- 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.
- I’ve been getting really into a remix project lately, and will likely come very close to finishing on my days off work this week. Seems like lately I keep having the same crisis: during instrumental breaks do I go batshit crazy with a guitar or with a turntable. Obviously this depends on the song, but it’s still hard to be clairvoyant and know which one will work better. So typically I will just record both and compare and contrast. First World Producer Problems.
- I think I’ve posted Ulises Farinas’ art here before, but it’s well worth a second mention:
The past three decades of wanton patent-granting have created a disastrous environment for innovation. Today it’s practically impossible to build anything without violating a patent of some kind—and risking a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for your troubles. Once intended to protect lone inventors, patents now form a kind of shadow tech industry, in which billions of dollars are spent on amassing huge portfolios. (A recent New York Times article noted that Apple and Google, companies that define themselves by innovation, now invest more in patent acquisition and defense than in research and development.)
Why are companies spending so much money on patents? First, as protection. “Patents are like bullets,” law professor Chien says. “They’re cheap to acquire but can cause a lot of damage.” But if you have your own bullets, would-be assassins are less likely to target you. That’s the thinking behind RPX (Rational Patent Exchange), whose clients include Google, Microsoft, and IBM. RPX amasses patents, it says, to keep them out of the hands of lawsuit-happy competitors, and it vows not to sue anyone over them.
- I’m a massive proponent for not going to war with Iran. The problem with my viewpoint is we kinda already are at war with Iran. It’s just a sophisticated war, a secret war.
The dramatic spike in suspected Iranian cyber attacks this year also has some in the U.S. distinctly worried. While direct denial of service attacks on U.S. banks – widely seen as retaliation for US sanctions and attempts to freeze Iran from the international financial system – were seen relatively simplistic, attacks on US allies in the Gulf were more complex.
The most worrying, experts say, were those on Saudi oil firm Aramco and Qatari gas export facilities. Last month, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta described the Saudi attack as the most sophisticated yet launched on a private company, effectively destroying tens of thousands of computers – although he stopped short of blaming Tehran directly.
I think I would need to listen to the album again in its entirety — which is a quite a job — to really say how much I like or dislike like it. So I’m categorizing this under the “upon first listen” thoughts. Which can, and do, change. I’ve been up to date with Neil Young’s modern material since 2003′s “Greendale”, having listened to all his albums since then. And I like most of them. Fork In The Road was probably the weakest of the batch, followed by the ground shaking Le Noise (which, in a strange bit of artistic freedom, featured little to no percussion). So new Neil Young, or old for that matter, is nothing new to me. Hearing him with Crazy Horse in the world of cellphones and private space companies, however, is. Turns out Americana was just rehearsal for the big dance. They’re really bringing out the big (epic, long, operatic, etc) guns for this album. And that world of cell phones and nano-tech is not something Mr. Young wants to be a part of; he sings on the 30 minute opener, “When you hear my song now, you only get 5 percent, you used to get it all… I’m driftin’ back”. The instrumentation is a little nostalgic too, with the band hearkening back to their 70′s days of drawn-out freeform jams, mic’ed 30-watt amps, and that vinyl, analog sound. It feels good on the ears (even if it feels a little strange when just a few years ago Young made an album about retro-fitting his classic car(s) with enough modern tech to free them from gasoline), and it’s sometimes nice to hear the legends crave the old days.
- Then you’ve got Kendrick Lamar’s debut full-length which deserves most of the credit it’s getting.
