Quotes

..it doesn’t seem to matter whether they interact over the Internet or via another medium. It seems that young people are mainly interested in what the particular medium or communication device can be used for. In the case of the Internet in particular, that can be one of many things: Sometimes it acts as a telephone, sometimes as a kind of souped-up television.

…According to a survey conducted by Leipzig University in 2008, more young people now access their music via various online broadcasting services than listen to it on the radio. As a consequence, the video-sharing portal YouTube has become the global jukebox, serving the musical needs of the world’s youth – although its rise to prominence as a resource for music on demand has gone largely unnoticed.

…the Internet is becoming a repository for the content of older media, sometimes even replacing them altogether. And youthful audiences, who are always on the lookout for something to share or entertainment, are now increasingly using the Internet to find this content.

Logging Off: The Internet Generation Prefers the Real World – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International

– interesting article, skewed by belief in bad futurism

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As society has become more complex and interconnected, so should our ideas about how we build and service cities. As a case in point, new “soft” technologies are already transforming hard infrastructure. Commuter train ridership, for instance, is more attractive when you can log onto a laptop and get in two more hours of work while you ride. Similarly, mobile phones have made hours stuck in traffic more palatable (even as they’ve made traffic more dangerous by distracting drivers). We could build on such practices, subsidizing fiber-optic communications lines to Main Street to encourage the growth of offices in downtowns that languish half-empty while peripheral suburbs boom. Or we could add wi-fi to all forms of public transit, encouraging commuters to get out of their cars and into existing buses and trains. But this is only a start, and we need to be daring. We need to reinvent infrastructure with new technologies.

I’d like to suggest that we embrace a cultural practice that is about as far from Congress and the White House as can be imagined: hacking. In the post-9/11 culture of government paranoia, hacking is tantamount to terrorism, but in the best sense of the word, hacking sets out not to harm other people but to expand our horizons, using systems in ways they were not intended as a means to free information. This is amply shown by the internet’s rapid growth, which stems from its status as an ideal environment for hackers. Anyone with a small investment in access can build new applications and interfaces. Why not open up infrastructure in a similar way? Legislating open access to data in new and existing infrastructure would allow developers to build applications—many of them as yet unforeseen—that would exploit that data to expand our infrastructural possibilities.

Take Google Maps on the iPhone. This service delivers up-to-date information about traffic speeds. Granted, it’s not perfect. Not all routes are covered, the data is too coarse, and sometimes it is unavailable, making real-time routing tricky. Still, I have a good sense of whether I should take the George Washington Bridge or the Holland Tunnel on the odd occasion when I have to drive into the city. With technology like this, there’s no reason why New York’s subway riders can’t be equally enlightened. If the MTA knows where its trains are, we should know too. It’s preposterous to wait forever to get on a local train only to find out—once the doors have closed—that the train is inexplicably going express, right past your stop. Government agencies have such information at their disposal, yet we, the users, don’t. Incredibly, forms of data as basic as subway schedules can still be hard to obtain, often requiring either Google’s muscle or a canny lawyer and a Freedom of Information Act request.

Infrastructure: A Hacker’s Manifesto – The Architect’s Newspaper
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He wants to secure humanity’s future by turning the human race into a space-faring people able to colonise other planets. It’s the only way, Musk believes, that we can be saved, either from destroying ourselves or from some outside calamity. To put it mildly, Musk thinks big and takes the long view. “It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now,” he says in an accent hinting at his childhood in South Africa. “It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.”

…

Using its hyper-efficient Merlin engines, SpaceX has successfully flown its first rocket, Falcon 1, up into space, where it put a satellite into orbit. Then it successfully flew the much bigger Falcon 9 rocket earlier this year. Now the company is working on Dragon, a space capsule that will sit on top of a Falcon 9 and deliver first cargo – and then, hopefully, astronauts – to the International Space Station.

