Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.
Read moreTen years after the introduction of Google’s self-driving car, it still shows ads for businesses in other cities. Everyone complains, but we’d be terrified if the ads were too good. There’s a mutual interest to retard the platform. You want a dumb ad network so you can believe Google doesn’t know too much. Google wants it to seem dumb so they can keep some knowledge for themselves. After watching a 15-second YouTube ad for bail bonds, the car starts driving you to the Google grocery store without you telling it you needed milk. When you arrive, the car makes you sing the grocery store’s jingle to unlock the doors.
When explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell ventured into Australia’s inland in the early 1800s, he recorded in his journals his impressions of the landscape. Around him he noted expanses of bright yellow herbs, nine miles of grain-like grass, cut and stooped, and earthen clods that had been turned up, resembling ‘ground broken by the […]
Read more
*Knock it off with those unlikely start-up schemes, and sell us the candy made from all-natural ground-up crickets
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/startups-that-will-change-your-life#3ftlm3y
the future of food
Read moreNATS – Guardians Of The Sky
From the gigantic white woman in heels roleplaying ‘Attack of The 50ft Woman’ on an airport to the assurances that she holds millions of lives in her hands, this Omnipotent Air Traffic Being clearly has our best interests at heart and yet she insists on remaining ‘unseesn and invisible.’ If infrastructure fiction did dream sequences, this would be it.
Our invisible flight controller waxes lyrical on ‘big data’ and robot planes. What exactly is the difference between ‘air traffic control’ and ‘dynamic air traffic management?’ No one knows. Doesn’t matter, it’s the future baby, which is essentially the same thing with the names changed.
The future is also ‘quieter and more efficient.’ Presumably this is because the overlord has reduced the other former populace of planet Earth to white silhouettes aimlessly milling about the code/space of airports. I guess if you’re just the blasted silhouette of a former human you don’t actually need to eat or consume or do anything at all really except pose for design fictions.
Of course, later we see the reason for the silhouettes as she boards the Hypersonic Jet Of The Future; no-one else is on it. Those silhouettes can’t recognise each-other, all familial relationships have broken down, they don’t know who they are or what to do and so they just wait, ghost-like in the airport wondering what happened to the cries of their children.
–
At NATS we believe we’re a little different. We’re best known for providing air traffic control in the UK, particularly at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports, the busiest single and dual runway airports in the world. But that’s not all we do.
We support airport and airline customers in over 30 countries globally to aid in achieving their objectives. Growth. Efficiency. Safety enhancements. Using big data to transform how air traffic control affects economies, affects people.
We’ve created a short film that asks you to consider us differently and to wonder with us what the future might hold.
“If infrastructure fiction did dream sequences, this would be it.” YES
‘Grand Canyon’ of Greenland Discovered Under Ice
The canyon predates the ice sheet that permanently covered Greenland about 1.8 million years ago, Siegert said. The channel curls across northwestern Greenland, ending in a deep fjord filled by Petermann Glacier. The find opens a whole new set of ideas to explore for scientists studying the glacier’s rapid retreat.
“If there is a channel that can transport subglacial meltwater all the way from the interior of Greenland to the coast, that flows right into Petermann Glacier, you change the whole water circulation there and have a big impact on stability,” Studinger said in an interview. “This is one of the biggest glaciers in Greenland and it produces a lot of big icebergs,” he said.
The new canyon isn’t the first amazing polar discovery from Bamber and his colleagues, who are experts in creating models of the polar regions, but it is one of the most incredible, they say. Siegert compared it to learning of Lake Vostok in Antarctica.
Read more
Read moreThis picture made me think ‘Manhattan’ wold be a better television drama if Frank Winter inexplicably tooled around The Hill on a monowheel.
*Also if Oppenheimer had more screen time as Winter’s antagonist, randomly appearing to drop existential musings that reveal themselves to be insults or dirty limericks – not unlike Sean Connery on Celebrity Jeopardy.
The audience was given an update on the current search for extraterrestrial biology including finding chemical signatures in atmospheres of exoplanets that indicate life, direct observation such as Curiosity uncovering layers of carbon strata as it climbs the hills around Mt. Sharp, or detection of radio signals which would indicate intelligent life elsewhere. They were then asked how humanity should handle such discoveries. If we discovered microbial life, what kind of impact would that have on us? If we discovered a technically sophisticated life, what would our reaction be? Further discussions focused on transcending anthropocentric thinking, questioning whether we should assume that all life was built on the same principles as life here on Earth, that our biology wasn’t universal. In the event of coming across life built on chemistry different from ours, would we even recognize it as life?
Theologians were asked to consider the status of alien life within the context of morality. What would be our responsibilities in dealing with extraterrestrials whether microbial or more complex life forms? We humans here on Earth have shown through past behavior little regard for other living things. If we can’t eat them or domesticate them to help us then we often decimate them. It’s only recently that conservation and biodiversity have been adopted as core values within our human existence. So in discovering life elsewhere what would be our behavior? Destroyer or conservationist?
In one session Christian theologians were asked if they would baptize an extraterrestrial A Jesuit in attendance is quoted by the Huffington Post as stating “any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” So on the question of baptism, if E.T. asked baptism would be granted.
NASA Meets Theologians to Discuss How We Respond to E.T.
Read more "NASA Meets Theologians to Discuss How We Respond to E.T."It’s the aesthetic. It’s supposed to be minimal and serious and authentic and (hair-shirt) ethical. But it is in fact Miserable Web.
Now that I’ve typed the words Miserable Web, I like the service much more than I did. And it doesn’t dismiss my previous conception of the place as “medical-grade internet,” either. Here is your grim prescription from Miserable Web. Meet the other patients. Enjoy your broken conversations in our infinite antiseptic white rooms, as if you were inmates in the cells of THX-1138. Consider the blank silence under our eyeless, lying smile. Even if you leave, the piece of you that loved colour and joy is still here, dying.
This is Miserable Web. Say Ello.
Ello Darkness My Old Friend | MORNING, COMPUTER
Read more "Ello Darkness My Old Friend | MORNING, COMPUTER"
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 