I suppose this qualifies as fun.
What I want to know is, how much training does it take for fighter pilots to stop passing out?
via Bits and Pieces
Saturday, April 19, 2008
"Wow, I went nowhere there for a while"
Boards of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy
Friday, April 18, 2008
You could be driving this someday soon
From the 2008 Michelin Challenge Design website:
In urban regions and tight spaces agility counts. Beside its minimal traffic area, Snook provides maximum agility through the principle of instability in combination with an auto stabilized carefree handling system. Drive-by-wire-technology and a multidirectional engine raise all of them three, comfort, safety and joy, by allowing completely new manoeuvres such as driving sidewards and turning on a point, for fun as well as for security. The control system runs redundant, so it tangibly proves the emotional suggestion of safety of the helmet-like impression and the SUV-like seat level.via Beyond the Beyond
Alright, if you guys pull this one off, we'll forgive you for the lack of jetpacks and flying cars.
hat tip to Posthuman Blues
A few items worth noting
Affluence is Good
Kevin Kelly nails it when he says:My own interpretation of this research is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory). We don't find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption, and in a chance to pursue individual freedoms -- all of which come with increased affluence.
Also: Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All
The way I see it, money buys three essential things: time, space, and resources. Everything else is for fun or compulsion.
As far as happines goes, William S. Burroughs changed my life with this paragraph:The only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program... the earth becomes a space station and war is simply out, irrelevant, flatly insane in a context of research centers, spaceports, and the exhilaration of working with people you like and respect toward an agreed-upon objective, an objective from which all workers will gain. Happiness is a by-product of function. The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function. -- The Place of Dead Roads
Burroughs had some heavy stuff embedded in all that craziness.
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The technology that will save humanity
Concentrated solar power looks promising, saving humanity or not.
Wherever you stand on the climate change issue, there are still a lot of good reasons to get off coal and oil. I'm not going to go into that here.
A good article though, with some informative historical notes. This caught my eye:Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain many designs for solar concentrators, including some for industrial purposes, because he worried about the destruction of the earth's vast forests in humanity's search for fuel.
Uncle Leo ahead of the curve, as usual.
via linkfilter.net
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Scientists sift clues to mysterious migration
The fate of the Anasazi has been a challenge to archaeologists for many years. Now, it seems they're making some headway, bit by painstaking bit.
From The Oregonian:Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors such as the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat.
Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They're looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.
via Santa Fe Institute
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ends
Why are all these dogs peeing?
This is a puzzler. Ortho, over at Baudrillard's Bastard requests:
My dear reader, dogs appear everywhere in the prints produced by British Americans during the War for Independence. Often, dogs pee on everything ...I've seen a few of these before, but I've never noticed the dogs peeing.
I beseech you Dear Reader, please share your knowledge with me. Please share citations for texts that analyze the dogs that pee in the prints of the American War for Independence.
You need to go check these out, and if you have any leads, drop Ortho a line.
Self Storage, Life Logging and the Dymaxion Chronofile
From Long Views:
Long Now was invited to be part of the art exhibit “Self Storage” which transforms a storage unit in San Francisco into a library of Ephemera open to the public under the care of a librarian and indexed for consultation and handling.
The project titled Self-Storage was inspired by the historical precedent of the Dymaxion Chronofile, a system that Buckminster Fuller devised to chronicle his life.
From Stanford's R. Buckminster Fuller Archive:
The centerpiece of the collection, in many ways, is the Dymaxion Chronofile, an exhaustive journal of Fuller’s trajectory from 1920 until his death in 1983. Fuller had been collecting clippings and artifacts since he was a child. But in 1917, he began a formal chronological file which he would later call the Dymaxion Chronofile. The Chronofile was a vast scrapbook that included copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, and even dry cleaning bills. Initially, the Chronofile was bound into handsome leather-backed volumes. In later years, to save space and expenses, the Chronofile was simply stored in boxes. By the end of his life, this exhaustive “lab notebook” of his life’s experiment amounted to 270 linear feet.Bucky's is said to be the most documented human life in history.
Fuller intended for the Chronofile to be a case study of his life in context, in which his daily activities were presented in parallel with developments in technology and society. In it, he at once traced the evolution of his own thoughts, relationships, and business ventures; and documented new inventions, trends, and technologies that were emerging on the broader level.
Over the years I had collected a fair bit of my life's documents and ephemera, but a few hurricanes and floods back in my New Orleans days truncated that effort.
In late 2005, I made it a habit to record every thought, idea, dream, phrase or random fuzzy notion that crossed my mind. I also record every word, name, object, book, work of art or any other item I might be interested in. It's not so much a journal or diary, it's more of a mental scrapbook. It has been very useful and enlightening. (I'm close to filling the seventh notebook.)
On looking back at my entries, two things stand out.
One, there are many items recorded that I am certain I would not have remembered otherwise.
Secondly, the practice has helped to alleviate the illusion of time compression.* Years don't seem to zoom by so fast when I examine my recorded thoughts. It makes me realize how long a year really is and how much one can think and do during that time. It also brings to mind what was going on in my life and how much I have learned in the interim.
I'll never come close to anything that Buckminster Fuller did in that regard, but I can attest that thought and life logging is a good habit to develop. Apart from personal benefits, it could also be quite valuable and interesting to those that come after.
* The other thing I've found to defeat this is novelty. When we are kids, everything is new. Time takes forever. As we get older and fall into patterned behavior, our life tends to go into auto-pilot and this is the big time-killer, literally and figuratively. Apart from slowing the zoom down, trying and learning new things will keep you young, healthy and sane and will fill your time with something worth remembering.
See also
Thursday, April 17, 2008
ZiL 29061: Russian screw-driven armored vehicle
Guess this guy didn't make it too far past field tests.
