“Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia’s Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual ‘curtains’ of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes.
It is thought that the periodic inundations of the Nullarbor caves by the sea occurred a number of times in the geological past and so researchers suggest that the Weebubbie Thaumarchaeota may have a marine origin.
“It just goes to show that life in the dark recesses of the planet comes in many strange forms, many of which are still unknown,” says Professor Paulsen.”
That last quote feels a little… just a little, Lovecraftian if you ask me.
“It flies over Waziristan, then to New York City and finally to the UK, asking itself philosophical questions and gradually gaining more self-awareness. However, the Freestone Drone is fated to die by getting tangled up in a washing line — the same washing line that American drone commanders use as a sign of activity inside the homes of suspects. Along the way he also gatecrashes a wedding in Paris, and even travels through time, as part of the piece’s exploration of the changing nature of warfare.”
“Were you conflicted about writing about your friend Harris’s death, about using that as a subject?
No. I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me. There was no way I was not going to write about Harris’s death. It’s like when you’re at a cocktail party and you meet someone you know you’re going to sleep with. You might as well get it over with and sleep with them. I’m talking about my former, younger life now. But. There is no point in pretending. I no longer try to avoid the inevitability of what comes to me, writing-wise.That said, there are a lot of factoids that I opted not to include in the book. This is not a book about everything I know about Harris. There are a lot of things about myself I chose not to include. I have written two memoirs but that doesn’t mean that I want to share everything. It’s hard to make it sound as if that argument holds any water at all. I don’t have a personal Facebook page. I don’t want to divulge what I don’t want to divulge.”
“A privately-owned unmanned US space capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, bringing to the space outpost food, scientific materials and other crucial equipment.
The capsule named Dragon was captured—with the help of a robotic arm – by NASA Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn, 5:31 am EST (1031 GMT), when the ISS was over northern Ukraine, US space officials said. The craft, owned by SpaceX corporation, will now be inspected via cameras, brought to the Earth-facing port of the ISS’s Harmony module and bolted into place by commands from mission control.“
- I have a shitload of comics to read. I AM EXCITE. I’ll have reviews up here this week. Also I hate how nobody gave a fuck about Morrison’s Batman for the past year until a major character got whacked, and now advanced orders for the next issue are selling out.
“Present Shock is a big concept with profound implications for culture, politics and business. A simple visualization (borrowed from Adrian Bejan’s theories of flow systems) is to think of time as a river flowing at a certain pace. Below a certain threshold, the movements of things on the river are fairly linear and predictable. You launch a barge in the river here and three days later you have drifted to there. This is historical progress as we have come to know it over the millennia But when the speed of the flow increases beyond that threshold, the river becomes turbulent, non-linear, unpredictable. Such is the state of time in 2012.
What does this mean? Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere.”
- In 1926 William Douglas Burden, of the American Museum of Natural History, set out with a hunter, a herpetologist, a cameraman, and his wife to capture giant dragons they’d only heard about. Turned out they were actually Komodo dragons. No one had seen them in the Western world though, they were only a legend. Besides bringing back footage to New York, the group also brought back several Komodo’s, some dead… some living. This was the inspiration for King Kong.
- OK, What Should We Make of Benghazi? by Thomas E. Ricks. Ricks is a pretty brilliant Foreign Policy journalist, he knows his stuff. This article is filled with close calls, including one from an ambassadors mouth in 2011 Syria. Here’s a standout paragraph:
Surprisingly few of Crocker’s PRTs were killed in Iraq, primarily due to the robust US military presence there. But that is seldom the case in most unstable areas where US engagement is essential. From 1968 to 1979, a US Ambassador was killed in office on the average of one every two years, so its is not just about “our times.”
A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.
It’s an exhibition that shows artists cleaving a new space for artwork, that’s less about pure concept, aesthetic or object, and more to do with pragmatism, education and storytelling. Many of the works are interactive, and feel like they’re caught somewhere between the White Cube and the Science Museum. The art snob in me was harrumphing from time to time; could this really be called art? Is art that invites play not ’serious’? Or is it the art market that demands art be static and handed down from an elevated plain of vision and skill? There’s no doubt that singular, non-interactive art objects will continue to be made (and coveted), but the data art world is a refreshingly open-minded, often big-hearted new sideshow in the art world.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the entire focus of the atomic program was to create the weapon to end any war, even one as all-consuming as World War II. After the war, the makers of the bomb saw its power, and their own uneasy public, and tried to think of ways to both soothe the American people, and put the bombs to good use. Some of their minds drifted to the Bible verse in Isiah 2:4, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
What is certain is that some sort of impact from another body freed material from the young Earth and the resulting debris coalesced into today’s Moon. But the exact details of the impactor’s size and speed have remained debatable. In a report online to be published in Icarus, researchers suggest that the crash happened with a much larger, faster body than previously thought. Such theories need to line up with what we know about the Moon, about the violent processes that set off the creation of moons, and what computer simulations show about the more sedate gravitational “gathering-up” that finishes the job.
