Yes Men & Data Mining Response

Yes Men -
The Yes Men exhibit I thought was pretty interesting. The satire that they were doing was reminding me of the Onion. They do things slightly differently than the Yes Men, but the same satire take on the topics presented are similar. I thought the Ice-EZ unit was interesting; controlling a polar bear via remote and joystick, that was an entertaining concept. The Survival Ball ad was funny. It kind of goes to show the crazy and ludicrous ideas that people come up with to combat the changing world environment and weather. The most striking out of all the videos was the McDonalds reBurger, the idea of burgers being recycled and served to third world countries to combat hunger. There was something at the begining about the loss of nutrients on those foods, so the idea of the waste being recycled and re-served drives home that idea. Another Yes Men act that caught my attention was posted on the wall in the office. It was about the Men dropping 100 $1 bills from the balcony on Wall Street and all the people clamoring overcome with their greed to grab the money and ignore the stock. In return they destroyed their images as well as cost the market millions of dollars. It provided an interesting look into the psychology of the Wall Street marketers. I also liked the mural they had of Ronald McDonald reformed into a bunch of world famous icons and people / revolutionaries such as Gandhi, Malcome X, Rosie the Riveter, and that Mexican revolutionary whose name escapes me right now.

Data Mining -
The Data Mining Gallery was pretty cool and I enjoyed it a lot. It is really interesting to see the patterns and connections that can be made just by looking and interpreting data. One display I though was awesome was the infinite house music generator, all based off the number Pi. Each decimal place is interpreted by the generator and is outputted as a tone or musical sound. An interesting tid bit of information was that the processing power increases exponentially with each decimal number, but with Moore's law, processors double every two years, so processors are constantly getting faster and if the house music system is updated, the music will indeed play indefinably. When I was viewing it was had been playing for just about 166 hours straight. Another display that stuck out was the "Dumpster" display which was a compilation of a bunch of posts on blogs about people's breakups from relationships. Unfortunately, it was down so I was unable to read it. I chuckled and decided that I would not blog about any breakup I went through.