf star that has Earth-sized planets that might either have or be ripe for fostering life. Granted, it's 40 light-years away, but still - that's freaking exciting! Here's NASA's press release on it, with plenty of media and pretty images. I do have to say, TRAPPIST-1 kind of sounds like a trying-too-hard trap album. But whatever. If we live there, I'm not going to complain. (Also, here's TRAPPIST-1's official website. The internet waits for no one.)


How Peter Thiel's Palantir Helped the NSA Spy On the World

Bad news bears. This is all about how Palantir works with government agencies (and undoubtedly private sectors) to make massive amounts of data easier to analyze and track. It's hard not to think of Palantir as reality's Evil Corp. (That's a Mr. Robot reference. If you love Glitchet, you'll probably love Mr. Robot.)

Tweets From Dystopia

@lachrob: Hey @Google, exactly what kind of AI am I helping you guys train with this? in response to Google CAPTCHA asking user to identify parts of a helicopter
@SwiftOnSecurity: If I was going to simulate a universe I'd totally stick a caretaker AI in it to screw with stuff. Flood planets. Resurrect dead things.