There seemed to be a twofold acknowledgement amongst the speakers.
Firstly, it was recognised that today ‘books’ are competing for attention in a flattened entertainment market, in which competition arises from literally any digital media available via the Internet, not just other book titles or genre rivals.
Secondly, it was recognised that to thrive in this flattened market, in which competition is multiplied and therefore ferocious, book publishers must think less about the specific format and dogmas of the ‘book’ as an object of tradition, and think more about the intrinsic qualities that separate book reading from other leisure pursuits.
“The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. It’s been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is. There are ways to make that stark, lava-covered ground artistically fertile and productive. Lush, humanistic, exotic crops will grow from that smoking, ashy techno-rubble of ours, someday. I live to think so. I’m all for that prospect. It’s exhilarating to see such things attempted, especially in a small auditorium before the straights catch on.
What’s more, I rather like the trend-line there. I’ve seen some attempts along this line before, but this one has muscle. The New Aesthetic is moving out of its original discovery phase, and into a evangelical, podium-pounding phase. If a pioneer village of visionary creatives is founded, and they start exporting some startling, newfangled imagery, like a Marcel Duchamp-style explosion-in-a-shingle-factory… Well, we’ll once again be living in heroic times!”
“3D printed objects, or “physibles” are an incredible example of the mundane aspects of future-weird. They are glitchy-as-fuck, but their shapeshifting effect on our cultural space will inhabit the same metaphysics of street graffiti— appreciated by only a few, truly understood by even less.
A physible is simple. Download a file with information about the shape of an object, or component parts of an object. Use a 3D printing machine that squirts molten plastic, metal or other material to pour you that object, without needing a mold. Or, send the file to a company who will do that for you. These machines simplify the process of fabbing an object, by using a single machine to create parts of nearly anything. Previously, specific injection molds had to be created for each piece, or a welder had to attach pieces by reading a diagram. Now the machine can build the entire piece in one run, with basically zero set-up investment. The investment to produce a single object is nearly nothing— all it takes is the design, and one of these universal printing machines.”
“Nestled amid the sagebrush along the California side of the U.S./Mexico border is a small DIY drone airfield. Makeshift and unkempt, devoid of pavement and infrastructure, it is unremarkable in the absence of the gathered assemblies of amateur pilots, planes, and spectators for which it is intended. One might well overlook it, yet perhaps in some way it serves as a model of sorts, a harbinger of airports to come: a preview of what drone airfields might look like, writ large, in their absence of traditional control platforms and optical infrastructures. Much like this one, the unmanned airport would contain no centralized control tower presiding over the runway and no lighting tracks reflecting its contours. There is no need for a commanding view from above. “
- We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction. Stephen Hawking wrote about this a little bit last year; how we’ve only had the ability to completely destroy the world for about half a century and it’s already almost happened at least once (that we know of).
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.
- How To Make Ethical Robots. Somebody should’ve sent this to the company that created Ash in the Alien universe. Not to mention HAL from 2001 and a whole slew of other androids.
The big question, according to the researchers, is how we can ensure that future robotic technology preserves our humanity and our societies’ values. They explain that, while there is no simple answer, a few techniques could be useful for enforcing ethical behavior in robots.
One method involves an “ethical governor,” a name inspired by the mechanical governor for the steam engine, which ensured that the powerful engines behaved safely and within predefined bounds of performance. Similarly, an ethical governor would ensure that robot behavior would stay within predefined ethical bounds. For example, for autonomous military robots, these bounds would include principles derived from the Geneva Conventions and other rules of engagement that humans use. Civilian robots would have different sets of bounds specific to their purposes.
Apple’s clout is coming under scrutiny as the U.S. Justice Department considers filing a lawsuit against the company and five U.S. publishers on allegations they orchestrated a price-fixing scheme on electronic books.
The involved parties are trying to avoid a high-profile court battle by negotiating a settlement, according to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper broke the news last week about the government’s plans to allege that Apple Inc. and the publishers tried to thwart e-book discounts offered by Amazon.com Inc. and drive up prices since the 2010 release of the iPad.
“I think this might be a bit of a wake-up call for Apple,” says Ted Henneberry, an antitrust attorney for the Orrick law firm in Washington.
The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology. “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.
“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”
- Since the announcement that the White Stripes were no longer going to be a band, Jack White has been busy. He’s been involved with a litany of side-projects (most of which are good) producing, writing, drumming, and playing guitar and singing. Now, he’s announcing his debut solo album on his own Third Man Records. I would assume he’ll be doing damn near everything on it, he’s an excellent drummer at least.
“Jack White has launched his solo career, announcing he will release his debut LP in April. Recorded over the last few months, Blunderbuss is “an album I couldn’t have released until now”, he said, revealing the first single on his new website.