SpaceX, which was only founded in 2002, is not even a decade old. Yet it is doing things in space that some countries with their own national space programmes have not yet achieved. “When we launched the initial rocket actually leaving the launch pad, that was awesome,” Musk says, gazing at the Dragon module being built. “Getting into orbit was when a lot of people thought: OK, it’s real. That’s something that South Korea tried a couple of times and they failed. Brazil tried three times and they failed. This is normally something a country does, and only a few countries have succeeded.”
…

SpaceX’s Merlin engines are beautifully engineered and powerful, but simply made. They run on highly refined kerosene that costs less than petrol. The rockets they power – in the shape of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 – are also simple. They have fewer stages (where one bit of the rocket separates from the other) than their rivals and are mostly re-usable. Thus they can put cargo into space for a fraction of the cost.

The Dragon module is also a throwback. It looks nothing like the space shuttle, which it essentially hopes to replace as the “taxi” service to the International Space Station. Instead, it resembles something from the 60s, being shaped like a shuttlecock.

…through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth’s orbit. He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World. “One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.”

Elon Musk: ‘I’m planning to retire to Mars’ | Discover | Technology | The Observer
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Anthropologists have unearthed the remains of an apparent Neanderthal cave sleeping chamber, complete with a hearth and nearby grass beds that might have once been covered with animal fur.

Neanderthals inhabited the cozy Late Pleistocene room, located within Esquilleu Cave in Cantabria, Spain, anywhere between 53,000 to 39,000 years ago, according to a Journal of Archaeological Science paper concerning the discovery.

Living the ultimate clean and literally green lifestyle, the Neanderthals appear to have constructed new beds out of grass every so often, using the old bedding material to help fuel the hearth.

…Evidence is building that Neanderthals in other locations constructed such functional living spaces within caves and rock shelters.

Neanderthal’s Cozy Bedroom Unearthed : Discovery News
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Freelancing means walking from the West Village to the Upper East Side and back because you don’t have enough money for the subway. Freelancing means being so poor and so hungry for so long that you “eat” a bowl of soup that’s just hot water, crushed-up multivitamins and half your spice rack (mostly garlic salt).

…

Freelancing is that remarkable stretch from February to December 2009, where I wrote entire features… using only my phone, a first-generation iPhone jailbroken for T-mobile, bought for $100 from a friend at Mac Week. That was because my computer had broken and I couldn’t afford a replacement.

Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup – The Awl
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Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible internet show got watched by a minimum of 2.2 million people in the five days it ran on the American iPlayer-ish Hulu service. For much of that time, the stream was locked to US-only computers. After that, you could only get it on iTunes for $3.99 a pop – and it sat at the top of the iTunes charts for some time. It didn’t go anywhere near a TV screen until the DVD release.

The inspiration for doing Dr Horrible as television-not-for-television was Felicia Day’s The Guild, a sitcom about online game-players, now shooting its fourth season. The first episode was “broadcast” by YouTube, where it has a current tally of over four million plays. Now you can find it on iTunes and Xbox Live.

There’s money out there. This was the same money given to Radiohead and Trent Reznor for music, to Wil Wheaton for e-books. People are more comfortable with buying or renting digital goods – and they’re certainly fine with streaming it for free and spending attention-economy currency on spreading the word and supporting the work.

Warren Ellis: The death of TV as we know it
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Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.

Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.

“The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003
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That is true on a stretch of Farnsworth Street that has been reclaimed by artists and activists, a leafy block in eastern Detroit surrounded by severe blight. The Yes Farm, a communal building with a stage and a studio, beckons on a corner, even if it doesn’t always have lights inside. Pickup soccer games happen on the empty lots at dusk. On a weekday evening Dutch artists in the middle of a two-month residency offered a talk on the sidewalk along with homemade fruit tarts.

