Author Archives: Jonathan Beilin

ShitPaint beta release

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: February 26, 2010
SHITPAINT BETA Python script + Processing sketch to paint with a palette of Google Image Search results in the primary colors as well as some shades and some neons. More documentation included with the bundle. Low-fi/digital-punk/whatever. Thanks to Catherine Musinsky, Times New Viking, and Mafia-Hunt for inspiration. Download ShitPaint beta
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E-mail Poetry

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: January 20, 2010
This piece was sculpted out of a long email thread I had with a close friend. >                 reveals >                 >         >                 >         >     [...]
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DJambalaya introduction

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: January 18, 2010
The first piece is DJambalaya, a playlist creation application for the iPhone that can be used on its own or to control a remote computer.
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On Alan Kay’s Technological Determinism

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: January 15, 2010
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay Alan Kay’s famous phrase reads as inspirational. I support the spirit of it entirely as it accords with the American spirit, the hacker ethos, the do-it-yourself revolutionary philosophy. It’s comforting and empowering to think that all it takes is some elbow-grease and ingenuity to [...]
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On Hysterical Realism

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: January 4, 2010
As I progress writing my novel, I find that my writing undeniably employs the devices used by the hysterical realists. This comes as no surprise given my literary preferences, yet it is a trait I must acknowledge nonetheless. I will now take a moment to congratulate myself for being sufficiently mature to admit that I [...]
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Request For An Honest Interrogation of Games – Counterpoint to Jon Radoff

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: December 11, 2009
Jon Radoff’s recent defense of games, “Six Wonderful Things About Games” managed to raise my hackles. In this article, he rehashes a number of contrarian, Everything Bad Is Good For You type assertions (which book is indeed cited in the original post) regarding the theoretical benefits of games: they make people smarter, inspire curiosity, build [...]
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Rebalancing Your Media Diet

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: December 10, 2009
Wired’s July issue featured a problematic infographic based on the FDA’s food pyramid, Wired’s infographic instead focusing on one’s media intake. It is reproduced below:
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On Wolfram Alpha and the Singularity

By Jonathan Beilin | Published: June 10, 2009
Although Wolfram Alpha (WA) entered the tech ideaspace as a revolutionary new tool, it is the latest iteration of a solution to an old problem – the process of question answering (think ask.com), a part of the larger field of information retrieval (think Google).
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