“I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time,” White told Radio 1′s Zane Lowe on Monday night. “I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’” The release comes almost a year after the White Stripessplit. The singer and guitarist has hardly been twiddling his thumbs: he continues to play with two other bands, the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs, and is one of rock’n'roll’s most sought-after producers and songwriters. But his solo album was an accident, he told Lowe.”
- Should Art Be Austere In A Recession?It’s an interesting question, and one that Guardian writer Jonathan Jones tackles sure-handedly. His answer is no.
In art, thinking about luxury is not the same as grasping it. Art can imagine everything from a feast to a fast – and yet it is always an idea, an image. This is not confined to artists: it is an aspect of how people think about food and fashion – we don’t necessarily leap from thought to action. Fashion fans do not all have the money to purchase everything or anything they see in a magazine, any more than an art lover has to have the clothes they see on a fabulously dressed person in a portrait. Fantasy is part of looking and thinking.
Leave it to clergymen to blame society’s ills on images of the unattainable. Imagining luxury is as human as imagining want. The real ugliness of the age of austerity would be to limit innocent pleasures, to force misery on the modern mind. It’s bad economics (someone has to buy some stuff if the economy is to grow), and it’s hopeless human psychology. You can’t impose austerity on the imagination.
The corporate society has been an enduring wellspring of stories over the last century. Inspired by the factory production line, Aldous Huxley predicted a future where humans were born and bred only to fulfil a corporate function in Brave New World. The cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Neuromancer charted a future where government had collapsed entirely, and society was ruled by a few super-powerful corporations.
In the midst of a global economic crisis that has shed light on the darker workings of the capitalist system, these days corporate society seems less like SF fantasy and more like a living reality. Whether it’s the revelation of the “super-cluster” of 147 companies who have grasped control of 40% of the world’s entire wealth, or the barely-reported $16tn loans made by the US Federal Reserve to banks and business soon after the 2008 financial crash, multinational corporations seem to wield incredible and unaccountable power over our democratic society.
Klosterman evaluates that puzzling phenomena where a good, not great, band shoots up the “indie” ladder to become one of the most talked about bands of the year. This time it’s Tune Yards (or however the hell you spell that shit; seriously… just write your name normally!!):
“When (and if) you listen to w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs, you are listening to two things: a record that’s very good, and/or a record that will someday seem way worse than it actually is. And logic suggests the latter is more likely than the former, even though that’s no reflection on the value of the artist.
I am rooting for you, Merrill Garbus. I like your record, and I hope you make many more. I want you to be a genius, and I have no reason to believe that won’t happen. But maybe don’t sell the puppets, because maybe you are doomed.”
“Robert Hooke discovered the cell, established experimentation as crucial to scientific research, and did pioneering work in optics, gravitation, paleontology, architecture, and more. Yet history dismissed and forgot him… all because he pissed off Isaac Newton, probably the most revered scientist who ever lived.
This seventeenth century polymath, who has been called the English answer to Leonardo da Vinci, almost disappeared from history entirely after his death in 1703, as even the only known painting of him was unceremoniously destroyed. It took over two centuries for his reputation to recover and his myriad of accomplishments to be properly celebrated. He’s a cautionary tale for just how dangerous it can be to find yourself on the wrong side of history.”
“It may seem like common sense that you need to get your ideas out of your head to act on them, but how many of us walk around with an always-updating to-do list in our heads only to forget one of them later? One of the basic principles of GTD and many other productivity systems is that your first step is to get your ideas and to-dos out of your head and on paper or into some system as soon as possible so you have the clarity to actually work on them. “
Here’s an awesome video of Kristoff Krane playing in a record store for some people in San Diego. He’s a wonderful performer, apparently even when there’s only like 10 people watching:
With 150 million registered users, about 50 million hits daily and endorsements from music superstars, Megaupload.com was among the world’s biggest file-sharing sites. Big enough, according to a U.S. indictment, that it earned founder Kim Dotcom $42 million last year alone.
The movie industry howled that the site was making money off pirated material. Though the company is based in Hong Kong and Dotcom was living in New Zealand, some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Virginia, and that was enough for U.S. prosecutors to act.
The site was shut down Thursday, and Dotcom and three Megaupload employees were arrested in New Zealand on U.S. accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue.
Megaupload is how I get lots of stuff I can’t find anywhere else. I just got a bunch of acapellas from that site recently, to work on a remix album. And there’s this band I like that encourages fans to record their shows. Well… lots of these tapers upload their results to Megaupload. Or did. I’m not talking torrenting here. This content is, in some degrees, user generated: DIY acapellas/self-recorded concerts. Oh well, there’s always Rapidshare I suppose.
“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the Protect IP Act,” Reid said in a statement two days after Wikipedia and Google led a wave of online protest against the legislation.
“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved,” Reid said.
“We made good progress through the discussions we’ve held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks,” he said.
US congressional support for the legislation — the Protect IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives — has been eroding in the face of the online protests which branded the bills a danger to Internet freedom.
Holy shit… did Congress just listen to people?? People who’s lives would be directly affected as a result of their actions? Holy shit.
