MathMap plugin and the Droste Effect

Found a very cool tool today which allows you to produce self-referential images, like you know it from fractals. It’s called MathMap and can do tons of other things as well – it even gives you the ability to write new plugins in a simple way yourself. There’s a GIMP plugin and a standalone Mac OS X program of it. The filter that’s particularly interesting is called the “Droste effect”. Josh Sommers has a collection of images produced with it on flickr and a tutorial there as well.

Here are some of the pictures created with it:

      

Piracy is good

Everybody knows and hears about piracy in new media, and media conservatives outright condemn it. If one takes a critical stance on this instead of falling into a simplistic mindset, however, then a lot of insight can be gained from free thinkers on this with surprising results.

There is a thought-provoking presentation from the Internet Archive titled Piracy Is Good? and Piratebyrån’s Rasmus Fleischer gave an insightful speech at the Reboot Conference in Denmark, formally titled “Gray Commons”, while Pirate Bay was still recovering from the May 31 police raid, which further delves into the implications that come with Digital Rights Management and Peer to Peer networks: Piratebyrån’s speech at Reboot.