WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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January 2007 Archives
Apollo 11
Archived From January 30, 2007 (5) Comments
Three incredible, little-known things about the Apollo 11 mission:
1. Although everyone knows what Neil Armstrong said as he hopped out of the landing module, I've always preferred Buzz Aldrin's elegiac phrase, "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation." This leads me to the next point.
2. Aldrin, always the most conceptually approachable of the Apollo 11 astronauts, claims in this interview that he (as well as Collins and Armstrong) observed an unidentified ship traveling alongside theirs, but never said anything about it for fear of being sent back to Earth. The sighting, which was repeated on later Apollo missions, has never been formally acknowledged by NASA, although video of it exists.
3. In the event that the moon-walkers might become stranded on the moon and, by consequence, die there, president Nixon had a funerary speech prepared, entitled "In Event of Moon Disaster." Reading it offers a devastating glimpse at an alternate past. Imagine this as part of our cultural vocabulary: "For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."
11:07 AM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Bucky's Mind
Archived From January 28, 2007 (19) Comments
Psychic Phenomena on Vimeo
I've been spending a lot of time lately with a late-70's interview with Buckminster Fuller, conducted at the end-range of his life and career by a really inspiring Los Angeles public-access television figure called Damien Simpson, who apparently died shortly after the airing of this segment. This interview, it seems, is only available on a DVD called "Buckminster Fuller: The Lost Interviews," along with a handful of other late-era New Age television segments. Bucky loses his marbles progressively throughout the interviews, but manages to say some pretty unforgettable things about his certainty in the afterlife and the will of the Universe in deciding the course of his career.
It's the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Buckminster Fuller wasn't just a crazy person with a total commitment to action. Some other notable Fuller interviews can be seen here and here.
"One of the most important things to me in my commitment was that I never become the head of a cult. I must always remember, 'it's just a little me.' I'm not a special messiah."
-- Buckminster Fuller
11:41 PM | Permalink | (19) Comments
And The Winner Is...
Archived From January 22, 2007 (7) Comments
NOBODY.
Yes, you read that correctly. Of the 57 entries submitted to the inaugural Universe/TOMS contest, not a single one was completely correct. I feel partially responsible for this! Probably it was too hard!
Before I announce the compromise, let's reveal what the damn things were. The first object, as many people surmised, was indeed a feather:
The second, however, was trickier, and nobody got it quite right. It was, of course (don't slap your foreheads too hard), a piece of felt. Cheap, regular craft felt:
So what do we do? The decent thing to do is give the prize to whomever came the closest -- after much deliberation, I've decided that person is "Perry," who guessed a) feather, b) acrylic yarn. This is the closest: I've actually looked at some acrylic yarn under my microscope and decided that it shares many of the same properties as synthetic felt. This is the only person who proposed both a feather and a synthetic craft material. Another really close guess came from "Tony Herhold," who proposed feather and scarf. What kind of scarf? It was close!
One particularly interesting thing about your guesses is that many of you simply named household objects which resembled the items as they were. For example, in the case of the felt, there were many votes for "dish scrubber," as though a dish scrubber still completely resembles a dish scrubber when it has been magnified 20 times. As though dish scrubbers were some kind of domestic fractal! I thought this was lovely and very poetic on your behalves, voters.
In any case, "Perry," you are the winner! Please contact me ASAP with your mailing address, shoe size, and choice of TOM! Lucky you!
1:58 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
Finally, 4x
Archived From January 20, 2007 (27) Comments
The final day of the TOMS contest is upon us, and what a time it's been. I've had highlights (when Josh guessed "baleen"), low-lights; we've gotten a little press. There have been moments of great tension, too, as I wondered when and where the correct guess would appear. Although I can't reveal if the objects have yet been identified, I can say this: keep guessing.
12:00 PM | Permalink | (27) Comments
10x Magnification
Archived From January 19, 2007 (10) Comments
Day two of the TOMS contest. Many good -- nay, great -- guesses have been made. According to the rules, I can't tell you if anyone has guessed correctly yet, but this will all be revealed in due time. Maybe these pictures, at a reduced magnification of 10x, might help.
