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!
LATEST POSTS
CATEGORIES
animal life (3)
earth life (18)
human life (25)
Mathematics Life (1)
outer space life (23)
sea life (2)
skullface life (6)
technology life (6)
UNIVERSE ARCHIVED
February 2008 (2)
January 2008 (1)
December 2007 (4)
November 2007 (2)
October 2007 (2)
September 2007 (4)
August 2007 (3)
June 2007 (2)
May 2007 (3)
April 2007 (3)
March 2007 (5)
February 2007 (3)
January 2007 (7)
December 2006 (1)
November 2006 (2)
October 2006 (3)
September 2006 (3)
August 2006 (4)
July 2006 (6)
June 2006 (3)
May 2006 (3)
April 2006 (3)
March 2006 (3)
February 2006 (4)
January 2006 (6)
December 2005 (5)
June 2007 Archives
Universal Images
Archived From June 16, 2007 (4) Comments
Occasionally, a friend or associate tips me off to a particularly interesting manifestation of the word "Universe." Some are more interesting than others; some are really in line with what this manifestation of Universe is all about, and those blow me away the most. This one -- all shadowy polygons, flowers, and color fields -- comes from Greg Davis, who once discovered a rare old Unarius film completely independently of me, and at the same time. Thanks, Greg!
11:17 PM | Permalink | (4) Comments
New Futures
Archived From June 8, 2007 (22) Comments
I never cease to wonder about the vast amount of futures we have in store. While there is only one past, albeit an eternally contested and subjective one, the future is manifold and unfuckwithable. Recent pulpy science fiction binges and forays into blockbuster cinematic media have proven this indubitably; After all, maybe the main reason Science Fiction works as a storytelling medium is because no one can prove it wrong. Who's to say that the Pre-Cogs, soaked in some primordial slime, will not be able to see crimes before they occur or that Rama, hollow and the size of a moon, is not floating through space on the way to some deliberately unknowable destination? Certainly one real future must be bobbing around in all the millions of lucid, delusional, sweaty, pedantic, post-apocalyptic, and utopian ideas that have been proposed by the authors of the past.
What if we had a choice? What if everyone decided that the future of Total Recall, with its boxy cars and three-breasted Martian women flouncing around anesthetic dance clubs with laser guns strapped to their loins, was the best direction for us? Could we rally together, lay out a 100-year plan, and make it happen? We could create a future, in a way, more firmly rooted in the past than anything that might have happened naturally.
In the light of this possibility, I've been considering the best futures, the ones I'd most likely rally behind in the case of a universal temporal survey of the human race. Of course, no one is interested in waking up one morning only to realize that they're actually brainwashed secret agents from Mars with some serious revenge on their plates, so I'm not considering the narrative arcs of these literary and filmic futures, only the world in which they ostensibly take place.
Before my official "Best Futures" list hits the Internet, I'd like to enlist you, my readership, to provide your personal votes. Do you dream of immortality within a crystal prism? Would you happily spend the rest of your life mining "the Spice"? I want to know! This should be the people's choice, and no one is safe from the conceptual flagella of future-leaning media, least of all in this day and age.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the interim, some suggested reading to get you going:
Geoff Manaugh (of BLDG BLOG) ruminates on the architecture of Science Fiction.
Excerpt from Mark Von Schlegell's new novel, Mercury Station
Where Science Fiction Films Take Place
Excerpt from Minority Report: A Report, a new collaboration between myself and Aaron Flint Jamison:
I loved it uncritically, without hesitation. Usually I am not this forgiving to movies, this completely open to whatever brand of reality they wish to impart; I am trying to figure out why exactly I feel this way. I think it is largely, although not entirely, due to a kind of nostalgia about Tom Cruise. He is excellent in this, and excellent in the way that only Tom Cruise in this particular kind of movie can be: incredibly angular, vaguely troubled by some long-passed trauma, prone to jogging at night in some gothically hooded sweatshirt, capable of making complex hand gestures. I found myself euphoric while he was running around wearing black, so fast, so Olympian, escaping not just his particular pursuers but the whole corroded logic of his future-history. I think that he runs with his hands flat, unclenched. More areo-dynamic, is the idea behind that.
Fingertips cutting through the air.
4:30 PM | Permalink | (22) Comments