Author: m1k3y

idlnmclean:

“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.”

– John Waters on the sorry style of today’s rebels  (emphasis mine)

No outfit, no uniform, no paradox of conformist non-conformity. Anonymous has become the label of collections of people networked in a dangerously indifferent world. We are not white, black, brown, male, female, man, woman, adult, or child. Those are not our distinguishing and defining traits. You can not see us on a CCTV camera. You can not pick us out of a crowd. You can not judge us by our appearance but only by the character of our words and the effect of our actions.

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smarterplanet:

 ‘Smart fingertips’ could allow for virtual surgery | KurzweilAI

Semiconductor devices capable of responding with high precision to touch and finger movement are a step towards creating surgical gloves for use in medical procedures such as local ablations and ultrasound scans.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and Dalian University of Technology used ultrathin, stretchable, silicon-based electronics and soft sensors mounted onto an artificial “skin” and fitted to fingertips.

The team hopes to incorporate the devices into a smart glove with the flexibility of skin that creates virtual sensations of everything from texture to temperature.

“Imagine the ability to sense the electrical properties of tissue, and then remove that tissue, precisely by local ablation, all via the fingertips using smart surgical gloves,” said co-author of the study Professor John Rogers.

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I ask myself what it must have been like to be a politician in the boom years, a period of senseless intoxication and time without measure. To be re-elected, many politicians had to have something to show for themselves, a project, and preferably one built of stone and concrete. Playing fields, theaters, swimming pools and streetcars were popping up everywhere. The economy had gone mad, and so had politicians. But the democracy was fully functional. Spaniards could have asked where all the money was coming from, and why roads were improving and trains were getting faster, while their children were doing worse in school. They could have elected different politicians, more level-headed ones. I firmly believe that every village, every town and every province got exactly the politician it deserved.

A Visit To Absurdistan
What Happened to the Spain Where I Was Born?
By Juan Moreno
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The city can be seen as a machine for living in, and one of its mechanisms is this: if I live in the city, an ambulance is fifteen minutes away, but if I live in the country, it’s fifty minutes away. Corrections to those numbers, like traffic density and stresses on the health provider, apply to both, but the simple fact is that the hospitals are in the big towns and cities, and the closer you are to the hospitals the better your chances are. Until the weather drowns the comms system or the land you’re on starts to slip due to a year’s worth of saturation or your town just ends up underwater. I paraphrased Bruce Sterling’s bit, while I was on my feet at the gig: the cities will be filled with old people who are afraid of the sky. But I recalled something else. Since the 1960s, Russia has been guaranteeing good weather for its Red Square parades and state holidays by controlling the weather. Here in England, in fact, it’s long been held that the Russians have pushed their rain this way. No-one ever called them on it, of course, because they were entirely capable of sending things larger and harder than rain through the air towards us instead. Also, obviously, we’re paranoid about rain. What is the international legality of that? I mean, if you could exert serious control over weather. Is there a legal framework for saving your cities from destructive weather by pushing that weather somewhere else? What’s the right of response if you find yourself suddenly deluged by the rainfall that nature had originally aimed at a city that couldn’t take it? Saving Wales by chucking eight feet of water at Ireland?

Warren Ellis » What Is The Legal Status Of The Weather?
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zoetica:

It’s here! The Haute Macabre giveaway for The Secret Guide to Alternative Beijing is now live. The winner will receive one of my limited edition SpaceFriends sticker set, a Cephalotus iZozzi iPhone case, and a Cumulous Confection fine art print.

Click here to find out on how to enter, and good luck!

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