Best of luck!
11:24 AM | Permalink | (10) Comments
Welcome to the Contest
Archived From January 18, 2007 (20) Comments
Urban Honking community, 2007 is the year of the co-brand, the year of the collaborative promotional effort. This is why Universe, the Urban Honking overlords, and (unwittingly) TOMS shoes are pooling together to present to you this shoe-giveaway contest! Why? Because we respect the mission of this company, which, for every shoe purchased, gives a free pair of shoes to an underprivileged critter.
The rules are simple. To win a pair of TOMS shoes -- the color and size are your prerogative -- all you have to do is correctly identify the two objects below. Now, the catch is that the Universe Laboratory has magnified these objects 20 times.
The answers will not be revealed until the contest has run its course; over the span of the next several days, I'll post lower magnifications -- first 10x, then 4x -- until it should become obvious. Post your guesses in the comments section of this blog; the person who correctly guesses both objects first wins the shoes. The winner will be revealed Monday at noon, pacific time. You must provide a valid email address in your comment.
Let the games begin!
12:00 PM | Permalink | (20) Comments
Interview: Mark von Schlegell
Archived From January 15, 2007 (6) Comments
Sometimes fractured energies in our planet's noosphere can throw people together who, logically, should never meet. There's no rational reason I should count among my friends the particularly reclusive, Cologne-based science fiction writer and critic Mark von Schlegell; but, lo, kismet, I do. Schlegell's work is dogged and incredibly esoteric, a wry mix of stupid fantasy and devastating insight, and although they're clearly influenced by the awe and slime of pulp paperback sci-fi novels, his are the kind of books that get published by MIT and Semiotext(e). His first and only novel, Venusia, throws the "dystopian future" paradigm out with the acid-bathwater, transcending spacetime and spacereason in a feverish gallop, telling the story of the totalitarian psycho-holographic regime of a future Venus. It's confusing, it collapses in on itself, it reaches across broad length of fictive time, and it's narrated by a plant.
I'm honored, blogosphere, to usher you into this world. Science and literature are profoundly complicit entities, as are art and science; they are two cultures which could not stand without each other, both disciplines cloaked in metaphor, which use symbols in inherently similar ways. Although I don't think science fiction is a perfect hybrid of the two, it explores important possibilities that linger, ignored, in both literature and the sciences. Hello! The future!
Universe: Donna Haraway, in the Cyborg Manifesto, proposes that the novel is a 19th century form. Do you think the novel is still relevant? If not, what is the literary form of the future?
MVS: The novel is still relevant, it's the Manifesto that's old news. The novel was and is the great forge of enlightenment and it was invented, so I believe, not in the 19th but in the early seventeenth century, in Don Quixote, a book so long it's almost impossible for one mind to handle.
Yes, we're at a low point today. Not only in novel-writing, but in all the arts except TV. This is no reason to run about and say a particular form is dead. There have been low culture points before. Late empire Rome in its full decadence, for instance, fascist Europe, Stalinist Russia. Guess what? The larger cultures sucked. When reason, peace, and economic and social justice are on the rise, so then is the good, published, available novel. There are signs of things getting better already.
Though there's a myth of a quickening, our lifespans are about to get incredibly long and perhaps multidimensional. The novel will have to expand if we hope to keep track and take control of what these lives might mean, into dimensions it hasn't even realized it's had. When space travel is the norm, long hours of flight will best be filled by long novels, longer, I think than we even imagine. Presumably, off-Earth, 1/3 gravity will be the norm so we'll be able actually to hold enormous books rather easily. These extreme books of the future will be extreme length narratives constituting alternate realities and economies of their own. You can already see this happening in popular literature.
Universe: Do you think a technological singularity is likely?
MVS: This idea of the technological singularity, so I believe, is the theoretical outcome of planned obsolescence in the computer industry. It's very impracticable. Moore's Law is no longer valid by most accounts, and the relation of capitalist technology to utopia is necessarily asymptotic. I don't see it happening.
