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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Political Science
Archived From February 25, 2008 (9) Comments
As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research, prefacing it with the pronouncement that "this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues," a statement that has proven in the intervening years to be true.
However, I can't deny that my love of the sciences has blossomed under the steely wing of one of the most anti-science political administrations (and social climates, to boot) of the modern era. If it's not the suppression and censorship of reports on subjects like climate change and pollution, it's the stacking of scientific advisory panels, the stem-cell debacle, ridiculously under-qualified NASA appointees, the insanely dubious removal of scientific information from government Web sites, or the misguided millions pouring into Prez Bush's "New Vision" for space exploration. Remember when the Bush administration removed the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" from NASA's mission statement? Really?
It is with a profound sense of purpose, then, that I bring you this information about the respective science policies of the two Democratic candidates for president of the United States of America. Most of this information comes from statements made by the candidates' surrogates at a science policy debate in Boston last week, as well as from the candidates' official websites and press releases.
Basic Research
Obama: Plans to double federal spending for basic research over five years, supports making the Research and Development tax credit permanent, and plans to strengthen funding for biomedical research, as well as better improve the efficiency of that research by improving coordination both within government and across government/private/non-profit partnerships. Supports stem-cell research despite the alternatives, stating that "embryonic stem cells remain unmatched in their potential."Clinton: Clinton plans to "end the war on science" by doubling the budget, within ten years, of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the basic and applied research at the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Plans to rescind the ban on ethical embryonic stem cell research and to straight-up ban political appointees from unduly interfering with scientific conclusions and publications. Lastly, plans to require that federal research agencies set aside at least 8% of their research budgets for discretionary funding of high-risk research, and plans to increase investment in the non-health applications of biotechnology in order to fuel 21st century industry ("the future").
Climate Change
Obama: Plans to reduce Carbon Emissions 80 Percent by 2050 with a market-based cap-and-trade system requiring that pollution credits be auctioned off. Plans to build incentives that reward forest owners, farmers, and ranchers when they plant trees, restore grasslands, or undertake farming practices that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plans to invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial-scale renewable energy, invest in low-emissions coal plants, and begin the transition to a new digital electricity grid (as opposed to the slow electromechanical switches and relays used today). Also plans to establish a 25 percent federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require that 25 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. is derived from clean, sustainable energy sources, like solar, wind and geothermal by 2025.More information about Obama's energy plans here.
Clinton: Clinton's plan would ostensibly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming, and cut foreign oil imports by two-thirds from 2030 projected levels, more than 10 million barrels per day. Major components of this plan: increased fuel efficiency standards, helping automakers retool their production facilities through $20 billion in "Green Vehicle Bonds," a new cap-and-trade program that auctions 100 percent of permits, and a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund, paid for in part by oil companies, to fund investments in alternative energy. Plans to revive and expand the national assessment on climate change, expanding the assessment to include not only the anticipated impacts of climate change, but also how U.S. regions and economic sectors can respond to climate change through mitigation and adaptation.
Also: plans to require that all federal buildings designed after January 20, 2009 will be zero emissions buildings. Cute!
More information about Clinton's energy plans here.
Science Education
Obama: Wants to increase the number of foreign students in U.S. graduate school and “give them a path to citizenship,” as well as improve minority scholarships. Plans to provide additional resources for public schools to adopt proven science, technology, engineering and math programs.Clinton: Clinton plans to triple the number of National Science Foundation fellowships and increase the size of each award. Plans to create new fellowships at the National Science Foundation to allow math and science professionals to become teachers in high-need schools. Supports initiatives to bring more women and minorities into the math, science, and engineering professions.
The Internet and Technology
Obama: Believes in an open Internet! Strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet. Supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. Furthermore, encourages diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, and plans to create "Public Media 2.0.," the next generation of public media that will birth the "Sesame Street of the Digital Age."Wants to implement sensible safeguards that protect privacy online, and supports restrictions on how private information may be used, as well as technology safeguards to verify how the information has actually been used.
Plans to "bring government into the 21st century:" wants to implement wikis, social networking tools and other transparent communications technologies in daily governmental operations, plants to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision-making. Lastly, plans to appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century.
Much more information about Obama's technology plans here.
Obama at Google, talking about improbable lives and net neutrality.
Clinton: The Clinton camp seems to have only one major stance when it comes to the Internet, which is a plan for the federal government provide tax incentives to encourage broadband deployment in underserved areas, and, correlatively, a plan to financially support state and local broadband initiatives. Clinton was quoted on Meet The Press as saying "I want to have as much information about the way our government operates on the Internet so the people who pay for it, the taxpayers of America, can see that. I want to be sure that, you know, we actually have, like, agency blogs." Also, her website is not as cool as Obama's.
Space Exploration
Obama: Obama hasn't released any information about his official plan in regards to space exploration, although there's some buzz that it will happen this month. In the interim, nerds are aflutter over an alleged leaked space plan, which you can read here. The leaked plan, if there's any truth to it, is very awesome, and includes some smart (and realistic) initiatives, such as support of unmanned missions, a vow to keep weapons out of space (yay), and some space-based climate change surveying. The leaked plan, however, does support the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and the Ares I Launch Vehicle, which is a disappointment to me because I can't stand to think of any Bush space policies lingering around after his dismissal.Clinton: The Clinton camp has made several statements about space exploration and aeronautics. Clinton plans to pursue a "21st century Space Exploration Program," by implementing a balanced strategy of robust human spaceflight, expanded robotic spaceflight, and enhanced space science activities. Furthermore, Clinton plans to develop a comprehensive space-based Earth Sciences agenda, including full funding for NASA’s Earth Sciences program and a space-based Climate Change Initiative. Most surprising of all, in my opinion, is her call of reversing funding cuts to NASA’s and FAA’s aeronautics R&D budget.
Clinton on space exploration, briefly.
More Information:
Obama Campaign Science Fact Sheet
Breakdown of all the candidates' science and technology stances (From Popular Mechanics)
Clinton's Innovation Agenda
3:00 PM | Permalink | (9) Comments
Happy Valentine's Day From Universe
Archived From February 14, 2008 (0) Comments
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Interview: Oliver Sacks
Archived From October 17, 2007 (1) Comments
Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals.
His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental connection to all things musical, dallying in the experiences of rhythymically-inclined Parkinson's patients and virtuosic amnesiacs, to name a few.
Thanks to the Willamette Week, and as a preface to his Portland lecture next week, I had a chance to chat with Dr. Sacks on the phone -- the result was a sincere, often suprising mish-mash of observations about iPods, pots and pans, and, of course, the fascinatingly complex relationship between our minds and music.
Universe: The New York Times famously called you the "poet laureate of medicine." Are your books science or literature?
Oliver Sacks: For me, an interest in science is inseparable from an interest in the lives of scientists, and the lives of ideas, as well as in storytelling. In medicine, of course, narratives are essential: the patient tells you what's going on, and you try to match this with stories heard from other patients. I love to give personal accounts, to try and enter people's experiences and describe them, and I don't think there should be a space between literature and the sciences. I think that the sciences should be literate, and that their function is not only exposition, but storytelling. Certainly for myself, science has to be combined with stories -- but also stories have to be combined with science. Although I may tell a story of someone who has musical hallucinations, or cannot tell one tune from another, I also want to know what goes on in their brain, and why this is the case. In a way, these are somewhat like detective stories.
Universe: Do you think that your fascination with music has something to do with the fact that it's a sort of bridge between the arts and the sciences?
Oliver Sacks: I think probably that's one of the things which attracts me to music, yes.
Universe: You often write about aphasic patients, people who can no longer speak. I'm interested in the fact the ability to sing words isn't affected. What is the difference -- isn't speech just a kind of rhythmic sing-song?
