Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can’t rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Hey. I’m supposed to be the optimist in this relationship. [...]
Tag Archives: post-planetary
student loans cliques
Starting next year, alumni of universities like Yale, Berkeley and Virginia Tech will be able to pool their money and lend it to students at those schools. And in return, pocket a share of the interest. Very interesting. It’s an effort to disrupt the established patterns of student loan debt, [...]
massively coordinated disaster response
Spiders flee Australian flood. You must see these photos. 1) massively coordinated and brilliant response to the spider’s end-of-the-world scenario 2) we have no idea how things will splatter when sh*t hits the fan. the earth will devour us when things go haywire
Tunneling time, magnetism, and greater data storage
Using a light source that creates X-ray pulses only one quadrillionth of a second in duration, the Boulder team was able to observe how magnetism in nickel and iron atoms works, and they found that each metal behaves differently. One quadrillionth of a second is a million times faster than [...]
Bees Knees
I am fascinated by the notion of the wisdom of crowds. The evidence and potential of a new intelligence that emerges from a group that is diverse and well networked is enthralling. A lot of people have talked about this topic, but maybe no one who described as well as [...]
Crowdsource an Overthrow
A new film sets up the idea that we can crowdsource international justice. It’s inspiring and scary and everything in between. Watch the first 5 minutes. KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise [...]
Past Predictions, Future Drones, Present Fears
Pressure builds for civilian drone flights at home Civilian cousins of the unmanned military aircraft that have tracked and killed terrorists in the Middle East and Asia are in demand by police departments, border patrols, power companies, news organizations and others wanting a bird’s-eye view that’s too impractical or dangerous [...]
Nostalgia for the Light
From Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light All of our life experiences including this conversation, happened in the past. Even if it is a matter of millionths of a second. The camera I am looking at now is a few meters away and is therefore already several millionths of a second in [...]
disruptive tech – p2p social network
Wired reported yesterday about the global square, a p2p social network backed by wikileaks for Occupy. I’m most curious about the paradigm of a social network built on open source peer-to-peer. Has this been tried before? The tech could “help establish more distributed social networks, … and perhaps even add [...]
you could never design a bicycle theoretically
“You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after [...]
synthetic serendipity
“You, each of you, have some special wild cards. Play with them. Find out what makes you different and better. Because it is there, if only you can find it. And once you do, you’ll be able to contribute answers to others and others will be willing to contribute back [...]
Institute for Applied Autonomy
The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists. http://www.appliedautonomy.com/ [...]
Butler Bodies in Alliance
In Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, Judith Butler seems to argue that in politics we cannot take the public space for granted, in theory or practice. She also seems to argue that there is a continuity between our bodies, our action, the space that we act in [...]
Manovich, surveillance, and tagging tag taggers
Working as a web developer with public interest organizations and campaigns, I’ve been frustrated in recent years at how domesticated, as Manovich describes it, our online work has become in the electronic suburb. I think Manovich is a little dramatic with his description, but in advocacy and activist work, making [...]
solar powered clothesline
Bill McKibben wonderful and hilarious response to Thomas Friedman Friedman can’t easily deal with such analyses precisely because of the tenets of the conventional wisdom, American style, which is that fundamental change in direction is essentially impossible. The world is a growth machine and “nobody can turn it off.” Everyone [...]
New social network connects people by gut flora
The idea is to connect people with similar intestinal bacteria so that they can share their diets and personal anecdotes, helping both the participants and the researchers to better understand which types of gut flora react positively or negatively to which types of foods. Read more: cnet.com
CENS – Center for Embedded Networked Sensing
Embedded Networked Sensing Systems promise to reveal previously unobservable phenomena widely impacting society by connecting the physical world to the Internet. UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) is a major research enterprise focused on developing wireless sensing systems and applying this revolutionary technology to critical scientific and societal pursuits. [...]