My novelette High Wichita is narrated by a "pet singularity," ASTA. ASTA can do everything, ride a photon, write a book, make 3d holograph recordings, even love, especially love. It's very expensive, illegal (though impossible to be contained), and just at the most miraculous point, just where it saves the day, it's somehow insignificant, a sort of cute little dog. It's modeled on "Asta" actually, from the Thin Man.
We don't need the singularity from our technology. We need privacy, good health, free clean energy, renewable resources and a space elevator.
Universe: Are there writers working outside the realm of science fiction that you feel are on the same page as you?
MVS: For contemporary writing I like to read things where I'll learn tricks of the trade and taste current zeitgeist. You'll find me being inspired by fantasy stuff in the Marion Zimmer Bradley or George R.R. Martin direction, or by romance a la Diana Gabaldon or by more literary writers like Chris Kraus and Fanny and Susan Howe. The ficto-historian Norman M. Klein and I have been on pages together. After Larry David, perhaps my favorite living writer is the comic book writer Alan Moore. I also loved Pynchon's Against the Day, though maybe after all, it is science fiction. I have so much choice that I enjoy most things I read the internet. If the whole internet was one giant web-page, written by Allperson, I would have to say Allperson is a pretty amazing writer from what I've seen.
Universe: Is Venus Los Angeles? Why is so much contemporary science fiction inherently about Los Angeles?
MVS: It remains a city able to inspire the sort of love-hate that helps writers make books. It's a field of paradox. Perhaps it's something like a muse. Venusia was mostly written there and is inseparable from the place in my imagination. But until such moment as the greenhouse effect finally runs away with the bag, L.A. is not Venus.
"Los Angeles," like all city-worlds is a function of certain particular common desires and fears. I would list apocalypse, freedom from history, glamor, trash, environmental masochism, futurism, sin, tacos and incredible gardens. An artificial ecology, it's the well-known end of the line. Where the dream busts and shines anyway with insistent beauty. Of course there's a real beauty to Los Angeles, on those perfectly real fake days. Something bordering on the miraculous.
It's not only a site of riot and rip-off, but of inspiration and achievement in the arts. Because of the entertainment industry, it articulates the imaginations of different generations in interesting ways, cutting across class, race, gender, politics . For my generation of Americans it was the invariable background of every film, every show that babysat our minds in those formative years. The very stage of our dreams. Star Trek for instance,a representative best possible future, was filmed exclusively there and you can see it everyday, wherever you look. Still, I'd say a lot of SF is about other city-worlds as well, New York, San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest, Glasgow....
Universe: Does your work as a critic inform your work as a science fiction writer in any way, or vice-versa?
MVS: It helps science fiction to have a tinge of the journalistic about it. An argumentative spirit of common-sense debate and politics should be in SF if I'm going to like it. A critical voice can be welcome. Poe (the creator) first published SF, in fact, in newspapers as hoax journalism, and he was a savagely intense critic. I came of age as a writer just before the blog and when I came to L.A. there were a number of small-budget, good lively local magazines that had real local and international effect, particularly in contemporary art. As a critic, I could offend people and do favors, tributes, write about almost anything I wanted to in the guise of anything else and be expected to argue about it in the bar at night with other writers. I even published my own newspaper. Having been that sort of critic taught me a lot about worlds. Nevertheless it didn't lead anywhere professionally. In fact, editors grew increasingly conservative, friends died, ideas were stolen, re-used, dis-respected, all sorts of depressing things occurred, and the magazines all folded. I discovered how rare an opportunity I had enjoyed only later.
These days I look at it like this. For me the only way to get at the truth is to admit I'm lying from the beginning. So if you ask me for criticism, expect a story. Science fiction helps my criticism. I often mix it in directly now. I found it adds humor, imagination, makes what is often a terrible chore done for money suddenly fun to do. Of course this means my criticism is pretty "out there," and appears in publications of the sort rarely available to U.S. readers. But wherever they're interested in cultural criticism by trees, collaborations by time-traveling Stalinist collectives battling time-traveling fascists, fake diaries of schizophrenic 18th century botanists, I'm the go-to guy.
12:00 PM | Permalink | (6) Comments