Oliver Sacks: A great deal of the brain is involved in the perception and memory of music, much more than is involved with language; as people lose language and become aphasic, they're often able to respond to music and to sing, sometimes even to sing lyrics, to retain language if it's embedded in a song. The brain's ability to hold musical patterns is almost indestructible. It's amazing to see someone with Alzheimer's disease, how music can still be there.
Universe: Is all music the same in this regard? Does some music have less staying power?
Oliver Sacks: I think the music which is called to one, the music which has interested one, I think especially the music which one has been exposed to in one's young years, tends to be the mostly strongly embedded in the brain. If one gets musical hallucinations -- which hopefully, one won't, although they're rather common -- these always tend to be of music which was acquired fairly early in life.
Universe: Does music have some sort of evolutionary advantage for us? How could it come about?
Oliver Sacks: Well, people have different opinions there. Darwin was very interested in music and thought that music preceded speech, that it was part of courtship and wooing. Other people, like Steven Pinker, feel that music is incidental. He speaks of it as "musical cheesecake," as if it's a luxury, or a bonus, or trivial. But it's striking that music is central in every culture to known to us, that we find musical instruments going back to 50,000 BC. You find dance, you find song, the religious use of music, the martial use of music, the social use of music, and bonding with music in every culture.
To claim an independent evolutionary origin from music, you would have to look for some aspect of music which isn't present in speech. The aspect which stands out is rhythm, and the particular fact that we respond to rhythm by keeping in time, by moving our heads. One cannot not respond to music: even if you don't make any external movement, the motor parts of the brain respond to rhythm. This appears spontaneously in every child, but you cannot train a chimpanzee, or a bird, or a whale, or an elephant, to keep synchronized time to a rhythm. This is a specifically human attribute which doesn't have an analogue in speech -- I mean, speech doesn't have the regular pulse of music. So one would suspect that the synchronization with rhythm has evolved independently in human beings, and it's been preserved because it is a reliable evolutionary advantage. For example, bonding, doing things together, and synchronizing social groups. One can only hypothesize, but the rhythmic power of music might be a point at which to start. But of course, we have skeletons, but we don't know what was going on with society and music half a million years ago.
Universe: What is your opinion of people who claim to have no interest in music? Do they have some kind of developmental problem?
Oliver Sacks: Well, some of them, and perhaps they have different bases. There are some people who don't appear to recognize musical patterns, who can't clearly tell when one note is higher than another, who can't recognize any tune -- this is fairly rare, in that degree. Other people can recognize music perfectly well, but it doesn't get them emotionally. Obviously, people vary a good deal here, but if someone is not affected that much by music, well, then they can live a perfectly full life with other things.
You know, I have one patient, a very nice, intelligent woman from the Bronx, who has a strange congenital amusia. Even when she was a child -- she came from a rather musical family -- she just could not distinguish one tune from another. She says that she used to be wistful; she would see that other people were greatly affected by music, but for her it was unintelligible, sometimes excruciating. For her, what people call music was like hearing pots and pans thrown around in the kitchen.
Universe: Whoa, are her other senses more developed?
Oliver Sacks: Yeah! Interestingly, this doesn't affect her perception or appreciation of language. She likes going to the theater, she likes poetry, she likes visual art, and she spent a lifetime trying to enjoy music. When her boyfriends, and then her husband, would take her to concerts, she would dutifully obey. Finally, she read an article which described this condition, and she got investigative. She was told that this was actually a neurological condition, and that if her husband asked her to come to a concert, she should say, "You go, but I'm going to go to a film instead." She only wishes she'd been given this advice when she was seven, and not seventy.
Universe: Speaking of music getting us emotionally, why do minor and major chords affect us so differently? Is it a biological thing or a cultural construct?
Oliver Sacks: Well, it certainly seems to us that things in a minor key are rather sad -- the slow movements in Mozart symphonies and Mozart concertias are most often in a minor key, and are sad -- but this is not always the case. If you go back seven or eight centuries, sometimes you find that major keys are used for sadness and minor keys for exuberance. So it's probably a cultural thing. Some things are built in biologically, though: the perception of octaves, things like that, and obviously music which is fast may be seen as animated, and music which is slow has a funereal quality. Sometimes when if we listen to music from another culture -- Hindu music or Chinese music -- we may not know how to respond, emotionally.
Universe: I heard growing up that kids who took music lessons ended up being better at mathematics. Is there any truth to that?
Oliver Sacks: Oh, I don't know, the so-called "Mozart effect" or whatever? Certainly, intensive musical training develops various parts of the brain to deal with music, and there's probably some bonus effect on other skills.
Universe: So it has nothing to do with the underlying structure of music?
Oliver Sacks: No, it doesn't, and simply listening to music doesn't do this. I mean, one is speaking of fairly intensive lessons or training...but then again, there are lots of great musicians who are absolute dunces mathematically, and vice-versa. There's no guarantee here.
Universe: What kind of music are you listening to these days?
Oliver Sacks: Well, it sort of depends on my mood. I sometimes like rather rousing music when I wake up, to get me up, and there's music which calms, and music which consoles...but since you ask, I happen to have here, let me look at the tape, I have some Brahms concertos here, which for some reason I always seem to be listening to. I don't use an iPod.
Universe: You don't?
Oliver Sacks: No, I'm actually a little frightened of iPods because I think that not only can you be given music all the while, but you can use it to ward yourself of from your environment. You can have it too loud, I think it can make you functionally deaf. I don't know how it is in Portland, but New York is full of people who are either on cell phone or iPods -- they walk in front of cars, and they're sort of like zombies.
Universe: Do you think it's music or the device which turns them into zombies?
Oliver Sacks: Well, perhaps they go together. There's the self-contained machine, the cell phone syndrome, but if music at great intensity is being piped into your head all the while...I think it can be wonderful in a way, but slightly dangerous.
12:00 PM | Permalink | (1) Comments
Time-Based Art
Archived From September 13, 2007 (1) Comments
This is almost certainly irrelevant, last-minute information, but for those of you readers who are both a) Portland residents, and b) free this evening, I will be presenting a once-ever-only immersive Power Point environment at PICA's Time-Based Arts festival tonight. It will be around 10:30pm at this year's "The Works," the Wonder Ballroom, at 128 NE Russell St.
This event presumably costs some money, but will be excellent. Other than myself, Lucky Dragons, Hooliganship, and Mean Age will present information and music. Also screening will be a pantheon of animated films from such luminaries as Takeshi Murata, E*Rock, and Michael Bell-Smith.
7:18 PM | Permalink | (1) Comments
Prospect of Immortality
Archived From August 1, 2007 (7) Comments
Every year, a few people decide to have their bodies frozen after death, in the hopes that the future will cure all that ails them. It's called cryonic preservation. You forgot it existed, right? So did I, but like all interesting things, cryonics is something that continues to exist, completely independently of your awareness of it.
As a literary trope, life-extension through procedures homologous to cryonics is as old as the hills; even Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea, and it's stuck around ever since, popping up in the works of Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur C. Clarke. In these contexts, cryonics aids space travel, shutting down biological operations during century-long interplanetary flights, or transports characters through time, plopping them into the strange new words that are the fait accompli of science fiction. Presumably, the kinds of alienation endured by newly-awoken time travelers in science fiction novels and movies have a lot to do with our almost ubiquitous cultural cold-shouldering (so to speak) of the practice.
