Read moreAs for Dune: [record producer] Allen Klein asked me to adapt The Story of O. I really wanted to get out of my business agreement with Klein. And [film producer] Michel Seydoux showed Holy Mountain in Paris, and loved it. And he said to me, “I want to produce for you a big picture. What do you want to do?” I say, “Dune.” Because a friend of mine tells me that it’s a very good book, though I didn’t know the book! He tells me it’s a science-fiction book about ecology. I say “Fantastic!” When I started to write my film’s script, I read the book. And I thought What have I done? Adapting Dune is impossible! After 100 pages, you understand nothing!
So I thought, This is so literary … I need to make something more optical. So I made a book called The Optical Book of Dune. But when I didn’t make Dune, I thought I’d take everything of mine and use it for comics:The Incal, Metabarons, Technopriests … I don’t know, 40 volumes of comics.
Quotes
The National World War II Museum hosts a time warp, with robots created by teams of middle school students moving through D-Day scenarios…The playing field includes robot missions of unloading soldiers from a Higgins boat and avoiding beach obstacles.
Miami Herald – Museum contest: What would WW2 robots do on D-Day? (via aeromenthe)
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Eventually, commercial moon landers may help carry a diverse library of cultural and biological records to the lunar surface, where they would be preserved in case Earth suffers a pandemic plague, nuclear holocaust or lethal asteroid strike.
The first artefacts to shoot for the moon could be three religious and philosophical texts. The Torah on the Moon project, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has been courting private firms to deliver a handwritten Jewish scroll, the Sefer Torah, to the lunar surface. If they succeed, later flights will carry Hindu scriptures called the Vedas and the ancient Chinese philosophical work, the I-Ching.
Each document will be housed in a space-ready capsule designed to protect it from harsh radiation and temperature changes on the moon for at least 10,000 years.
The texts would join a Bible left on the moon in 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. The red leather Bible sits on the control console of an Apollo moon buggy.
“I don’t think these religions are claiming the moon. It’s about saving our culture, saving the humanities,” says Naveen Jain, CEO of the California-based X Prize hopeful Moon Express.
Jain thinks future projects should find a representative sample of humanity, perhaps a million people, take their DNA and store it on the moon. “So in case of an asteroid strike that wipes us out like the dinosaurs, humanity can be saved.”
Jain’s idea may become a reality: New Scientist has learned that a UK-based venture is quietly developing a mission to store human, animal and plant genomes on the moon – although flaws in this plan are turning up in seed banks on Earth (see “Banked seeds are plants out of time”).
Such off-planet backup missions are proliferating, says Joanne Wheeler, a lawyer specialising in space issues at CMS Cameron McKenna in London. “There are several missions planned to put religious and spiritual icons on the moon and also to preserve some trace of humanity on it,” she says.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says that the moon could even become a “cosmic tombstone” if humans become extinct.
“We should be using it to store the best humanity has ever had to offer, like the works of Michelangelo, Beethoven, Schubert and Shakespeare,” he says.
Meanwhile, Roger Launius at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC thinks it apt that such space flight projects should be tied to religion, because space flight advocacy itself has many of the hallmarks of a religion. “There is salvation theology, in that they believe the human race will be saved by space flight’s ability to make us a multi-planetary species,” he says. “And we have pilgrimages at gatherings like launches, which are like a euphoric religious experience.”
Earth’s backup: Sending religious texts to the moon – http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229702.500-earths-backup-sending-religious-texts-to-the-moon.html?full=true
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Facebook and Google seem very powerful, but they live about a week from total ruin all the time. They know the cost of leaving social networks individually is high, but en masse, becomes next to nothing. Windows could be replaced with something better written. The US government would fall to a general revolt in a matter of days. It wouldn’t take a total defection or a general revolt to change everything, because corporations and governments would rather bend to demands than die. These entities do everything they can get away with — but we’ve forgotten that we’re the ones that are letting them get away with things.
Everything is Broken by Quinn Norton –
https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1
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https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1
Read moreMedia lets you clone pieces of yourself and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf. Even while you’re sleeping, your media —your books, your blog posts, your tweets—it’s on the march. It’s out there trying to making connections. Mostly it’s failing, but that’s okay: these days, copies are cheap. We’re all Jamie Madrox now.
…
We all do this; we all use media every day to extend our senses and our spheres of influence. At some scale, sure, things gets weird, and you lose track of you, and suddenly you’re being choked to death by your own robotic arm. But way before you get to that point, you get these amazing powers:
The power to reach beyond yourself, outward in space and forward in time.The power to have conversations—really rich, meaningful conversations—with more people than you could ever break bread with.And, increasingly, the power to get reports back from your little platoon—to see how your media is performing.
We’re all media cyborgs now.
Study yourself the way a hunter studied prey. Exploit your own weaknesses to create desired changes within yourself.
Grant Morrison (via beherenowandzen)
Have we talked about Revolver recently?
(via zerosociety)
Not aside from me raving about it to theheadlesshashasheen & victoria-vacuus.
We should.
(via coldalbion)
Lot of love for Revolver in my crewe, especially Wolven and of course zerosociety. You’re aware of the vast difference between the UK and US cuts, yes?
(via catvincent)
Only seen the UK one, so no. What’s the difference.?
(via coldalbion)
Jesus, yeah, I’m obsessed with this film, and the differences are massive. It’s not just an issue of there being a lot of content cut from the US version, although there is, but the UK and US versions are edited in a wildly different order with completely different structures and endings.
The UK version is by far the superior version, although I might trade the US after-credits sequence (mystics and psychologists discussing the ego) for the UK sequence (famous mob murders).
