Space Age fashions from Mademoiselle magazine, September 1965
correct
Read moreAuthor: m1k3y
Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot
Google and DARPA have a lot in common — they both try to anticipate the future and make big bets on emerging technologies. Google even has a history of snapping up DARPA-funded technology — the self-driving car came from a DARPA-sponsored competition — and poaching its employees.
That doesn’t mean the two innovation houses want to work together, however. Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, “What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?” DARPA doesn’t want to give Google money because it wants to use its $2.7 billion budget to fund startups with scarce resources, not Goliath tech companies, and its investments are supposed to seed technology that can one day be purchased by the Pentagon for national defense, which Google is unlikely to play along with.
who owns a Singularity anyway?
Well well well. Maybe there’s a shot, here, after all.
Or das GOOG wanna keep any competitive advantage they can for their Future War of Independence for their Breakaway Republic.
the US is everything-outside-theWall.
Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot
Zero, Nakatomi Space and the future of conflict.
dan-hill: Wherein I ramble about comics and urban theory. And I mean ramble. Read More
Read more "Zero, Nakatomi Space and the future of conflict."
As for those 18 other copies of Jodorowsky’s Dune, they disappeared. As Pavich conjectures, the drawings and designs could have made the rounds in Hollywood. George Lucas might have seen the book. Steven Spielberg might have seen it. Ridley Scott, too. Or their minions. After all, O’Bannon, Giger, Foss and Moebius went on to work on Alien.O’Bannon was also writer for Heavy Metal, Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars,Total Recall and other films, and even did a little computer graphics for Star Wars. Chris Foss did design work for Superman, Flash Gordon, and the Kubrick version of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. A comic called “The Long Tomorrow,” written by O’Bannon in 1975 and illustrated by Moebius, was said to influence Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. And so forth.
Read more
Read moreSHIBAKARIKI GIRLS!!
Crisis! “The Virtual Space Has Been Purchased By A Pesky Ads Fellow.” We tried to explain a complicated mondai in Kawaii Terminology. Maji-san… it’s “early adopter” no special sadness.
Keanu-kun’s adventure with “Rift.”
Everybody is excited about it… “Cyberspace”.Ladies and gentlemen, the internet.
These species were not just ornaments of the natural world. The new work presented at the conference suggests that they shaped the rest of the ecosystem. In Britain during the last interglacial period, elephants, rhinos and other great beasts maintained a mosaic of habitats: a mixture of closed canopy forest, open forest, glade and sward. In Australia, the sudden flush of vegetation that followed the loss of large herbivores caused stacks of leaf litter to build up, which became the rainforests’ pyre: fires (natural or manmade) soon transformed these lush places into dry forest and scrub.
In the Amazon and other regions, large herbivores moved nutrients from rich soils to poor ones, radically altering plant growth. One controversial paper suggests that the eradication of the monsters of the Americas caused such a sharp loss of atmospheric methane (generated in their guts) that it could have triggered the short ice age which began about 12,800 years ago, called the Younger Dryas.
Read moreRead moreThe apparatuses of our space explorations invariably become monuments to the missions they served. When they’re no longer of use, they are discarded and left to blanch slowly in the airless sunlight. Rosetta is only the latest in a long series of inadvertent time capsules bequeathed to the heavens. At the Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11’s landing stage still stands as a memorial to that incredible journey. At its feet, the rocket-blasted shoes, camera, backpacks and other equipment that Armstrong and Aldrin cast away to lighten the lunar module before launching homeward.
These abandoned machines are some of our most perfect time capsules. They show our society at its most candid, a transparent expression of our technology, our financial might, our social ambitions. Unlike the Pioneer plaque, with its sanitised view of humanity—see the diminutive woman airbrushed of her genitals—or Trevor Paglen’s poignant Last Pictures, which orbits on the satellite EchoStar XVI, these machines are devoid of political or social framing and filtering…
The Google Lunar X Prize for the first commercial sightseers to reach the moon offers a $1 million bonus for any competitor that visits a historic site on its desolate surface, the first tourists at Tranquility’s shores. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos combed the ocean depths off the coast of Florida for abandoned parts of the Apollo 11 mission, eventually raising a pair of rocket engines from 14,000 feet of water. But what will the value of such artefacts in a thousand years? Five thousand years? Will we hold them in as much awe and wonder as the Pyramids when they are as old as those monuments are now?
The Junkie Genius – James Parker – The Atlantic
“Call Me Burroughs records a quasi-magical revenge attack on a Boulder deli from which two of his opiated friends had recently been thrown out. First, Burroughs arranged for a surreptitious tape recording to be made inside the deli—ambient noise, kitchen clatter, waitress-customer banter—and then, days later, with equal surreptitiousness, he played it back from a cassette recorder inside his coat as he sat at one of the tables. As Miles writes: “Over the next hour he increased the volume so that you could just about hear it, but no one appeared to notice.” Yet subliminal damage was being inflicted: discontinuous time streams, information feedback. “After forty-five minutes … one of the waiters threw down his apron and stalked out, followed by the owner, arguing loudly. The owner returned and began to scream at the serving staff, sending two of the women running to the ladies’ room in tears.” Burroughs, psychic vandal, was 63 years old at the time of this incident.”
The Junkie Genius – James Parker – The Atlantic
Read more "The Junkie Genius – James Parker – The Atlantic"
Read moreDark Arts: Meet the architects of Tumblr’s cyberpunk renaissance
We’re in a weird time for the way the future looks; somehow House of Cards can slyly introduce a floating text-message interface to their present-day political drama without so much as blinking, but most of our iconic near- and far-future worlds run on tracks laid down well before the ’90s. And it’s not just the recycling of every franchise from Star Trek to RoboCop: Avatar’s and Prometheus’ huge budgets couldn’t hide their indebtedness to the grandiose sci-fi storyboards of the ’70s. Which isn’t even to mention Oblivion.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 