Still, it isn't fiction. Modern cryonics, after a tinfoil-hat boom in the mid-1970s, is more of a reality than ever. As it stands, it's only practiced by a handful of non-profit groups and satellite organizations around the United States: namely the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. Alcor and CI's beginnings were, of course, dubious; and their rivalry, understated and surreal. The first Alcor conference in the early 1970s only attracted 30 attendees, and it conducted early cryopreservations out of a mobile surgical unit in a large van. Over the years, both organizations have accrued legitimacy despite Cease and Desist orders and macabre PR stumbles, including a 1994 scandal in which a Riverside county coroner ruled that an Alcor client was murdered with barbiturates before her head was removed by the company's staff (yikes!). Alcor contends that the drug was administered after her legal death, and I believe 'em, because of the inevitably rampant misconceptions about this kind of thing, and because of this devastating quote from the much-misunderstood Alcor's website: "sincere idealism is not fraud. While reading the many articles by physicians and scientists on this website, we ask you to remember one thing: We mean it."
Important Mythbust #1: Cryonic preservation is not "freezing." Freezing a human body damages it irreversibly, as ice crystals form between cells, causing straight-up mechanical destruction. What Alcor and CI perform is a process called vitrification: the replacement of more than 60% of the water in human cells with protective chemicals, which can reach sub-zero temperatures without forming any ice crystals. The chemicals involved in the process, called "cryoprotectants," aren't perfect, either, and cause significant biochemical damage while retaining the structure of the tissue. It's sort of a win-lose, but cryonics organizations seem dead-set (again, no pun indented) on the viability of repairing this damage in the future.
Important Mythbust #2: Although the prospect of immortality plays a large part in the decision-making process, cryonic preservation is considered by devotees to be a forward-thinking medical practice more than anything else, a chance for the terminally ill to benefit from therapies still unknown to the current medical establishment. The majority of people who undergo preservation consider it to be a sort of extended coma from which they will one day emerge, ripe for the skilled hands of advanced doctors.
Gory Reality #1: Although they tread lightly on the issue, cryonics institutions often do preserve just heads. These are referred to in cryo subculture as "neuros," and Alcor's clientele is about 2/3 heads, one of which belongs to baseball great Ted Williams (although his got a little banged up in the process). After all, our brains are the only part of our bodies that are absolutely essential to personhood. Everything else is just noise and limbs. If nanotechnology progresses to a point where vitrified human bodies can be resuscitated without brain damage, then perhaps we will also see massive advances in cell regeneration. Alcor firmly enthuses the possibility that "future technologies developed for healing trauma victims will someday regrow an entire new body around the brain." Why the fuck not? It's the future! Is there anything more vast?
The place that cryonics holds on the crackpot-scale all hinges on your definition of death. You hear terms like "legal" or "clinical" death thrown around all the time on TV, but, as an increasingly unfuckwithable amount of research shows, those things aren't really dying. In a way, the declaration of legal death is just a certification that there's nothing more contemporary medicine can do for a dying patient. See, cardiac arrest is one thing, but the death of all the cells in your body is something completely different; I know it's hard to swallow, but honestly -- even if your heart has stopped, you are technically and biologically still alive for a couple more hours, or until all your cells die. This is medical truth. What's arguable is the cryonics angle: that if a team of surgeons gets your head chopped off and vitrified in time, you might one day return to consciousness.
Robert Ettinger, the father of modern cryonics and author of the surprisingly readable Prospect of Immortality, explains it thusly: "a man does not go like the one-horse shay, but dies little by little usually, in imperceptible gradations, and the question of reversibility at any stage depends on the state of medical art."
I'm not going to waste our time together here in the blogosphere trying to convince you that cryonics is a plausible, or, worse, reasonable practice. What scientific evidence there is pretty much speaks for itself, and the rest just depends on the amount of trust you're willing to place on the future. Disclaimer: I'm almost entirely convinced we'll all be telepathic techno-immortals by the time I'm 60. And I love crackpots with a profound tenacity.
The philosophical questions raised by this relatively simple idea are almost overwhelming. If cryonics can be used to secure treatment for persons suffering from currently untreatable maladies, is the medical establishment barbaric not to practice it? Can our identities be preserved after our frozen brains are thawed out? What right do we have to impose our degenerate bodies on our descendants? Who will want us? Who will debrief us, help us adapt to an undoubtedly isolating future? Will our cowardice cause disastrous overpopulation? Robert Ettinger argues that the weight of a human life transcends these sorts of questions, and that thawed patients "will not find themselves idiot strangers in a lonely and baffling world, but will be made fully educable and integrated," by virtue of the human responsibility to others.
I hope you're right, dude.
12:00 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
Team Eames
Archived From May 14, 2007 (5) Comments
I've been thinking a lot about über-couple Charles and Ray Eames recently; those of you who attended last week's Urho Talks will know the territory I'm about to shlep into.
If you don't know, Charles and Ray were designers, architects and filmmakers who are responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century (Thanks, Wikipiedia!). Notably, a great deal of wonderful furniture, the IBM Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair, ground-breaking exhibition designs, and over 100 short films.
Their place in the world of "Design" (whatever that means) is both unclear and totally manifest, maybe because of their uncanny understanding of scale: They managed to tenderly articulate the relative dimensionality of the universe while molding chairs out of fiberglass, as though those two things were part and parcel of the same practice.
Charles Eames once called modern architecture "a philosophy of life," as opposed to a style. Obviously, because the Eames' architectural practice extended far beyond putting buildings together: They were architects of form (furniture), sure, but maybe more than anything else, they were information architects. They did with ideas what they did with furniture, by always arranging shapes and structures into their most minimal components. The end product is always radically simplified, both aesthetically unfettered and popular, in the sense of being comprehensible to all, without bias. It was often said of their low side chairs and molded plywood furniture that they were both "strong," and "light;" in the same sense, their films and exhibition designs articulated inordinately complex ideas (strong) without ever being bogged down (light).
Of course, they weren't scientists, but they explained the world the way scientists should. I know everyone saw this movie in grammar school, but Powers Of Ten is a monument of humility and grace, as well as a perfect example of the Eamesian tendency to talk simply about complicated things -- here, the relative size of the Universe. And yes, the opening scene of the Robert Zemeckis film Contact bites this experiment of "adding another zero" with considerable tinseltown panache, to be honest.
While on the science tip: the Eames office made a series of "Mathematical Peepshows" for IBM, including some animated films that simplified the conceptual workings of computers. These, as well as their wonderful film about Polaroid's SX-70 Sonar Camera, are worthy of seeking out. You can find them on the Films of Charles and Ray Eames DVD set (Netflix has 'em).
Theme #2 echoing throughout the 50-year Eames tenure is a ceaseless elevation of the seemingly mundane; a great deal of their short films are simple celebrations of the lives of material objects. The 15-minute Tops, for example, shows a beautiful collection of tops in every stage of spin and rattle, while Bread is a series of panning shots of fresh-baked bread of all forms (at the original screening, Ray Eames orchestrated bread-smells through the theater's ventilation system). Toccata for Toy Trains places antique toys in a fanciful, collaborative environment with one another. The Eameses collected knick-knacks from all around the world; to them, objects had presence, rights, onus, and the correct use of quotidian objects was essential to human well-being, as well as pleasure. From the 1972 film, Design Q&A:
Q: Does design imply the idea of products that are necessarily useful?
A: Yes— even though the use might be surely subtle.
Q: It is able to cooperate in the creation of works reserved solely for pleasure?
A: Who would say that pleasure is not useful?
It makes sense that they would be so obsessed with making documentary-style films about objects, since all they did in their careers was sacralize quotidian, functional things. They are most known for designing chairs, for crying out loud: how much more pragmatic can you get?
Both of these prevailing ideas -- the radical simplification of form and the celebration of the mundane -- are rooted, I think, in the same all-encompassing ethic. Charles and Ray Eames understood that all artists are also, to a certain extent, curators. Painters collect forms and color into a predetermined personal space, the canvas, and all their work has something to do with this, no matter how conceptual: all we do in life is collect ideas and re-arrange them. The Eameses got it, and I don't think they ever considered that they were stepping outside of their architectural or design practice by making films, photographs, textiles, or toys. It was all part of the same thing: a desire to curate the world into a comprehensible, beautiful, and efficient place.
