William Gibson interviewed by Cory Doctorow about Zero History, the Bigend trilogy and more

The volunteer service, which is available in the south-east of England, offers a free out-of-hours service to a number of NHS hospitals and can be asked to carry anything urgently needed from baby milk to blood products and X-ray results.

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Steve said his two most unusual jobs had been getting a rabies vaccine for a hospital in Milton Keynes and getting frozen urine to a London ward for next-day testing.

All Serv volunteers are unpaid, receive no expenses whatsoever and give up a few nights throughout a month to be on call to respond to requests from hospitals.

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The group is said to have begun after a motorcyclist had a serious accident and needed a transfusion. A friend volunteered to fetch the blood from the nearest hospital that held his blood type and Serv was born.

BBC News – The ‘night riders’ who help the NHS

Air – Universal traveller (via trangnghiem83)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

In 1490, the von Thurn und Taxis clan organized a postal line between European cities. Albert’s father claimed the family had the resources and manpower to start the organization after a stint as brigands in the Alps.

The Thurn und Taxis family eventually won the lucrative position of postmasters-general for the Holy Roman Empire. Their riches piled up. They moved into their 500-room castle in Regensburg in 1812. Albert still lives there with his mother and older sisters.

In our 2008 list of the planet’s richest, published in March, we found 1,125 billionaires worldwide. Of that group, 370 inherited their money. Many have had plenty of wealth in their families for multiple generations.

The U.K.’s richest citizen Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor traces his $14 billion fortune back centuries. In the 1600s, his family bought a cabbage farm. Cabbages may not make billionaires, but great real estate does. Those hundreds of acres are now hugely valuable because of their central London location. Like Albert, Grosvenor also has a title to go along with his fortune. He’s the sixth Duke of Westminster.

Dynasties Of The Billionaires – Forbes.com

Down With Everything (by Alice Taylor)

Jean Tinguely – Homage to New York (1960) (by Stephen Cornford)

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

via 24.media.tumblr.com

Martin Roemers’ “Relics of the Cold War”

This and many more amazing photos via n0t.nu who explains:

Dutch photographer Martin Roemers spent ten years compiling an incredible collection of images that expose the clandestine…

(((Really interesting point among many in this interesting interview. I don’t think it’s “cyborg culture” that has proliferated. It’s digital metamedia that’s proliferated, so that people who might have once been futurists or NASA theorists can enter the previously unknown technosocial niches of “design blogger” and “technology evangelist.”)))

(((This is an interview about a project with an extremely heavy science-fictional tinge that is in fact quite remote from science fiction. It lacks the look, feel, extrapolative techniques and sense of wonder payoff of science fiction. There’s no fiction in it, and it has scarcely a whiff of science. Basically, it’s a large clique of obviously intelligent and creative people who all more or less know each other through the Internet, and are all loosely riffing about cyborgs, and what-cyborg-means-to-them. A cultural artifact of this kind could not have existed without collapsed barriers-to-entry in publishing.)))

(((And it’s not even dull, fannish, or self-indulgent. It’s a little overwhelming in its volume and its focussed erudition, but it’s a very readable and illuminating “project” (whatever a “project” is). Certainly it’s far more interesting and gets much more to the core of the matter than, say, a comm

Bruce Sterling’s excellent meta-commentary about #50Cyborgs

Cyborg Prospecting: an interview with Tim Maly | Beyond The Beyond