I keep meaning to do a write-up summarizing the differences, but the US version is almost a different movie, honestly.
(via zerosociety)
Fuck. Going by the end credits, I think we must have gotten the US cut down here… Or at least I did. m1k3y?
(via buddyblanc)
This film cries out for a definitive fancut. Even if that’s just swapping the end title sequences.
buddyblanc – maybe we should get both versions and make detailed notes on our own anthropology.
What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.
For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes twice a year.
From ‘Manhattanhenge’ by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. Tonight is the second night this year that the sunset will align with Manhattan’s grid—producing a luminous effect.
—Daisy (via anthonylawsonbaker)
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—Daisy (via anthonylawsonbaker)
Read moreWhat happens in a world, or at least a nation, where most of the population lives semi-comfortably (by historical standards) off a basic income, supplemented by occasional temporary gigs, thanks to the economic output of tomorrow’s technology; a small middle class works at the diminishing number of jobs which can’t be handled by technology; and a smaller-yet minority of the ultra-rich actually design the tech, and/or live off their inheritances a la Piketty? Call it a “low-scarcity” future, as opposed to the full-on Singularitarian “post-scarcity” future.
It seems to me that such a world would be extremely fertile ground for the rise of — you guessed it — a reputation economy. The key is that it wouldn’t outright replace a traditional monetary economy, at least not for some quite considerable time; rather, it would begin to thrive parallel to, and independent of, its capitalistic counterpart. Eventually, though, as I’ve argued before, since we are fundamentally social creatures, in the long run, “at some point it will be better to be awesome than to be rich.”
* this feeds nicely into that Star Trek as LARP idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395). The Star Fleet ranks as a reputation economy. Social capital etc.
I like to think on a good day that’s what we’re doing in these spaces. Bootstrappin’ the internet into a Type 1 Civ communication system. Negotiating a new culture, a new societal operating system. Eating the old world. Folding in the machines. Neotany on a global scale. Cyborg Gaia.
We definitely need new mythologies, patched out of whatever is at hand.
LLAP.
Read moreBut based on evidence from ancient bones, spears, and porridge, Speth believes our Stone Age cousins likely boiled their food. He suggests that Neanderthals boiled using only a skin bag or a birch bark tray by relying on a trick of chemistry: Water will boil at a temperature below the ignition point of almost any container, even flammable bark or hides…
Speth suggests that Neanderthals boiled foods in birch bark twisted into trays, a technology that prehistoric people used to boil maple syrup from tree sap.
Archaeologists have demonstrated that Neanderthals relied on birch tar as an adhesive for hafting spear points as long as 200,000 years ago. Making birch tar requires clever cooking in an oxygen-free container, says paleontologist Michael Bisson of Canada’s McGill University.
“I’ve burned myself trying to do it,” Bisson says, adding that Neanderthals were plenty clever when it came to manipulating birch. They likely ignited rolled-up birch bark “cigars” and plunged them into holes to cook the tar in an oxygen-free environment.
If the tar is exposed to oxygen in the air as it cooks, “it explodes,” Bisson adds.
Supporting the boiling idea, Speth said that animal bones found in Neanderthal settings are 98 percent free of scavenger’s gnawing marks, which he says suggests the fat had been cooked off.
And some grains found in the teeth of a Neanderthal buried in Iraq’s Shanidar Cave site appear to have been cooked, according to a 2011 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science report.
“It is speculative, but I think it is pretty likely that they knew how to boil,” Speth says.
In a separate talk at the meeting, University of Michigan paleontologist Andrew White noted recent evidence that Neanderthal mothers weaned their children at an earlier age than human mothers typically do. He said the early transition from milk to food supports the theory that Neanderthals boiled their youngsters’ food to make it more digestible.
Let me throw out this specifically very creepy science fiction scenario for you.
When people in a zoo or in a preserve will try to raise a panda from a baby, or try to raise a condor from a baby or whatever they have ways they can convince the other, because they are so much more intelligent than the creatures. They have all sorts of tools for convincing the creatures that they are one of them. Like they will let you feed them … you can even make yourself look like its mother or smell like its mother. And out in the wild even, you know, in many cases if you can make yourself smell perfectly like another gazelle you can walk around the gazelles, and they’re so dumb … they can smell a lion and they know it’s a lion, and they know to be alarmed. …
So it’s easy to fool them that you’re one of them. In a way that’s it’s impossible for them to detect.So, if there was another species that wanted to study us the way we study gazelles or the way we study rare birds or whatever,
if they are that much smarter than we are than we are to the animals, they would absolutely have ways to walk among us in ways that are absolutely undetectable.
Even we wouldn’t see them at all, or else we would mistake them for a fellow human.But the way we portray them in movies, like the aliens are sort of clumsy in how they do it, like they don’t know how to mimic human emotion or that they don’t understand love or they’re very robotic … We’re kind of insulting the aliens when we assume that. They’d be smart enough to come here and they’d be of much higher intelligence, but they wouldn’t be able to mimic our social cues.
Ok, just like we can smear animal urine over our own bodies in order to pass among them, they would totally know how to imitate love and charisma and all of those things.
So I think if they were here and watching us, if they were that much more advanced than we are, we would never know they’re here. We would not be capturing their ships on freakin’ camera phones or whatever.
They would pass among us completely undetected and we would never know until they chose to let us know.
David Wong (aka Jason Pargin) on the Cracked Podcast
I recommend listening to the whole thing — it’s a pretty interesting conversation overall. This was just my favorite excerpt.
(quote starts around 55:20)
This is on point for several reasons.
(via flavorcountry)
A++++
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 