Eames Office
Library of Congress' Eames Exhibition
12:30 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Le Grand Saut
Archived From May 1, 2007 (5) Comments
Based on the theory of General Relativity, Albert Einstein knew that a man hurtling through the emptiness of space wouldn't be able to detect whether or not he was falling; he called this "a happy idea.” Of course, not enough people are experienced in the field of free-fall space-floating to corroborate this notion. It seems that some variables would have to be in check -- does the parachute work? can I breathe? where is land? -- before joy could creep into the equation; even then, the vision of Frank Poole careening through black space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is difficult to shake.
Still, there must be something to it. After all, the Apollo 11 landing module was impulsively dubbed the “Eagle,” and we all know how the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to stick around in low-Earth orbit for more than 24 hours, famously replied to a call from mission control with the elated cry: “I am Eagle! I am Eagle!”
For some, it’s a happy idea to find oneself among -- or beyond -- the birds, exempt from the rules of up-and-down. Take for example the parachutist and former French army colonel Michel Fournier, whose planned leap from 130,000 feet above the snowy fields of Saskatchewan this year will shatter the world records for both free-fall and human balloon flights. He can’t help but think of eagles, either.
“When you're in the air,” affirms Fournier, who has 8,600 parachute jumps under his belt, “you are struck with such a high dose of adrenaline that you immediately take yourself for the most beautiful of birds, the bald eagle. Only parachutists truly know why the birds sing."
I know that I once publicly decried Fournier's leap as being a feat of "human extremist frivolity," but after corresponding with him over email and getting an idea of his myopic sincerity, I've changed camps. Besides, I love space and am in no position to lambaste the dreams of others.
Fournier’s leap, which will take place in August of this year (after many postponements), has been dubbed the"Super Jump," or “Grand Saut.“ It's been in the works for over 14 years, despite a flock of financial setbacks -- advertising space, incidentally, is still available on the balloon gondola that will bring him to altitude -- persistent equipment failures, and the general incredulity of the scientific community.
The sexagenarian Frenchman is not easily dissuaded; he has an initial budget of 12 million dollars. Flanked by a litany of press attachés, engineers, astronauts and launch technicians, decked in a special “space suit” designed by the French Textile Institute, and high on 4 hours of pure oxygen inhalation, Fournier will reverse Neil Armstrong’s legendary axiom: One giant leap for man, maybe, but one small step for mankind.
Of course, this is not so much about mankind; Fournier frames his feat, rather, as a rare moment of pure individualism in a world -- and a scientific community -- increasingly defined by structures of collectivity. With the success of his jump, his website preens, Michel Fournier will become “an archetype of the Happy Man That Lives Out His Dreams.”
Moreover, it will dwarf the previous record set at the dawn of the space age by Joseph Kittinger, the US Air Force test dummy of “Project Excelsior,” an Air Force venture ostensibly created to explore the increasingly important issue of flight crew safety at high altitude. Kittinger, arguably the first man in space, floated up to 102,800 feet in a military-issued balloon, strapped a camera to his helmet, and dove off, arms splayed. He fell for 4 1/2 minutes at the speed of sound through the nether regions of space before passing through the familiar clouds and into the thick atmosphere of Earth. The footage of this feat is literally crazy to watch.
In Einstein’s defense, parenthetically, Kittinger plummeted to Earth so quickly that he didn't feel as though he were falling: It was only by looking at the rapidly receding helium balloon that he even realized in which direction he was going. Fournier will climb higher, and fall faster. It stands to reason, then, that he might have more fun.
Now that commercial space travel looms closer, however, and NASA’s slated to send men back the moon, what’s the big idea with Fournier’s jump? Is this self-avowed altitude-junkie trying to grab onto a long-musty trophy, or does another staggering parachute leap through the ether warrant scientific merit of its own? The Super Jump team stresses the feat’s scientific worth; regardless of how strongly its solitude smacks of daredevilism (“I find myself perpetually battling the solitary nature of this,” Fournier acquiesced to me), the project is among the first to address the human body’s reaction to breaking the sound barrier, and emphasizes that establishing a high-altitude human presence will ultimately aid astronauts during pivotal moments of take-off and landing.
Fournier gives credit where it’s due, however, “Joe Kittinger is my idol,” he gushes, “I've always been obsessed with this notion that I could fly even higher than him.”
Perhaps Einstein was right, although not quite how he might have imagined to be. It may not be the emptiness of space, nor the feeling of disconnect from gravity’s influence that elicits such a strong desire to fly through the air, but rather the knowledge of being the one who flew the highest.
7:10 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Two Things
Archived From April 11, 2007 (5) Comments
1. Because I love to share my human and technological developments with you, readers, I proudly present, in the unabashed tradition of the Uniarian Brotherhood (incidentally, my latest Unarius E-Flash informs me that they've digitally remastered "Infinite Perspectus"), my Very First Flash Animation. It took me a very long time to make and is almost completely inspired by this piece of new-age propaganda sent to me by Sarah Anderson, who has something of an Infinite Perspectus herself.
2. To legitimize the borderline fluff of this entry, let me include my own Universe E-Flash: an increasingly magic-obsessed Jona (YACHT) and I will be red-eyeing to New York City tomorrow evening, in order to perform our latest Power Point oeuvre for the good people of Rhizome.org. The performance will take place on April 16th at the Hiro Ballroom of the Maritime Hotel, be MC'ed by Cory Arcangel, and be appropriately expensive. It also boasts a mind-melding flyer image by Takeshi Murata. It is a benefit for a good cause (new media art).
4:37 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
The Intelligent Universe
Archived From April 4, 2007 (0) Comments
James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.
Dude also rolled with J.P. Sartre in 1967, edited the Yale Law Journal, counts Ray Kurzweil among his colleagues, and was a six-year Oregon State Senator. I also went to elementary school with his son.
Thanks to the good people over at the Willamette Week, I had the opportunity to pursue some really metaphysical, extended e-mail conversations with Jim Gardner, the most interesting of which is featured below. Get deep with me: it's worth it.
Universe: I'm interested in the process of explaining complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. There are moments of great elegance in your book, in terms of how compactly you manage to lay out huge ideas. Is this something you find difficult -- or, as a self-avowed "scientific generalist," does this sort of synthesis come naturally?
Gardner: The composition of both Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe was excruciatingly difficult for me. The two books presented the most daunting set of intellectual challenges I have ever confronted, both in terms of coming to grips with the implications of some very unusual ideas and then communicating those ideas and implications to a lay audience. That being said, there were extraordinary “Aha!” moments I experienced throughout the process of writing both books that were truly exhilarating—moments that more than compensated for all the pain.
Universe: You often cite Ray Kurzweil's ideas of our transhuman or post-biological future. As a writer, what do you think the role of writing -- or more generally, of culture -- will be in a post-biological society? Does the singularity necessarily imply an end to creativity and the arts as we know them, or simply a huge shift?
Gardner: I believe that culture and art will continue to flourish in a post-biological future. That future will build on what has gone before. Indeed, it will represent a fusion of the human and the transhuman. (As you saw in the last part of my book, I disagree with the pessimistic views of Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood’s End.) Because it will vastly expand the realm of intellectual possibilities and the sheer size of available cultural space, the onset of the Singularity should facilitate an immense burst of creativity and give birth to new artistic genres that we can only dimly foresee. Some people believe, for instance, that we are on the verge of a Golden Age of truly artistic video games and that the Shakespeare of this genre may already have been born. I would add that that video-game Shakespeare need not necessarily be a traditional, unaugmented human being.
