March 2010
54 posts
February 2010
65 posts
“The project is based on research into how spider silk might become a material of choice for prototyping scaffolds on which to grow human tissue. Research in tissue engineering has indeed found that silk is a better substance than polymeric materials to construct such ‘scaffolds’. Fully functioning hearts and wombs have already been grown artificially on silk scaffolds. For example, Canadian company Nexus Biotechnologies is manufacturing Biosteel(TM), a high-strength synthetic spider silk from the milk of genetically modified goats. The fiber material is allowing for the development of new products in a wide range of fields - from bulletproof vests to scaffolds for artificial human organs - including wombs.”
—Golden Orb Spider Farm - we make money not art
“Mr. Astore, a former Air Force Academy history instructor (and Wehrmacht buff as a boy), says “the American military’s fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking” is reflected outwardly in busts of Clausewitz on display at American military academies, and more tangibly in echoes of Blitzkrieg in the first and second Iraq wars”
—
Reading the Web - Idea of the Day Blog - NYTimes.com
Every schoolboy knows that American military doctrine follows Clausewitz in tactics, Jomini in strategy.
“The ‘pre-distressed antique futurity’. William Gibson wrote about this when we was writing about atemporality, associating it with his ‘Zero History’ novel that he is working on. Gibson was saying that if you have a genuinely avant garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. In other words, if you want to do this, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen. Imagine that it was twenty years gone into the future. Just approach it from that perspective. No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty. Just refuse to go there. Accept that it is already passe’, and create it from that point of view. Try to make it news that stays news.”
—Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond
“Well, let me take a guy who I am very fond of, a very immediate, hard-headed scientific thinker - Richard Feynman, American physicist. Richard Feynman once wrote about intellectual labor, and he said the following: ‘Step one - write down the problem. Step two - think really hard. Step three - write down the solution’. And I really admire this statement of Feynman’s. It’s no-nonsense, it’s no fakery, it’s about hard work for the intellectual laborer… Of course it’s a joke. But it’s not merely a joke. He is trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean: really just confront the intellectual problem! But there is an unexamined assumption in Feynman’s method, and it’s in step one - write down the problem. Now let me tell you how the atemporal Richard Feynman approaches this. The atemporal Richard Feynman is not very paper-friendly, because he lives in a network culture. So it occurs to the atemporal Feynman that he may, or may not, have a problem. ‘Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’”
—Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond
“Okay, you’ve treated your future as an “unpredictable lurching thing…” and now you’re all morose about that… You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of “disruptive innovation,” “disintermediation,” “offshoring,” “small pieces loosely joined,” “de-monetization,” “plug and play,” “the network as a
platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement
watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now!” —The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement
watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now!” —The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
“To get the full impact of this photo, Stone says, you really have to see it up on a wall, as part of large panorama that Voyager 1 took of the solar system’s distant planets. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab used to have just such a display with the full mosaic of photos posted up in an auditorium, says Hansen-Koharcheck. “And to show the whole thing it covered, oh, I don’t know, 12 or 14 feet,” she says — of mostly empty black space, with just a few pinpricks of light showing the planets. One of them was labeled Earth. “One of the guys that took care of that display told me one time that he was forever having to replace that picture,” says Hansen-Koharcheck, “because people would come up to look at it and they would always touch the Earth.”
—Pale Blue Dot: An Alien View Of Earth : NPR
“According to my Property professor, students who graduate from top-forty law schools are bred to “find a comfortable desk job, most likely in a corporation, and make a nice income without really having to get their hands dirty.” The old saying goes that the A students become the professors, the B students find jobs in government or corporate law, and the C students end up making all the money.”
—McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet?
“Dull, dirty and dangerous work is stuff that takes scholars to make interesting, priests to ennoble, and artists to make beautiful. But in general, it is actually done by some mix of the deluded hopeful, the coerced, and the broken and miserable, depending on how far the civilization in question has advanced.”
—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor
“Their answers quickly turn into a list of excuses. And most of those excuses revolve around two words: “Middle America.” Middle America can pretty much be used as an excuse for any miscalculation ANYWHERE. I’m not just talking about movies. You accidentally put too much ketchup on your hot dog? Middle America’s fault. Your boss is pissing you off? Middle America. Celebrity Trump? Middle America. Okay, maybe that last one is true. But come on, let’s be serious for a second. We can’t pin all our bad predictions on the that pudgy central section of the country. Sometimes, we have to take responsibility for our actions (the key word here is “sometimes” - not always).”
—What We Can Learn From Five Box Office Surprises
