(Source: fuckyeaharchergifs)
Fuckery aside, this place is actually beautiful.
from Miguel, a U.S. Marine. Re: Well, it almost does not matter, because we hear this almost everywhere we work. (UPDATE: O.K., because you asked. Miguel was referring to Afghanistan.)
(Source: cjchivers)
Feedair Digital Ticker hands-on -- Engadget
One of the first consumable glanceables.
Feedair is a USB-powered WiFi enabled digital ticker that will span emails and tweets (or anything else with an RSS Feed) to its old-school dot-matrix display. Controlled with an iOS or Android app, it’s designed as an “unobtrusive display:” for those situations where you can keep a casual eye on a physical device or send messages to people who aren’t au-fait with technology. Feeling it in the hand, it’s machined from heavy aluminum and we could see this doubling as a paperweight for the right kind of office — and a great way for your assistant to send you discreet messages during tedious meetings. Constructing a “vidget” (visual widget) is apparently very easy and the company’s planning to court young developers to expand the capacity of the gear. Setting up the display to show Enagdget’s twitter feed took around 30 seconds, although in the process, the app froze out a few times, so it’s not quite ready for prime-time just yet. The Feedair is expected to hit the shelves in March and cost around $50.
Looking forward to this & the hacks that’ll follow.
2 weeks ago - 
13
13 ///I need to dump this whole thing [when it’s finished] into a pdf so I can print it & take notes in the columns.
On a similar note, perhaps next year’s edition can be delivered in installments to Berg’s Little Printer.///
Aldrin also doesn’t mention why NASA can’t innovate. It’s because NASA became a pork machine; it methodically spreads out major projects among so many Congressional districts that they’re unkillable, but also unworkable. Nobody was ever held to account for the failure of the Shuttle. even though the thing was a chimeric gobboon from the get-go. At least Aldrin manfully admits this failure, but he doesn’t address the underlying systemic problem involved in having Congress run a space technocracy. The contemporary Congress isn’t about Mars, it’s all about culture war over evolution and climate change. It’s a radically anti-science Congress where denial of facts is a litmus test. These guys can’t repair bridges, much less build shuttlecraft.
That doesn’t mean the US doesn’t innovate in aerospace, though. A giant, high-tech, robot blimp with a laser communication system and a starling horde of Predators. “Blue Devil” is not fast, it doesn’t zoom into outer space, it just sees global guerrillas and it illegally kills them. If anything’s gonna intimidate and cow the Chinese, it’ll be weird, scary, Gothic High-Tech devices like this, not some General Motors Martian bailout for NASA.
*The Chinese are building drones as fast as they can weld ‘em. Everybody likes drones. Even terrorists like drones. In 2012, drones are where it’s at, and they don’t even have pilots, much less glorious astronauts.
The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2012 (via new-aesthetic)
(via new-aesthetic)
Shit. Sometimes I think about getting back to Academia so I can conduct explorations like this without using my limited resources.
“Following on our visualizations of our census data of the Internet address space, we plotted the whole Internet at scale in October 2007. By “at scale” we mean one pixel is one address and every single address is shown. At 600 dots-per-inch (typical printer resolution), the plot turns out to be about 83 square feet (7.7 m2, about 9 feet or 2.8m on a side!).”
3 weeks ago - 7
7From an interview with William Gibson
I like that in Zero History, Twitter is used as this covert communication device. How do you use Twitter?
I follow less than 100 people. I use it to keep in touch daily with a few friends. The rest of it, for me, is just an incredibly powerful aggregator of novelty. I’ve chosen to follow people who are themselves keen and very active aggregators of novelty. And it all tends to present the highest quota of pure, random amusing novelty of any medium that I have access to. Every once in awhile, I glance over at—but do not open—the trending topics and I go, “Oh, ew. That’s horrible. That’s foul.”
It’s like, #Heidi Montag and #LadyGaga.
That’s the opposite of novelty. It’s just the sludge of the commonplace.
It’s the viscous fluid of culture. Yuck.
Yeah. So you could be swimming in that, or you could be sitting in a fine prismatic spray of triple-filtered novelty.
(Source: vice.com)
Total Massacre
Clip from Miike’s 13 ASSASSINS. The scene in which the scroll was created was fucking amazing in its terror.
Electric car charging station at Dunkin Donuts parking lot. Who knew DD was so eco-hip? (Taken with instagram)
Signals & broadcast.
“Try our Internet access”
Customer-specific information on the receipt.
“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices.”
This movie.
Admission #1: When I saw this for the first time, I loudly said, “Shut the fuck up!”
Admission #2: I’ve been drinking coffee.
1 month ago - 1
1 
The splattering…
It’s so good.
“The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.”
BBC News - Robotic prison wardens to patrol South Korean prison
How many minutes would it take US prisoners to transform bits of this thing into shanks?
1 month ago - 8
8