Universe: Will the Internet survive the technological singularity?
Gardner: Oh yes. Indeed, I believe we are just at the beginning of the transformation of the Internet into a true global nervous system. The increasing pervasiveness of Internet-enabled applications—which will leash humans ever more tightly to machines (think of the Blackberry epidemic) and link machines to machines with humans essentially out of the loop—will propel the whole shebang, at an ever accelerating pace, toward the future that Teilhard de Chardin foresaw.
Universe: I'm sure you've been asked this before, but what (if any) role did spirituality play in the formulation of your Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis? It's a profoundly hopeful way of approaching the Universe.
Gardner: None really. I am not a religious person. I began my quest almost accidentally by attempting to answer what seemed to me to be a very straightforward question: what process could conceivably supply the missing von Neumann elements—elements that von Neumann demonstrated were logically essential for any self-replicating object—in the context of Lee Smolin’s hypothesis of cosmological natural selection. (This is covered in detail in the Complexity essay that is included as an appendix in The Intelligent Universe and is entitled “The Selfish Biocosm: Complexity as Cosmology.”) It was only after I framed the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis that its extraordinary implications slowly began to dawn on me. I certainly did not anticipate them at the beginning of the process of discovery. The whole experience reminds me of graphically displaying a fractal or graphically displaying the results of running cellular automata through millions of iteration. From so simple a beginning—Darwin’s wonderful phrase—endless and totally unsuspected diversity and richness of detail emerges, almost miraculously.
Universe: Your hypothesis is that biological evolution is part and parcel of a cosmic reproductive cycle -- a "coming alive" of the Universe. Does this mean that the human race will evolve to the point of being able to seed our own new "baby universes," as ours was sown before us? If this is the case, then are we created in the image of whatever intelligence seeded us? Does this mean that all extraterrestrial life (if it exists) would resemble us on some profound level?
Gardner: Yes, it is a central tenet of my hypothesis that our distant successors will be capable of seeding new baby universes and endowing them with “cosmic DNA” (i.e., a set of tightly constrained physical constants) that renders the Big Babies bio-friendly, so that the process of cosmic replication can continue indefinitely. An implication of the hypothesis is that our universe was created in the image (metaphorically speaking) of a predecessor universe that possessed that same or very similar “cosmic DNA.” And yes, all extraterrestrial life (if it exists) will have evolved on a common substrate (that cosmic DNA again) and thus will resemble us on some profound level.
Portlanders: James Gardner is reading from The Intelligent Universe at Powell's Technical Books, 33 NW Park Ave, at 7 pm on Monday, April 9. Hit it. It's free.
On an unrelated note: If you're interested in "Free Culture," I just wrote a short piece about Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales' recent talk at Reed College over on Urban Honking's nerd.blog.
12:00 PM | Permalink |
Interview: Thomas A. Day
Archived From March 27, 2007 (0) Comments
Welcome to the second in an ongoing series of Interviews with authors of Science Fiction. I'm lucky to have had a chance, recently, to review Portland local Thomas A. Day's A Grey Moon Over China, a totally postapocalyptic epic that takes the ongoing cultural fear of an energy crisis to a particularly dark and alienating place in the cosmos. He's an interesting writer for his sense of grand scope -- in the complexity of the narrative and the breadth of time it represents -- but also because of his background: he's worked in the aerospace industry, flown night-cargo planes, and developed Artificial Intelligence software.
Edit: Thanks to the Willamette Week for the nice mention!
Universe: Tell me about your "day job." How does it inform your writing practice?
Thomas A. Day: I serve as an expert witness in high stakes, high tech litigation. I examine patents, source code, trade secrets and computer-based evidence in disputes among the big players, advise their law firms on strategy, and then, if they can’t all just buy each other out or scare one another into settling, I go to court and get disemboweled in public for the cause. It would be imprudent to tell you how much of this process is art more than science or law, or how fleeting the truth tends to be in such matters, because then I would get slapped around with a copy of your blog the next time I testified, but…well.
The experience informs my writing in two ways, I think. First, it reminds me how frail even our strongest institutions remain in the face of concentrated economic power. The Anglo-American system of government and law is probably the best the world has managed to date, but any writer interested in the great struggles of civilization should not forget how desperately difficult it is under the best of circumstances to make a true system from such false creatures.
Second are the personal stories. We start in this litigation business, as in so many aspects of our lives, with convenient narratives about the people caught up in it: the conniving entrepreneur, the sellout, the toady, the noble whistleblower. And then we strip them bare. We read everything they’ve ever written, interview their colleagues, trace for each of them the painfully intimate trail we all leave in the computers we use, and finally fillet them alive on the deposition room table—and what’s left in every case is a deeply compelling, ultimately personal story of an ordinary human being caught up for better or worse in a wholly impersonal affair. And this—exactly this—is also the novelist’s job. So I am reminded with every one of these hundreds of stories I get to watch unfold that the writer should also never believe for a moment the convenient fictions that the careless eye is tempted to draw from the dramas around us.
Universe: Do you find a background in the sciences, as you have, is an advantage or a disadvantage when it comes to proposing fictional future technologies?
Thomas A. Day: All it does is keep me honest, probably. I find, heresy though this may be, that I’m not really terribly interested in technology. If it doesn’t clatter, stink, terrify, punish, mock or bear witness—in other words, if it doesn’t challenge our characters or deepen the atmosphere—I tend not to have much patience with it. I certainly have no idea what technology is to come, and neither does anyone else. So all my background does, with luck, is keep me from striking false notes as I set up physical forces and machines into their own roles as characters in the story.
Universe: You wrote Grey Moon Over China 18 years ago, right?
Thomas A. Day: It is curious how differently the book is being read now from how it was at first. All of the passages about the Mexican border fence, the energy wars, the Ganges delta flooding, the hair-trigger realignments of global power—none of this seemed to register with early readers. Now it is the first thing they mention.
Universe: As both a writer and as someone who has worked in AI, where do you think the future of literature lies? I often feel as though my generation is the first to ponder the ultimate relevance of text.
Thomas A. Day: Well, much as we like to flatter ourselves with our despair over the fate of literature, I think the first generation to ponder the ultimate relevance of text was probably the Sumerians of 3,000 BCE, who were appalled at the idea of their living spoken novel, the Epic of Gilgamesh, being killed by fixing it into dead clay tablets.
I’m not worried about the future of literature. We humans love a story, and in particular we love a story long enough for it to breathe deeply on its own, yet short enough to have a complete arc of suspense and resolution. In other words, a novel.
In the past year, in fact, we’ve had delightful proof of this. HBO’s serial masterpiece, the Sopranos, arc-less, is on its way out. At the same time, viewers are demanding that ABC’s Lost, which is arc on steroids, come to ground as it must, and now. And finally, they have told HBO that its exquisite Deadwood, with its low Dickensian characters, high Shakespearian form, and bleak Faulknerian landscape, resolve itself properly, no thread left untied, to the extent that HBO will have to release theater films to do it. So we have witnessed the novel’s form impose itself whole on yet another medium.
I think literature is alive and well, and it is in the viewers’ very capable hands.
10:35 AM | Permalink |
Back in Print
Archived From March 7, 2007 (5) Comments
Followers of this web-rag know well that Universe was once a bi-weekly print column in the now-defunct LA Alternative. The intertextuality of it all -- blog, paper, and the interactions between the both -- was a lot of fun, brought readers in from all over, and smeared Web 2.0 all over the place. Sadly, the LAA went kaput ("Print is dead," they crooned forlornly from their last cover) and print-Universe was homeless.