They sold the prototype to Race Bannon.
more here
YouTube
via Disinfo.com
Spider-Man web catches suspects like flies
From news.com.au:
A Spider-Man-style web designed to subdue belligerent suspects has been demonstrated for South Australian police.
It works by deploying a high-tensile net across a 16sq m area at 6m per second, covering a person in seconds.
They are immediately restricted by the net strings and can be pulled down to the ground, cutting off any chance of escape. The net uses compressed air – not an explosive charge or electrical current – to operate.
via Nothing To Do With Arbroath
More on echolocation
My aunt sent me an email with a related story. With her permission, I post it here:
I was looking at your blog and saw the piece on echolocation. I worked with a blind man who used it all the time. He went from the North Side to Downtown Pittsburgh and back for lunch every day by himself via echolocation. It was amazing to witness. He would make clicking noises and could tell from the feedback if something/someone was or was not in front of him. I never saw him bump into anything in or outside our offices. He was a systems analyst and fixed program bugs and was really good at it. He used special scanning equipment that translated the code into braille. Truly, he is an amazing man.I had to share this. Too cool.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics
For a sharp, concise summary of the emergence of the Information Age and its transformation into the era of open-source economics, this will be 17+ minutes well spent. He ties it all together nicely.
From TED2005 Oxford
(I couldn't help noticing that TED ditched the Pee Wee Herman theme at the beginning of their videos.)
Link Souffle
A few items:
Maverick academic Philip Zimbardo says we are all capable of evil. Is he right?
No argument here.
via Schneier on Security
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Cubans Line Up for Cell Phone Service
Watch Cuba closely. It's the new frontier. Because they're pretty much starting from scratch, you'll likely see some interesting technological leap-frogging; straight from the 1950's to the 2010's.
They're blogging and Twittering, too.
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Ray Kurzweil: Making the World a Billion Times Better
Ray Kurzweil is one the the few future thinkers that is persistently optimistic.
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Water, the new oil
Melanie Swan hits us with a real poser: how are we going to manage the world's water situation? She has a few ideas.
Here's another one.
Back in the late seventies, Robin Williams used to joke, "Whenever I want to spend a dollar on a bottle of water, I drink Perrier." People roared with laughter. I did, too. The thought of paying for water was absurd back then.
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How we got from one to 162 million websites on the internet.
PDQ
via Rocketboom
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Ten weirdest computers
Maybe not so weird in a few years or decades or so.
Although, I suspect that Glooper and Mouldy computers will remain weird for some time to come.
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ends
Japan's Underwater Pyramids
From National Geographic News:
Submerged stone structures lying just below the waters off Yonaguni Jima are actually the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis—an ancient city sunk by an earthquake about 2,000 years ago.
That's the belief of Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan who has been diving at the site to measure and map its formations for more than 15 years.
There's another article and video here.
I don't know. From some angles it looks like it could be artificial and from others, it looks like it could be natural.
Israel's Stalags
Taking their name from the Nazi prison camps in which they were set, Stalags were Israeli pornographic paperbacks featuring Nazi themes.
How do you make a movie about a disreputable and totally defunct literary genre? That question never quite gets answered by Ari Libsker's hour-long documentary "Stalags,"
I had no idea.
I did have reservations about posting this, but frankly, I found it too fascinating to pass. Human behavior is always so surprising, unique and varied.
via Gpod
Barack to the rescue or Obama-nation?
Do you think Obama is going to come through? Or, more to the point, do you think that the Military-Industrial-Petroleum complex is going to let him do anything? They'll throw him a few bones, but in January of 2009, there is going to be a closed door meeting where the new president will be summarily briefed on the facts of life.
That's assuming he gets elected. I don't think the Clinton machine has played all of its cards yet. I suspect that they are holding back on something until the right time. That's why Hillary is still in the race. Don't underestimate the Clintons. They're players.
If Obama is elected and doesn't come through with his promises, like every president in my lifetime, many will turn on him, real quick. I give it about two years before the euphoria turns to disillusion. Sad thing is, it probably won't be his fault. You live long enough, you start recognizing these patterns.
If you think I'm a cynic, you might be right, but I'll have you know that the only president since FDR whose approval rating was higher upon leaving office than entering was, funny enough, good ol' Slick Willy.
The Whirl
Visual thinking guru, Dave Gray provides a demonstration of visual language in relation to The Whirl, which is the dense cloud of noise, signal, data and information that swarms and bundles around us in a seemingly chaotic manner. Visual language can cut through this fog and cross lingual and cultural barriers as a sort of global auxiliary language, something we'll need as The Whirl intensifies. (The Whirl is so much more euphonious and comprehensive than terms like 'ubiquitous computing' or 'information overload.')
Images are the primal language. William S. Burroughs's 'Language is a Virus' thread explores the supplanting of the visual with the verbal.
And yet still, we are highly dependent on visual information. So much so, that we often equate our thinking with it. When have you ever heard of a scientific theory based on smell or taste? Studies of sensory data are always conducted with graphical outputs. You don't have an olfactor for your computer. When we communicate verbally that we understand, we often say, "I see." It was a big jump for many of us as kids to go from looking at the pictures to reading the text. We observe holidays and monitor the situation.
As visually oriented creatures, we'd be well served by developing a more methodical and informed skill set for communicating visually. We already do this in many ways. However, as a medium that is understood, mastered and universally adopted, visual language is still in its childhood. I look forward to seeing this kid grow up.
Blind Kid Uses Echolocation and Sound to See
I found this very uplifting. I've never seen a human use echolocation before. This is very encouraging for someone who is going to be blind some day.
You're never helpless unless you choose to be.
from Metacafe
via Dedroidify
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
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