The Story of 'Calculator Love'.

Drawing by Geek On Acid

I am fascinated by the technology - it is an essence of Geek On Acid. I am entirely dedicated to McLuhan's and Baudrillard's notion that technology is not only an extension of our evolution, but also our body and mind and the existence itself. We gradually expand ourselves to achieve more and achieve it quicker. I love to experiment and play with technology, and part of it has been related with programming. I learn bits and pieces of programming languages to use for my work as doctorate researcher. I play with markup programming, tweaking HTML, jQuery, and CSS to better visualize information (online). I've been also programming hardware synthesizers - as a hobby. I bought, used and sold about 50 different synths, ranging from proper analogue 70s mammoths, to slick and noisy 90s digital synths. After some time, I kept only one synth, a modern one, but with incredible old-school vibe. For example, it has exact emulation of Commodore 54 chip (SID MOS6581), implanted into it's hearth. And amazing user interface glowing with a toxic blue light. We quickly connected well to each other, and I felt like this synth became a part of my body, a part of my auditory cortex. I can sit down, and loose myself in the flow of low frequency oscillation tweaking, waveforms warping and sequencer triggering. I apply filters to artificially vocoded voice and take apart conventional percussion to slice them into dirty-beat-noise. And that's how Calculator Love was born - few months of flowing with 8-bit-Tetris-like-sounds wrapped in electronic beats with a touch of industrial sounds and techno-repetitive cherry on the top. All done with one Calculator I love.

That's it, everything else is on geekonacid.com.

Computers Will Predict The Future

Let's do an experiment.

Let's take supercomputer with 1024 Intel Nehalem cores and let's call it Nautilus.

Let's take Nautilus and give it 100 million news articles to read.

Let's ask Nautilus to apply mood detection for those articles searching for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice". Those words will describe global sentiments.

Let's ask Nautilus to detect words for locations, like 'London', and record those locations on the map, showing where the specific waves of news were produced.


What do we get?


We get a trend, showing that BEFORE large events happening around the world, the mood of the words used in the news becomes very negative. And we know the location of the places, where the mood goes down. Such analysis is possible because Nautilus was programmed using similar algorithms for analyzing news as those used in DNA simulations and weather forecasting. It was done a posteriori - after the events happened - but now it will be applied to the ongoing events with better location engine.


What Nautilus did is, indeed, a weather forecasting for the large events in the worlds. Not perfect, but definitely above the level of chance. Still, as @mjrobbins points in his article for Guardian, you need human to make sense out of the analysis outputted by Nautilus, so it's not that computer does all the job. But it's a good start.

Details are in this paper and slightly biased BBC news article.

Drawing by Geek On Acid
@motioninsocial