Thankfully, the wonderful people over at Portland's Willamette Week -- an alternative newsweekly with a whopping 100,000 circulation -- have taken me under their wing, and I'm now gleefully penning Science Fiction book reviews for the second-largest newspaper in Oregon. My first piece, a review of Thomas A. Day's Grey Moon Over China went "live" today. Read it here, and let's get this hypermedia exchange going again!
11:34 AM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Homebrewed Dome
Archived From March 6, 2007 (9) Comments
Did you know that the geodesic dome is the only man-made structure (apart from, maybe, a "spirit vibe") that gets proportionally stronger as it increases in size? Truth: of all known structures made out of linear elements, a geodesic dome has the highest enclosed volume to weight ratio. It is no secret to my intimates that if I ever earn enough money to own anything, I will have a home with a room-sized dome inside of it, and inside of this dome I will hang a globe of Earth, and there will be a crystal bowl of fruits in the center.
Buckminster Fuller, incidentally, didn't invent the geodesic dome. That privilege is reserved for a certain Walter Bauersfeld, who built a like-structured planetarium right after World War One. Bucky, to be fair, may have absorbed the idea from cultural osmosis independently of Bauersfeld, and he did the rest. It is to him that we owe the word "geodesic," in any case. To think of young Buck and his friends at Black Mountain College, hanging like children from the early dome's struts, euphoric in the face of tensegrity, is heartwarming.
Wanting to experience a shadow of this joy, I set out to build my own dome, albeit on a smaller scale. I gathered an armful of the Pacific Northwest's twigs from Portland's Forest Park -- taking care to gather slender, sturdy branches -- and brought them home, where they were each whittled and sanded to the appropriate density.
Following the invaluable guidelines of Desert Domes, which, despite its deeper Burning Man aesthetic, provides a simple strut-length calculator and ample mathematical formulae, I decided on a relatively simple 2V structure (the "V" represents the structure's chord factor). This meant that I needed only two strut sizes, and hence I cut my twigs accordingly, into 3" and 3.5" lengths. After that, I followed a diagram and carefully pieced it together. The glue was tricky: my original call of using polyurethane was a disaster, since it dries to rigid immovability. I disassembled and started again with rubber cement, which provided the necessary flexibility. The whole project took me weeks, which is probably about as long as it would take to construct a human-sized geodesic home.
The structure surprised me on many occasions; despite my shoddy craftsmanship, it held itself up without support very early in the construction. A moment of revelation, too, occurred midway through the process. Now building the dome firsthand, I suddenly understood that the edges of all the small triangles make up larger, remarkable circles -- "great circles," they're called -- that distribute stress across the sphere. These circles are the geodesics, and where they intersect, triangles are born. The beauty of this interconnectedness, once I saw it, was striking.
7:40 PM | Permalink | (9) Comments
Universal Overhaul
Archived From March 4, 2007 (6) Comments
The French have a Internet neologism that I particularly like, "Internautes," which of course is a sort of digital traveler, an Astronaut of the web. If any word is more fitting for this blog's readership, I don't what it is.
Welcome, Internauts, to this new version of Universe. We were long overdue for a design overhaul -- cutesy deep-sea creatures are a thing of the past, as is darkness -- and this one, appropriately, is a wonderful collaboration between myself and the Team Yacht one-man band. Influences: Charles and Ray Eames, 60's IBM advertisements (often one and the same), the wormhole to Vega that so brilliantly concludes the 1997 film, Contact. With this redesign, 'nauts, we will plunge headlong into another year's worth of great changes. What will be addressed?
Among many other things: messages pointing upwards from Earth and into interstellar space, Arecibo, Carl Sagan's weed-smoking treatises, sounds made by the human body and the shuttering beat of pulsars, more Interviews, SETI, new Science Fiction, tensegrity, money, writing, the patterns inside of envelopes, "the thing's hollow -- it goes on forever -- and -- oh my God! -- it's full of stars!" Starting from Planet Earth and panning out, out, we'll pass by the planets one by one (the radio signals aging, growing fainter as we go), then the whole galaxy, and then our galaxy will dwindle to a pinprick among the other galaxies, and so forth, forever.
6:13 PM | Permalink | (6) Comments
Universe Worldcast #2
Archived From February 19, 2007 (10) Comments
Following the runaway success of the first Universe podcast, I have decided to make this -- so to speak -- a running thing. This one is less "vibes" and more "ambiance," and includes some human voices reading texts, so if that kind of thing upsets you, steer clear.
Some highlights, which might elucidate the relevance of any of this, are the Brian Eno recording of algorithmic bell tones inspired by the Long Now clock's now-prototyped chime mechanism, Cacao's wonderful Bucky Fuller-inspired dome music, Mort Garson's Moog version of "Let The Sunshine In," and a couple glimpses into yours truly's archaic 4-Track recording projects, one of which features the voice of Unarius founder Ernest Norman.
Universe Podcast #2 (27.9 MB, 30:22 Min) Playlist:
Pyha Vuori -- Thunder Sundress (Unreleased)
Having a Coke With You (1960) -- Frank O'Hara (The Voice of the Poet)
Changes Where Bell Number = Repeat Number -- Brian Eno (January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now)
Why I Take Good Care Of My Macintosh Computer -- Gary Snyder (Poetry on Record)
Let The Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures) -- Mort Garson (Electronic Hair Pieces)
Buoyant -- Cacao (Domes of the World)
Reciting The Airships -- Eluvium (Copia)
Tesla (Unarius Version) -- The Skulls (Unreleased)
Little Black Buzzer -- Ivor Cutler (Hammersmith Lyric, 10-Mar-02)
What About Dying? -- David Ignatow (Poetry on Record)
Throughout this podcast, there are snips of ambient noise from the recording "Steam" by Alfred Schnittke, from a record called "Electroacoustic Music (Russian Early Electronics 1964-71)." These are mostly to make the poems sound less like poems.
For your iPod!
5:33 PM | Permalink | (10) Comments
Dark World, Dark Signs
Archived From February 13, 2007 (1) Comments
The most recent issue of Cabinet Magazine has a really good article by artist and CIA expert Trevor Palgen about the iconography of military insignia, particularly of those branches of the military that "don't exist." How do you celebrate your work with traditional military regalia, Palgen asks, while retaining the secrecy which defines it? It's an interesting question.
Well, sometimes you don't. Take for example this embroidered patch, distributed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the US "black" space agency primarily responsible for the operation of military reconnaissance satellites (and God-knows-what-else). The patch was released by the NRO to commemorate the launch of a Titan 4B from Vandenberg Air Force Base -- one that boosted, according to the Air Force, a classified payload into orbit.
Classified, that is, unless you can read into the NRO's weird symbolism. Apparently, the patch -- right down to the angles of those boomerang shapes -- is a dead giveaway about the launch payload, that, it has now been confirmed, were four "Lacrosse" recon-satellittes, which give the U.S. military the ability to monitor problem spots around the world and accurately target weapons in almost real time. Yikes, that is a whole other ball of yarn entirely that I am not going to tangle with now.
On a more abstract level, these kinds of patches betray the U.S. military's deep-rooted love of insignia and symbolism. So profound was their desire to reduce, stylize, and graphically compartmentalize the event that they couldn't contain themselves from nearly giving away really classified information. It's baffling, though. Who is this highly-coded symbolism, this "formal doctrine of signs," as Charles Sanders Pierce had it, for? The people that fly the covert experimental CIA jet-planes? Most of the time, the visual rhetoric is so obscure, and yet so clearly steeped in a formal methodology of signifiers, that it's hard to see who might have the pleasure of "getting" it.
The Cabinet article has nice, full-color reproductions of some particularly oblique NRO patches, one depicting the planet wrapped up in three giant, venemous snakes flanked by the latin phrase "Nunquam Ante, Nunquam Iterum," which literally means, "Never Before, Never Again." It's enough to make me think that there's something to the whole reptoids thing.
