bookmark | Chris Aldrich

Bookmarked Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses by

Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

The Gopher story is a perfect case history for Adversarial Interoperability. The pre-Gopher information landscape was dominated by companies, departments, and individuals who were disinterested in giving users control over their own computing experience and who viewed computing as something that took place in a shared lab space, not in your home or dorm room.

Rather than pursuing an argument with these self-appointed Lords of Computing, the Gopher team simply went around them, interconnecting to their services without asking for permission. They didn't take data they weren't supposed to have—but they did make it much easier for the services' nominal users to actually access them.

ᔥ Paul Linder‘s retweet of a post by Cory Doctorow (2020-02-21)

Bookmarked Twitter OPML Export by

Luca Hammer (opml.glitch.me)

Get websites and RSS Feeds of the people you follow on Twitter. Import the OPML-file with your favorite feedreader.

I love nothing more than OPML related tools! I just finished exporting all of my YouTube subscriptions the other day, now I can get the RSS feeds from the websites of all the people I’m following on Twitter?! This is awesome. I’ll need to work out how I might be able to import it all into my following page.

As I look at this wonderful little app, I can’t help but think at how nice it might be if they added the SubToMe universal following button for these. I haven’t looked in a while, but it’s possible that the Feed.ly integration for SubToMe needed a tweak to get it working again.

Bookmarked Extra Feed Links by

David Shanske (GitHub)

Adds extra feed links to a page based on tags, taxonomy, and author. - dshanske/extra-links

Bookmarked Blogroll by Dan MacKinlay (danmackinlay.name)

This is the script I use to generate a blogroll from my OPML:

#! /usr/bin/env python3
"""
Parse OPML into markdown.
"""
import sys
import re
from xml.etree import ElementTree


def main(fname):
    with open(fname, 'r', encoding='utf8') as fp:
        tree = ElementTree.parse(fp)
    for cat_node in tree.find('body').findall('outline'):
        print("\n## {}\n".format(cat_node.get('title')))
        for node in cat_node.findall('outline'):
            name = node.attrib.get('text')
            feedurl = node.attrib.get('xmlUrl')
            url = node.attrib.get('htmlUrl')
            print("* [{}]({}) ([feed]({}))".format(name, url, feedurl))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(*sys.argv[1:])

❧

Bookmarked Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by

Adrienne Mayor (Princeton University Press)

The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life—and even invented real automated machines

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements—and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines.

As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for real automata. Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.

A groundbreaking account of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life, Gods and Robots reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth—and how science has always been driven by imagination. This is mythology for the age of AI.

↬ Sean Carroll Mindscape Episode 40: Adrienne Mayor on Gods and Robots in Ancient Mythology (#)

Bookmarked ATI 2019-20 Webinar Series (Academic Technology at USNH)

USNH Academic Technology Institute Presents the 2019-20 Open Ed Webinar Series The next in the series is Feb 6 at 7:00 pm - Ungrading: Pedagogical Possibilities for Going Beyond the Grade. Hosted by Robin DeRosa of Plymouth State University. Register here!

These webinars are designed for past and present ATI Ambassadors as a way to continue our learning and sharing help keep us current on trends in Open Education. At ATI 2019, ambassadors identified key areas of interest that they wanted to learn more about and explore more in depth.

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