• A programmer writes text:
• which is compiled into software
• which generates organised pixels on a screen
• which are looked at by users
• whose interpretative systems create meaning out of it.

At dotAtelier's event space there is a new interactive event. Intertidal music allows you to compose nature music with the sounds of the intertidal zone. Click on the pictures to generate the sounds of the Pacific Ocean where it meets the land at it's western edge. Combine sounds to generate interesting atmospheres.
Turn on your audio and make sure you have a Java runtime environment.

The word "kangaroo" is commonly held to be an Aboriginal word, meaning the same as the modern word for the well-known marsupial. However, the Aborigines of the Sydney area, at the time of the first English settlement there, believed it was an English word meaning "animal". They would point to a sheep and say "kangaroo" (Watkin Tench "1788"). Unlike words such as "wombat" or "boomerang", it was not from their language.

According to Etymonline it is "supposedly an aborigine (i.e. Aborigine) word from northeast Queensland, Australia, usually said to be unknown now in any native language."

I would like to propose another explanation of its origins.

The Aborigines learnt the word "animal" from the English who were mostly of poor urban origins. In Cockney English it would have been pronounced a-na-moo. Small sound shifts to adapt to Aboriginal speech norms:

• add a consonant to first syllables with vowels (a becomes ka) and
• modifying n to ng (a typical sound of Aboriginal languages)

The supposed origin (Etymonline) in Queensland is unlikely as the word was already used in Sydney at the time of the first English colonisation. Often the best approach when trying to understand indigenous people is to believe what they say as Jeremy Narby suggested. If they say it is an English word for "animal", this should be take as a plausible explanation.

A new exhibition "Snake in the wattle" has opened at the dotAtelier exibition space.

At the SEARCC conference in Sydney (28 to 30 September) Kevin McKean predicted implants to be one of the significant developments of computing in the near  future. Virtual realities would become far more powerful than in existing games. New illegal drugs may be developed to enhance modified perceptual spaces.

This provides a complementary scenario to fitting computers out with biomass-based memory as discussed here in the debate on “creativity”. Through implants, the innovation of the human can be blended into a distributed intelligence system which would determine the parameters of experience through human-to-electronic connections combined with chemical influences. The human spirit would be harnessed within the logic of the machine.

A small implant linked wirelessly to a network of computers could enormously expand the power of an intelligent machine. The traditional  limitations of “nature” in human perception would cease to exist. No longer would the computer seek to imitate human functioning, but could put to use for its purposes the innovative and rule-breaking potential of the human which a machine cannot have itself.