But Detroit is far from idyllic. Jeff Sturges, who lives on Farnsworth Street and helps run the Fab Lab, a design shop in a trailer, pointed to a scar near his mouth, from an attempted holdup. “It’s an extreme city,” said Mr. Sturges, 33, an architect by training who moved here in September from the South Bronx. “There are some days where I get up and say, ‘What am I doing to myself?’ ” But, he quickly added, mostly he is pleased to be here. He recently started a hacker space, a collective for technology and art projects, one of a handful to open around Detroit within the last year.

Still, the number of people who have this creative do-gooder verve is small. The largest Soup only had 120 guests. “You can’t change a city of 800,000 with 200 people,” said Phil Cooley, an owner of the popular Slows Bar BQ in Detroit. “There’s so much work to do.”

Wringing Art Out of Rubble in Detroit – NYTimes.com
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To get used to the dizzying feeling of weightlessness, astronauts spend a considerable chunk of time in water. The initial test is to swim three lengths of a 25-metre pool without stopping. That might sound easy, but candidates must then do it again, and also tread water for 10 minutes… in a spacesuit. As if that’s not enough, each astronaut has to undergo a military water survival training course and become fully scuba qualified to start getting used to the exciting – but risky – sensation of being in space.

Wannabe astronauts get a more authentic taste of weightlessness as passengers in the so-called Vomit Comet – a converted C-9 jet aircraft that performs parabolic manoeuvres to produce periods of weightlessness that last about 20 seconds. Though that might seem fun as a one-off – even Stephen Hawking volunteered for it – prepare to feel queasy: the process is repeated up to 40 times in a day for trainees.

Short Sharp Science: How to be an astronaut 2: Beating boot camp
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No show in American television history, it is safe to say, has ever put so much effort into maintaining historically appropriate ways of speaking — and no show has attracted so much scrutiny for its efforts. The three seasons that have been broadcast, set between 1960 and 1963, triggered endless arguments in online discussion forums, with entire threads devoted to potential anachronisms.

…

When I spoke recently with Matthew Weiner, the creator, executive producer and head writer of “Mad Men,” he readily admitted that goofs sneak through on his show. He said he still regrets allowing the character Joan to say “The medium is the message” in the first season, four years before Marshall McLuhan introduced the dictum in print. But he defends Joan’s year-end valedictory, “1960, I am so over you,” by pointing to the Cole Porter song “So in Love” from “Kiss Me, Kate.” Scholars of semantics might disagree, seeing a nuance between Porter’s use of the adverb so, which quantifies the extent to which the character is in love, and the later Generation X-style spin on the word as an intensifier meaning “extremely” or “completely” without any comparison of relative degree.

Other lines that have struck a discordant note with quibblers include Don’s “The window for this apology is closing” and Roger’s “I know you have to be on the same page as him.” Window in its metaphorical sense (as in a window of opportunity) and on the same page evidently date to the late ’70s. In a piece in The New Republic, the linguist John McWhorter complained that Peggy’s line “I’m in a very good place right now” is actually in a bad place, historically speaking. Even interjections can come under fire. When the character Sal reacts to the abrupt end of a screening of “Bye Bye Birdie” by exclaiming “awwa!” his falling-and-rising intonation has a 21st-century tinge, according to the linguist Neal Whitman.

…

To a large extent, Weiner and his staff members brought this festival of nitpickery on themselves through their own perfectionism. The show is famous for its loving attention to retro details, most notably in the set design (Weiner has been known to halt production over matters as subtle as the size of fruit in a bowl) and wardrobe (the actresses bravely suffer through the exquisite discomfort of vintage undergarments). Language naturally comes under the same microscope. To try to ensure accuracy, Weiner and his fellow writers sometimes take cues from the films and books of the era, but, as Weiner told me, those sources don’t necessarily provide the best window into genuine speech patterns. “You’re much better off if you can find a letter from your grandmother,” he said. He did acknowledge that Joan owes much of her sultry style to the writings of Helen Gurley Brown, the author of ’60s advice books like “Sex and the Single Girl” and “Sex and the Office.”

On Language – The Language of ‘Mad Men’ – NYTimes.com
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