This is probably the strongest Rap debut we’ve had in some time. I use the term “Rap” deliberately. The production is rock solid, rarely missing the mark. And the slate of producers, besides perhaps Just Blaze, are a little bit off-kilter compared to the sometimes predictable melody makers of 21st Century mainstream Hip-Hop. I always like Pharrell’s beats, and I almost wish he’d do an entire album for a guy like Kendrick. And what of Kendrick himself? He lives up to the hype. Well, most of it. A lot of the these lines are really thought provoking, more than what Top 40 Rap was giving us in the hey-day of materialism Rap, when the illustrious 50 Cent album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” was the big anticipated album of the moment. Those days are gone, thank God. And Kendrick Lamar, along with a whole slew of new-ish rappers, are taking mainstream Rap into the 21st Century (finally) with equal parts style and substance. It’s nice to see. What this album is not, is “Illmatic”. This is not an “instant classic”. It might become a classic one day, but it’s not instant. In fact, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City might suffer a little bit from Dark Knight syndrome: levels of anticipation so off the charts there’s absolutely no way it can live up them. Which is too bad. This album isn’t breaking down any walls, it’s not shattering the paradigm Rap music exists in as it stands, but it is solid. And it’s the best mainstream Rap has been (w/ a few notable exceptions) in quite some time.
- A few thoughts about the sexual harassment of the woman who dressed as Black Cat at NYCC. Her name is Mandy. She’s a 22 year old freelance designer (here’s her Etsy page) and more who lives in NYC. Reading about her experience at NYCC, from her own blog, is just a disgusting feeling. Especially as a man. To think that a large group of men didn’t think twice about the way they were behaving — or worse, some did but were too big of pussies to say anything about it — is just inexcusable. This isn’t 1952 anymore, and you can’t go around saying these types of things and behaving this type of way. Obviously. That being said, the comics community (fans and creators alike) are missing a massive opportunity to fix, or at least talk about, something that’s been plaguing mainstream books for sometime now: sexism. Mainstream comic books, mostly superhero ones, not only condone sexism, they thrive off it. Don’t believe me? Did you know THIS book exists? Go ahead and Google image search some pages. Not only in the pages but on the covers too, you will find poses that would make Sasha Grey blush. It’s really bad, and has gotten more and more out of hand the past 5 years or so. So I guess I wasn’t surprised when a bunch of adult-adolescents harassed this woman. Not one bit. They probably all read that things like Gotham City Sirens! And Black Cat is one of the characters who gets taken advantage of the most by artists. And I don’t mean making her “sexy”, there is a difference between sexy and gratuitous (go out to a bar on Halloween this year and you’ll know what I mean). Now, of course no one deserves to be sexually harassed when they dress up like Black Cat, or Emma Frost, or fucking Linda Lovelace. But what does it mean when women are dressing as Slave Leia? What kind of subconscious themes are at work amongst those seeing these beautiful women at Cons? Are we just simply feeding the machine to continue to keep female characters down? Will they ever rise from the box they’ve been put in?
- I’m realizing that there is a fundamental flaw with democracy: to get elected you need votes, to get votes you need to appease people now, to appease people now you need to focus on what ails society now. It’s instant gratification on a very large, sociopolitical scale. And right now more than ever before, we need to look at problems in the long term because what we face has plagued us since we’ve been the modern version of ourselves. Of course, no one’s gonna win with a platform of “We’ll be in a lot better shape by 2060!”.
- The Iron Man 3 trailer is up:
- I’m going as Walt from Breaking Bad for Halloween. Here’s a cool piece of Walter White fan art:
- Information Is Beautiful is an excellent website, if you’ve never heard of it. They pledge to give readers “ideas, issues, knowledge, and date – visualized”. And they do. They compiled a comprehensive list of Logical Fallacies recently and it’s something everyone should look at to be sure you’re not using any of these in your daily conversations, writing, or thoughts. Here’s an example, but they have so many more (such as appeals to the mind and appeals to emotion):
CUM HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC – Claiming two events that occur together must have a cause-and-effect relationship (correlation = cause). “Teenagers in gangs listen to rap music with violent themes. Therefor, rap music inspires violence in teenagers.“
Or, “… Therefor, all rap music has violent themes.“ This fallacy falls under the sub-genre “Garbled Cause & Effect”.
Neither. Messy, unexpected, and increasingly complex.
In the past few years, we’ve explored a range of possible futures, from the dystopian business model of ARK-Inc to the hopeful, humane crowdsourced futures of the Power of 8.