You can also buy a slightly modded reproduction of an Air Force patch commemorating a flight test of a B-2 stealth bomber. This one boasts a classic "grey" ET and the slogan "tastes like chicken," in Latin.
Trevor Palgen, who is incidentally a really interesting artist that leads camping trips to view clandestine military bases and tracks unmarked CIA aircraft, has made an entire installation called "Symbology" addressing this issue. From his website:
"The symbols and insignia shown in the Symbology series provide a glimpse into how contemporary military units answer questions that have historically been the purview of mystery cults, secret societies, religions, and mystics: How does one represent that which, by definition, must not be represented?"
8:03 PM | Permalink | (1) 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
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
The Real Great Leap
Archived From November 17, 2006 (8) Comments
I've been thinking a lot about Explorers since my last post. Certainly exploration is intimate with extremism: extreme temperature, extreme height, extreme speed, extreme isolation. It is also a practice of firsts. After all, it matters little who the second man to climb Everest was or who made it most of the way to the North Pole. In that capacity, it represents our perhaps natural tendency to think in terms of binaries -- there is, to us, the one man who first sailed 'round Cape Horn, and then there is everyone else who didn't. Most people know little about the men who went to the moon after the Apollo 11 mission (although there were 24, in all, and 12 to walk on the surface), because those people were no longer the first.
I think, however, that there is a second level of Explorer, one that overlaps with the traditional "extreme and first" conception, but manages to shy away from its inherent binary. I hate that I'm about to use the following phrase, considering how heavily it was batted around in my liberal-arts years, but what I am alluding to, here, are explorers of the "liminal space." In a world where the most essential comfort comes from being one or the other -- us or them, if you will -- maybe the truly extreme thing is to explore whatever is in between those states. I'm not talking about this on a sexual or even a cultural level, though more power to anyone who introduces marginality into the mainstream. Rather, it's particularly frightening when people set out to explore physical places that are by nature indeterminate.
A good example is Joseph Kittinger, an American military pilot who, in August of 1960, parachuted from a hot-air balloon 102,800 feet above the Earth. It's hard to explain how far 102,800 feet above the Earth is: it's far beyond the limit the stratosphere, it's some 73,000 feet above what we call the "top of the Earth." Most importantly, it's outside the protective atmosphere of our planet, in the literal nether-zone at the very beginning of outer space. Where Kittinger jumped from, there's no blue sky, only black, and he could see the tops of our clouds thousands of feet below him. Wearing a special pressurized suit that had already sprung a leap, he fell for 4 1/2 minutes, at the speed of sound, through outer space before passing through the familiar clouds and into the thick atmosphere of Earth. I am not shitting you: although Yuri Gagarin got all the credit, Kittinger was the first man in space.
I saw the footage of his fall for the first time recently, on a particularly devastating episode of the 1999 BBC Series "The Planets," and it was genuinely horrific. Kittinger strapped a film camera to his suit before jumping, and the footage is unreal: as he falls, arms splayed, into the ether, the cloudy edge of the Earth tumbles in and out of the frame, in stark contrast to the total darkness of space. He was going so fast, apparently, that he didn't even feel as though he were falling -- it was only by looking at the rapidly receding hot-air balloon that he even realized which direction he was going in. Based on the theory of General Relativity, Albert Einstein knew that a man in the emptiness of space wouldn't be able to detect whether or not he was falling; he called this "a happy idea." From the looks of Kittinger's footage, however, it seems far from a happy state of being.
It is, however, liminal as all hell. What is more indeterminate than the space between the end of our planet and the beginning of outer space? Although Anne Herbert, who worked on the early versions of the Whole Earth Review, once said, "The sky starts at your feet. Think how brave you are to walk around," the dark void we associate with "space" doesn't really start until the end of our onion's skin of nitrogen and oxygen. I think Kittinger's feat isn't terrifying because of its extremity -- after all, men have lived in space, now -- but because the liminality of its location reminds us a little of something that frightens us: indeterminacy. At the same time, this act was temporally liminal, too, preceding the Apollo missions and seeming to augur the future well. Change is scary, and the period of transition between the age of Earth and the age of Space is characterized by its ambiguity, the way it dissolves our sense of national and species-identity. Kittinger's jump is disorienting, plunging right through the median of time and space, literally, but it gives us a unique perspective on what happened next.
Before someone beats me to it, yes, I know that the French Michel Fournier is planning to drop from 130,000 feet above the snowy fields of Saskatchewan in 2007, re-setting the world records for freefall and human balloon flights. His project is called the "Super Jump," or "Grand Saut," and though it will dwarf Kittinger's heroic leap, nothing about it smacks of "Exploration" to me. Sure, he's jumping from higher up, but he isn't the first to do it. Although it's an insane thing to do, it's not "extreme," either: Fournier's project is so gear-heavy, he'll even have a small space-craft with him, and now that we've sent probes to Venus, it's not that mind-boggling. Nor either does it address, in any capacity, the unknown or the in-between. If anything, Fournier's jump seems more in the tradition of daredevilsm than that of exploration. Knievel might be impressed, but this kind of feat of human extremist frivolity does not constitute an explorer.
5:52 AM | Permalink | (8) Comments
Add it up
Archived From August 19, 2006 (2) Comments
For effect, I'm just going to say something here, something that your outer skeptic -- nay, even your inner skeptic -- might immediately buck against. Don't worry; I'm not going to start talking about the healing power of Lemurian Seed Crystals. I will only present you with this deceptively simple idea:
"The world is a better place than it was before."
Or, alternately: "The world, on the whole, is improving."
You may, very rightly, protest: they did kill the electric car, after all. Global warming is probably going to melt the Internet, and we are in a state of constant and meaningless war. Popular culture is an amalgamation of insipid garbage, and gay marriage is still illegal. This Lemurian Healing Crystal is doing nothing! The world's going down the tubes! Just look around!
Let's, however, tune in, drop out, and simplify the question. What defines the quality of life of the world? Is it the population? The amount of wealth per capita? Literacy? Disease prevention? Spiritual crystal vibes?
Has life gotten better on Earth recently, or what? It's a simple question, but the answer seems more elusive than Nirvana.
However, according to the statisticians and software programmers at the Malmo, Sweden-based nonprofit organization Gapminder.com, the variables that go into understanding the quality of life on a global level are diverse and scattered -- but they are far from unknown.
The UN, for example, has been collecting precise global statistics of a staggering range, about everything from Internet literacy to HIV rates, since the mid-1960s. This data is incredibly rich and could potentially tell us a great deal about how the world has changed since the crystalline 60s; unfortunately, however, it is banished to unbelievably esoteric and dusty volumes that are generally inaccessible and boring. Statistics, right? Long the dread of adolescents, long bastardized by useless USA Today "Info-Graphics," and long expatriated to the cobwebbed rhetoric of phrases like -- yawn -- "see Fig. 2.5"
Statisticians, however, have an essential role to play in our blossoming world, in that they present a great deal of complex information to skilled and unskilled audiences alike. If they do badly by us, we end up feeling alienated by information. If they do well, on the other hand, laypeople become able to understand intricate images of the world in which they live, which has a huge effect on how they live and treat others.
Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund, co-founders of Gapminder, wisely observed that, "many statisticians are like musicians standing up in front of the audience showing the sheet music instead of playing it." The global UN data is no exception: it's about as efficient as a tone-deaf person trying to read a Rachmaninoff symphony using a Russian phrase book.
What Gapminder does, which doesn't exactly seem revolutionary, is make this information accessible and understandable to anyone that wants to tackle it. They make free software that overhauls the dusty UN data, makes it interactive, and shows global changes over time. It lets you choose the variables, if you like. Most of all, it makes the state of the world pretty comprehensible.
