photo
27 Nov
(via smut-to-go)
[I believe this is the magazine that first called for the importation to America of Italian bees.]
text
27 Nov
On the Stylistic Tropics
kazys:
Over in Prospect magazine, Brian Eno confirms something I’ve been saying for a few years. The coolhunt is dead. Instead, we live in a stylistic tropics, a world of interchangeable language games dedicated to fashion. It’s worth reading this in the light of Alan Liu’s the Laws of Cool: first, social capital based on class and taste hierarchy was replaced by the pursuit of cool, then the cool as property of an informational élite is replaced by the stylistic tropics. Unless you’re studying earlier eras, its time to retire all those books by Bourdieu or sell them on Amazon. I know I have.
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27 Nov
turnofthecentury:
Nikola Tesla, reading by the light of the Tesla Coil
via pictura poesis
[I’m pretty sure this is a double exposure.]
photo
26 Nov
Dark Roasted Blend: The Art of Science, the Science of Art
[I know some of these are field equations and I recognize a Feynmann diagram, but what is this?]
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26 Nov
Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen’s agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what’s not addressed to them. But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space — and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations. Existing products do precisely this. Australia’s WiPath Communications offers Interceptor 3.0 (there’s even a free download). Maryland-based SWS Security Products sells something called a “Beeper Buster” that it says let police “watch up to 2500 targets at the same time.” And if you’re frugal, there’s a video showing you how to take a $10 pager and modify it to capture everything on that network.
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26 Nov
There was also an incident when he had to play a concert in Windhoek [Namibia]. It was a particularly difficult concert. He played, among other things, the Asencio suite [Collectici intim]. And just as he was playing his second piece there was a power failure. Not a light in sight. You just saw this shadow sitting on the stage, just continuing, just carrying on, playing as if nothing had happened. So at the interval I rushed backstage; I said, “Narciso, what are we going to do?” He said, “Nothing. I have the habit.” [Laughs.] I said, “Would you like candles?” He said, “No, no, they flicker. No, no, I’m fine. There’s nothing to be done. I have the habit.” So he played the whole concert in the dark.
link
25 Nov
VQR » Sixty Hours of Terror»
Comprehensive account of the Mumbai attacks.
quote
25 Nov
Just Imagine, a Fox picture - “presents a picture of what New York may be like in 1980,” when airplanes have virtually replaced motor vehicles, television apparatus has supplanted telephones, people are known by number instead of name, and eating is replaced by “simple swallowing, three times a day, of a small pill containing the essential essences of roast beef, vegetables, and desert.” However, Prohibition is still in force, though people get around it using liquor pills. Film’s main interest is in introductory scenes showing how life is led in 50 years, and in glimpses of future male and female dress styles; “incidental song numbers and dances are unimportant, and the long expedition to Mars” is relatively boring.
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25 Nov
Human love, *amor hominis*, chooses what is attractive and present. Luther emphasized this clearly when, recalling Augustine, he stated: ‘The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it’. The *amor crucis*, on the other hand, God’s love revealed in the cross of Jesus, discovers nothing attractive, only sin, so that God’s love first creates what is attractive by the act of love: ‘The love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it’ (Luther). The love of God, the *amor Dei*, is directed to the unlovable and the ugly and by the act of creative love makes them lovable and beautiful (‘sinners are attractive because they are loved, they are not loved because they are attractive’, Luther).
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25 Nov
It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.
— Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka. (via
dailymeh)
text
25 Nov
Not Yet
mills:
My friend E., an architect, posted the following extraordinary photo and quote on Corner Lot:
The airplane shows us that the problem well stated finds its solution. To wish to fly like a bird is to state the problem badly, and Ader’s Bat never left the ground… to search for a means of suspension in the air, and a means of propulsion, was to put the problem properly: in less than ten years the whole world could fly.
The problem of the house has not yet been stated.
- Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture
quote
25 Nov
6. Are Opus Dei supernumeraries actually alien zombie warriors ready to be activated by the secret word “meringue”?