Positioned as a radical and alternative investment company, ARK-Inc by Jon Ardern was a superfiction, envisaging products and services for a post-crash civilisation. ARK-Inc’s stable of products included a short-wave radio that, in event of a disaster, enabled encrypted transmission and two-way communication between other ARK members, a series of books that help mediate one’s response to disaster, and disaster tourism services that helped users adjust to the idea of a looming collapse.”
“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. “
I’m not concerned about the Penn State University implications of the firing of Joe Paterno, nor the college football ones. There’s more to life than football, than sports. I really couldn’t give a shit (that isn’t to say I’m not concerned about the children in this story). What I do find interesting is the cultural implications of the story; they go much deeper than the walls of the University, into the fabric of our sociological history, a representation of what is to come in this society and beyond.
Paterno — those glasses, that haircut, the vest — has been a staple of the program for nearly half a century. He was born in 1926; Al Capone was at the center of violent turf wars in Chicago, and the Transportation Department conceived and built US Route 66, a stretch of highway connecting the Windy City to burgeoning Los Angeles. He took over the head coaching gig of Penn State 40 years later, 1966; when a gallon of gasoline cost 32 cents, the Vietnam War escalates out of control, and the Supreme Court ushers in the concept of Miranda Rights.
That year — 1966 — is ironic in a lot of ways. It was around that time when we started down the many, many paths that have led us to today. What is today? Today we are in flux. We have arrived at some sort of crossroads in the sociological timeline of our culture where everything is being questioned, nothing is certain, and no one knows what to do next. We are beginning — in my opinion — the Great Transition of modern society. It may be painful, it may be challenging, but it is inevitable.
The iconic image of Coach Joe Paterno patrolling the sidelines is a legacy of the previous Age. It is the past. In a time now, where everything we think we know hasn’t panned out the way we thought it would, these allegations of a cover-up involving such an iconic figure of 20th Century culture carry quite a bit of metaphorical weight. He (as Denny Green put it) wasn’t who we thought he was. At least for a brief moment in time. Maybe we aren’t who we thought we were.
Paterno going down isn’t new. There was Gaddafi, Micheal Jackson, the Arab Spring, Lehman Brothers… I could go on and on. Is this some form of cultural Darwinism we’re seeing? No… because this isn’t necessarily survival of the fittest. Hmm. Or perhaps more of a cultural purging fire? Yes. Maybe the downfall of the icons of the 20th Century is the world’s way of tearing down what we knew of as modern cultural society to make way for the next stage in our history? A sort-of cultural forest fire. Tyler Durden once said:
“You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs.”
Either way, with the state of the world right now (and the United States in particular) this whole Paterno story — and the response — has been very fitting to the bigger picture. Maybe it’s not even so much that we’re supposed to turn the page on the 20th Century, or write a new chapter… maybe we’re supposed to sit down at the typewriter and start a whole new book.
I was watching television the other day — at work — and realized the future is nigh. Or at least around the corner. Some media outlets have mentioned it (from The Colbert Report to Wired): the all-too human-esque computer/robot plowing through the competition on Jeopardy. It was a sad sight, really, glancing up to see the wide-shot of contestant’s row (is that a game show-wide term, or only The Price Is Right?)… the embattled, mere human opponents hovering around 3 or 4 grand while the Machine surpasses 35.
“Watson”, they call it. Artificial Intelligence of the most superior kind we’ve seen developed, and still being perfected, by IBM. It was designed to “answer questions [from simple to complex] posed in natural language”. ”Natural Language” meaning: off-the-cuff, regular way of speech — in whatever language — of human beings, not some stiff phrases preconceived to suit the Machine’s robotic A.I. Like all other previous forms of A.I., Watson’s “brain” (what a scary term that is in this context) is well rounded, cunning, and efficient; unlike its forefathers before it, however, Watson possesses something of a personality (albeit a robotic one). It’s voice isn’t the dial-up voice we heard in Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”, it’s smooth and natural. It has it’s own way of putting words together, unlike the now ancient “Deep Blue”. It weighs options carefully, sometimes choosing to not answer at all if it’s so unsure of itself. Scary, scary stuff.
