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“Behold the astronaut, fully equipped for duty: a scaly creature, more like an oversized ant than a primate — certainly not a naked god.  To survive on the moon he must be encased in an even more heavily insulated garment, and become a kind of faceless ambulatory mummy.  While he is hurtling through space the astronaut’s physical existence is purely a function of mass and motion, narrowed down to the pinpoint of acute sentient intelligence demanded by the necessity for coordinating his reactions with the mechanical and electronic apparatus upon which his survival depends.  Here is the archetypal proto-model of Post-Historic Man, whose existence from birth to death would be conditioned by the megamachine, and made to conform, as in a space capsule, to the minimal functional requirements by an equally minimal environment– all under remote control.”

Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine, The Pentagon of Power, 1970

The modern day shaman — the serial start-up entrepreneur — carries around a fascinating collection of baubles and tools. The old school shrunken heads, shark’s teeth, eagle feathers, ointments and herbs are certainly no more fetishistic than today’s gadgets, cables, and protective sleeves.

This fascinating anthropology study belongs to Joi Ito, which I stumbled across by reading up about HTML5 on Hixie’s blog.
go to flickr page

**note, isn’t it kind of cool that we can emulate all the embedded objects related to the photo and then iframe them in Wordpress…!

How is it that my brother, Po, marooned out in the wilds of the high desert at Canyon Blanco is first one to tell me about the synthetic brain news?    Here I am, wired up to the ears with wireless routers zapping me and servers buzzing underfoot…only a beer cap toss from a major data center…and as far as I knew I had a unique and unreplaceable hunk of gray matter floating in my skull.   Sure it’s a little frayed around the edges, has its foibles, is a beast when it comes to  cold starts on a winter morning, but still–after all it’s been through–it seemed a right decent old brain, as far as I was concerned.  But now we know that these dweebs over at Blue Brain Project have already concocted a rat’s brain, and are madly tuning their skills to create a human brain within ten years.  **BBC Story**

Is it just me, or does that seem like it might not work out according to plan?

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It is hard for me to imagine, but I am more than forty years old, indeed very close to fifty years!   I know, dear reader, you will be startled to hear such a thing, since all you encounter on my blog are absurdities, and many seemingly juvenile links to old comic books and science fiction artists.   But there is reason encoded behind the screen of disconnected trivia that you find here.   In fact, I am arranging these posts into a secret code; nor would it especially please me to know that you have figured it out…the news is not pretty! These are clues, do with them what you will.   But mind you, time and decades are flashing past like lightning!   Like a cinder snapping out of a burning log in the fireplace, ride this moment like a rocket…

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Reading the MOMA Book on Rodchenko, I was struck by Rodchenko’s diary entry about the early aviator Aleksandr Vasiliev.  What must a barnstorming demonstration have been like at Kazan in the year 1912?   At a time when the world was being transformed by new technology, here was a living vision of speed, of man’s ascent to the skies, of futurism come knocking at the skulls of old consciousness, and the dawning of a new age of man.    According to Rodchenko, on Sunday, June 3rd, 1912:

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From a series of socially provocative cartoons by Tom Gauld, it was really hard to choose one to represent the lot.  They remind me vaguely of Ron Cobb (who was incidentally the author of the very first poltical cartoon book that I bought, Raw Sewage), except that Gauld’s cartoons  have a more distant, metaphorical humor.   I found the image above,  “evolution of the poetry receptacle,” to be irresistable.   With a few simple lines, Gauld has captured our trajectory perfectly:  tablet > scroll > bound volume > chapbook > laptop > potato viewer > potato mutant > wireframe.   Presumably when we get beyond the wireframe of the poem, we can just zap consciousness around by telepathy… either that or we will be eating termites out of dust-heaps, or both probably.