Understanding the state of the world, they figure, will help us to define humanity's problems, and will point us to the places where action would be the most effective. This much is clear.
What is really revolutionary, however, is how fruitfully optimistic their graphics are. Across the board, Gapminder's presentations of UN statistics show us a world that, despite its pockmarks and setbacks, is definitely on the up-and-up.
One breathtaking animated graphic shows the changes in child mortality in every country of the world since 1962; each country, represented by a color-coded bubble (or "bubbel," as these Swedes have it), totters across a grid whose axes represent the percentage of child deaths pitted against the number of children per average woman. As the years peel by, the bubbles of developing countries move away from the danger zone incredibly quickly -- in a mere forty years, high infant mortality rates are almost eliminated. Life everywhere on Earth, if these variables are considered, is better.
Of course, children still die sometimes, and in some countries more than others. On a long-term scale, however, the human race is doing a remarkable job of taking care of its kind. Fewer babies are being born, we are living longer, we are more literate, and the gap between rich and poor is getting smaller. It takes a lot to make a dent in this juggernaut of human progress: looking at these statistics, you realize that even the Vietnam War only momentarily stunted the drastic reduction of child mortality in the history of the country.
If we look at our immediate surroundings, things will always look bad. The human race, however, has been on this planet for a hell of a long time, and things have often looked bad. For once, we should give ourselves some credit; at least in the grand scheme of things, the world is getting better.
7:00 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Archived From May 20, 2006 (5) Comments
The drive from Los Angeles to El Cajon doesn't take more than two hours, excluding traffic. Although the scenery along the way is generally bleak, as it is on most stretches of the I-5, there is something meditative about driving along the Pacific Ocean. Once you hit El Cajon, a town which can be most flatteringly described as "nestled in the San Diego foothills," you may be put off by its monochromatic wash of strip malls, its half-abandoned downtown, or the unremitting hum of the freeway. Do not be forsaken, however, because you have come here for a reason. You don't know what to expect, but you have come to visit the Unarian Academy of Sciences, right here in inauspicious El Cajon.
Unarius has been quietly running its visitor's center on this arbitrary stretch of suburbia for years. Though wedged between a Salvation Army thrift store and a gas station, the building is far from unassuming. It's bedecked by a massive mural depicting the sunken city of Atlantis flanked by shining UFOs; a large display window containing a costumed dummy of the inventor Nikola Tesla faces the otherwise anonymous street. Residents of El Cajon walk placidly by, clearly accustomed to Tesla's presence. You, however, are not. You look him in the eyes, which are hand-painted a crystalline blue, and wonder what he could possibly be doing here, a stone's throw from San Diego.
Pushing open the oak doors and stepping inside the Unarian Academy of Sciences doesn't particularly explain the maligned Polish inventor's role in the whole affair. It does, however, lead you to a visual assault of plastic flowers, Roman statuary, semi-functional dioramas, and an overwhelming amount of cultish marginalia. A diorama of "Earth's Future City" lurks by the entryway; a triumph of hot glue and kaleidoscopic plastic beads, it gathers dust under a sign reading "Welcome Space Brothers." The model supposedly represents what cities will look like on Earth once we receive enlightenment from extraterrestrials. If you ask an employee to turn it on for you, Christmas lights embedded in the plastic structure flicker to mild effect.
Let's rewind, though. Why are you here, gaping at this electric ornament? Perhaps your curiosity was piqued after you caught a sci-fi-chedlic Unarius cable access program on afternoon television. Maybe you somehow ran across a brochure advertising the "Infinite Concept of Cosmic Creation," or any of the other series of books written by the Academy's founder, Ernest L. Norman. You might be someone interested in eccentric Americana, New-Age philosophy, flying saucers, or you might just have wandered in off of the street. You might, like myself, be an unemployed science writer with not much else to do.
Who knows, you're here now, and Carol Robinson of the Unarian Academy -- who signs her emails "In Light, Carol Robinson" -- is walking up to you with a UFO pin on her lapel, and you're going to have to pretend to buy it.
Not that pretending to buy it is going to be a difficult thing to do. Unarius, fortunately, has something in its catalogue for almost everyone; if you're not particularly interested in the 32 planets which comprise the Intergalactic Conclave of Eternal Light (represented in a "star map" made of ping-pong balls and glitter), you might appreciate learning about the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis, or of the "truth about Mars." Do you believe in past lives? Unarius proudly advertises past-life therapy as one of its myriad services, and has published autobiographies of both Jesus and Napoleon written by their present incarnations. If you don't buy that, then the paintings flocking the El Cajon visitor's center, many painted by students channeling the higher mental energies of Leonardo DaVinci, might interest you.
In fact, almost everything at the visitor's center is the product of mental channeling; all of the 90 self-published books and monographs, as well as the countless video programs and impossibly psychedelic paintings, are said to come from direct mental contact with advanced intelligent beings presently living in extraterrestrial civilizations. Unarius qualifies all of its claims by citing as "scientific" evidence these mental transmissions. Turns out, it seems, that aliens are channeling the minds of middle-aged Southern Californian women in turquoise sweat suits. And it turns out, in a pure coincidence, that aliens are way into rainbows, crystals, and tiaras.
I am interested in people who give themselves the appelation of "scientists" in their practice of a discipline outside of the traditional boundaries of Science. Whether or not they know it, they are the only ones truly exploring the porous nature of the line between the sciences and everything else: the arts, the perverse, the literary, the religious. The women at the Unarian Academy of Science are such people. Their crystal rainbow aesthetic, furthermore, is a pure articulation of how misunderstanding the original gestures of science inevitably leads to an entanglement in art. Even the channeled DaVincis, in their folly, are incredible monuments of outsider art.
Incidentally, how do you know when you are channeling a higher mental energy? If the tenets of Unarian science rely so profoundly on these transmissions straight from the mouths of the aliens themselves, then there must be a way of measuring, quantifying, the process. If you ask Carol Robinson, whose eyes gleam a crystal blue, she may point you to the water coolers dotted around the room.
"You get thirsty," she says.
12:00 AM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Unarius Lives and Universe Live
Archived From May 15, 2006 (2) Comments
Growing up, I watched a lot of television. Not the good stuff, mind you: rather, I would gambol home from elementary school to watch hours of Designing Women re-runs and then laugh uproariously at Step By Step while enacting my early OCD tendencies in elaborate Lucky Charms marshmellow seperation projects. In retrospect, I realize that I could have been playing soccer or going to sleep-away camp. My bearing witness to the worst television programming of early 1990s, however, has probably shaped me in ways I am yet to fully understand.
For example, I am haunted to this day by a "Cablevision" public-access show that I would often chance upon during my manic commercial-break channel flipping. The program in question is incredibly hard to describe: it was cultish and hosted by a ludicrous blond woman named Uriel, who appeared to be the Tammy Faye Baker of New-Age occultism. Uriel, in a floppy purple hat, would ramble incoherently about something called "the interplanetary conclave of light" while tripping out to ethereal synthesizer music and 8-bit video animations of glowing pyramids, iridescent comet tails, and UFOs bearing "love and understanding." The aesthetic was similar to the kind you see in Jehovah's Witness pamphlets about heaven: lots of rolling hills, utopian cornucopias of fruit, people in white robes stroking lions, and ringed planets setting in the sky. In short, a total mind-fuck for an already sugar-high eight-year old.
The show was a truly psychedelic and aesthetic experience for me, years before I even knew what that meant. It was, I have since discovered, the primary proselytizing arm of the Unarian Academy of Sciences, a New-Age Science movement based (appropriately) outside San Diego. Unarius, (UNiversal ARticulate Interdimensional Undestanding of Science) founded in the early 1950s by Ernest a