I’m not talking some Terminator scenario, where IBM is commissioned by the U.S. government to make a militaristic version of Watson, who then uses free thought to rebel, creating SkyNet and drops The Bomb on L.A. No, this is a more subtle version of scary. How long until Watson, or others like it, is developed and manufactured so efficiently that it’s (I’m using every fiber to not write “he’s”) affordable in every middle-income home across the country? The world? Could the notion be that far off? 10, 20 years? Then what? You’re drinking beers with your buddies and to solve those pesky pop culture arguments, only to ask the resident everything expert; he… sorry, IT answers and soon everyone’s giving him pounds and becoming better friends with it than anyone else. Or you’re at home while your husband/wife is at work. You’re jobless and the kids are in school/daycare. No one listens to you except your Watson… who not only listens, but answers honestly and truthfully anything you ask, and carries on with you the most interesting conversations you’ve had since graduate school. So you become attached a little; not anything crazy, just a small amount of attachment.
Artificial Intelligence with budding personality and a limitless wealth of knowledge? Sounds scary to me.
The boy – young man perhaps – lived in a sub-village of Qakilik, western China. He used to spend his summers in the deepest parts of Lop Lake, imagining a time when it was full of water.
White cranes swoop down, skimming the surface with tailed wingtips, releasing crystallized droplets into the hot air. The mist spreads outwards until his face becomes awash with it. An orange fish swims to the surface. It says, “this is no longer my country”, in his dead Grandfather’s voice.
The Kunlun range sways to the South. When he turned 13, he spent 9 days and nights in a tiny cave atop Ulugh Muztagh. His family’s ancient religion, nearly extinct by the time he was born, only deemed followers official members once the isolation cycle was complete. The prehistoric founders of the tribe – the Muztagh – excavated the cave themselves. The walls are covered with petroglyph’s detailing the consumption of the Muztagh culture millions of years before it happened. They were slaughtered not unlike the Neanderthals. Few survived. He was one of the few remaining descendants. Thinking back to the cold dampness of that cave, creatures squirming in the darkness, he felt shame. Not of that experience… of the now.
In the middle of the night he snuck out of his folks’ modest home. The wind gracefully rushed between the neighboring houses at his back as he checked his watch. The night sky sparkled with points of light, majority man-made and moving. He made his way to the Qakilik courtyard, where SmartSoft had installed the town’s only ultra high speed T-17 terminal for public use some years ago. A simple 3rd generation cable connection had been installed in the majority of the homes; “Not fast enough, I’m afraid”. Each connection trickled into the Earth to the main line which ran through western China like an electronic version of the Great Wall. The PRC government kept it very close to the chest; the expansion of Internet to the badlands of the State proved financially valuable but culturally volatile.
- If there’s a photo that comes somewhere close to representing all that is wrong with American culture, symbology (sorry, Robert Langdon), and “corporate imperialism” (yep, I’m gonna go with that), it might be THIS picture of Dallas Cowboys QB Jon Kitna. The famous “Cowboy’s Star”, Pepsi, and Christ. To the latter: help us.
- Speaking of our Lord and Savior, I’m reading a book about his childhood pal (well… him too) recommended by a friend of mine. It’s called LAMB: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Within the first 50 pages, hilarious author Christopher Moore takes on “miracles” like raising the dead and Christ’s face on toast. Moore’s writing has been dubbed “absurdist” by the Wiki-esque masses, but I tend to think of it more as realism, very very ballsy realism.
- The other book I bought which I haven’t started yet is called The Stories of IBISby Japanese writer Hiroshi Yamamoto. Excited to start this novel. “A human wanderer and writer meets an angelic android named “Ibis” who tells him seven different stories of human/machine interaction which work together to reveal to the reader the secret behind the cultural fall of humanity.” Yeesh.