Attending Antonio Di Mambro’s lecture last night at Boston Public Library, it was amazing to see the giant crowd that packed Rabb Lecture Hall.  Who would have thought that an urban planning talk — stoked with dire warnings and gloomy facts — would bring out such a vibrant cross-section of the city?  It is almost as if, after thirty years of vapid hand-wringing and self-gratifying acts of “green” living, the mass of architects, planners, designers, and technocrats are beginning to realize that if they do not actually change the way America is built starting immediately, that our cities are literally going to fall apart.   Cities can only take so much pillaging by the greed heads, then they go belly up.

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I was talking with my friend Don about this cool book I am reading about the rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons — Strange Angel — when the conversation somehow changed tracks to Leon Theremin, the enigmatic Soviet inventor.   This conversation prompted me to check out the recent biography by Albert Glinsky, Theremin: ETHER MUSIC AND ESPIONAGE, with an introduction by the late great Robert Moog… yes, that Bob Moog!  In his introduction, Moog mentioned that he wrote an article for Electronics World in 1960 that detailed his early work selling theremin kits by mail order.  Hmm, I thought…wonder what became of that article?  Turns out that someone scanned it for a website, which later vanished, but miraculously it was archived by the Wayback Machine!   Mr. Peabody and Simon, I know you’re out there watching out for us miserable earthlings, and I have to thank you, sincerely. Hope you will enjoy the scanned images of the article, which appeared in the January 1961 issue of Electronics World:
page 1 (288k jpg)
page 2 (472k jpg)
page 3 (400k jpg)
page 4 (342k jpg)
page 5 (135k jpg)

Now we can build our own authentic 1960-style theremins and aspire to the magnificent soundtrack of the original The Day The Earth Stood Still.

If you are interested in other kits, check out the amazing kit details by Art Harrison,  Theremin Enthusiasts Club, and the geeks at Theremin World.  If you are into the latest theremin music, check out Thereminvox.

Although it is exciting to think about water and soil on Mars, and new horizons for human exploration of space, still we should bring our heads back out of the clouds and face facts: human civilization is a bloody mess! While people in the so-called “advanced” economies continue to suck energy likes pigs at the trough, and while “developing” nations such as China and India are racing to catch up like wild-eyed racecar drivers hyped up on dexadrine, untold billions of people are left starving at the margins… We are at the point of no return, and yet our so-called “leaders” can think of nothing better to do than rape, loot, and pillage whatever they can get their hands on. What is a thinking man or woman to do?

The only thing I can suggest is to ratchet down your own energy footprint, ride a bike, eat locally grown foods, and focus on two key tactics: creating pesticide free & bee friendly habitats, and implementing appropriate technology.

If the human race does nothing but blindly spin its wheels, we will very be soon left with no option but to become scavengers when the unsustainable mess comes tumbling down. Koyanisqaatsi, my friends.

These thoughts occurred to me when I saw an article on rocket stoves. These make a great deal of sense, because they can burn the smallest scraps of fuel and turn them into cooking energy with the lowest exchange of gases and smoke. The use of appropriate technology clearly should not be limited to people who must be resourceful to avoid starvation, and clearly cannot wait for the approval of idiots who continually drive their ridiculous gas-guzzling monsters to WalMart for 20 pound slabs of read meat.

Appropriate technologies need to be tested and used by all of us.

Remember Mister Miracle and his incredible super-detection + power-enhancing device: Mother Box?

Well, now an erstwhile gadget maker has built a prototype for Mother Box! It combines a wireless detection card with a microcontroller that produces a small heartbeat-like vibration when a wireless signal is detected. ping - ping - ping ! You’re walking into a hotspot, Sister!

Imagine the possibilities of combining this with other frequency & radiation detectors. We could have a very useful Mother Box warning system, mounted neatly on the shoulder. Just far enough away from your skull, and just high enough to have a multi-directional clear space to listen on. As the inventor points out, people (”meat” sic) absorb signals, so a receiver above the shoulder like an epaulet might work best.

**LINK**

dvorak has done some homework for us on what we need to know in the 21st century. thanks dvo!