bot talk

5 signs you may be talking to a bot

If you're on social media - be it Twitter, Facebook or Instagram - it's worth asking yourself: Can you tell when you're talking to a bot?

One study last year estimated that bots make up nearly 15% of Twitter users in total – about 30 million – double Twitter’s own estimate of bots on their platform.

Stop Discrimination and Respect Diversity

elevation 1049| Breaking Into Trunks

Allora & Calzadilla

Breaking into Trunks, 2017

The stump of a tree is like an open book. A book in which the tree tells its story. Everything that happened.  They record everything and keep it engraved as the lines of a hand.  We just observe them and they speak to us through this secret language: the language of shapes. The wood is the second life of the tree. Stradivarius said that ‘the violin was born in the woods and that it sounds like a tree’.

-Marcello Mazzocchi, December 14, 2016

“Breaking into Trunks” takes the form of a meditation on the interior orders of the universe. Inspired by visits to the Gstaad-Saanenland it draws inspiration from the mysteries of music, physics and economics. From the hunt for the resonant ‘Stradivarious Violin’ trees that found their way into the hands of famed violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, to the search for the mysterious Higgs Boson particle in nearby Cern and the tally stick system used by local farmers, it traces a path of order and disorder, beauty and chaos as it might be staged within the humble confines of a local barn.

The film shows the process of a 250-year-old tone-wood tree being cut down (breaking into its trunk) on the last autumn full moon of 2016, the moment when the sap-level is at its lowest, the wood the driest, and the acoustic properties the best. The straight lines of the wood’s grain, themselves tallies of time, are what make the sound resonate so perfectly. The music for film is composed entirely with a violin. The voiceover recounts parts of a short story attributed to the late 4th century BC Daoist philosopher, Zhuangzi, titled "Breaking into Trunks" which contemplates the nature of wisdom and its effects on the ordering of the world. The text’s strong resonance with todays political climate, paired with the image and sound, lends the whole film an allegorical character. VIA

...Mettlenstrasse 41a, Gstaad

ARTIST
Cecilia Bengolea

Artist

Olympia Scarry

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet - We Learn to Speak Yet Another Language

Support Animals

airlinepilotguy.com

PIGS CAN FLY?

From best friend to therapist: Research on emotional support animals
It turns out pigs can fly. And turtles and dogs, but maybe not peacocks or hamsters. As some household (and exotic) pets receive promotions to more clinical roles as emotional support animals (ESAs), companions that run the gamut from furry to scaly are popping up increasingly in unexpected places. This research roundup highlights scholarship on perceptions and conceptions of emotional support animals. It also delves into another controversial aspect of ESAs — whether or not they benefit their owners. http://bit.ly/2obeX4t