Read morehe said the 12-29-year-old demographic is in focus for him and his colleagues. Those Millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are “much more traditional,” Toffler explained. For example, many of them watch “Jersey Shore” with their parents, he said.
Quotes
The only sane way out of a technosociety is through it, into a newer one that knows everything the older one knew and knows enough new things to dazzle and dominate the denizens of the older order.
FUCK YEAH CHAIRMAN BRUCE
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Read moreYou are known by your role, your assigned place in the hierarchy of fame, and any deviation from that causes a stir. It’s very odd.
Read moreFoursquare users get far more irate when they lose mayorship of a Starbucks, as compared to a Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. People are much more attached to the small places they visit over and over, and have some personal investment in. The smaller the venue, the bigger the value.
Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station bears little resemblance to SpaceX’s sleek headquarters. The Air Force used the site most recently for the launching of Titan rockets, now obsolete. SpaceX has leased the site for two years, knocking down the launch tower. In its place it has built a hangar, 225 feet long, 75 feet wide, where the two stages of the Falcon 9 rocket, laid out horizontally, can be mated together along with a Dragon capsule on top.
Much of the launching pad seems like it was assembled during a scavenger hunt. A 125,000-gallon liquid oxygen tank from the Apollo era was bought for $86,000 — the price of scrap metal — and refurbished. SpaceX bought some rusty railroad cars that NASA had used to transport helium and refurbished those, too.
Private Companies Like SpaceX Look to Take Over From NASA – NYTimes.com
building the future on the ruins of the past
Read moreThere’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity
Read moreWe must plan for a world in which oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil prices have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity.
Read moreCrete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.
Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.
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The standard hypothesis had been that Acheulean toolmakers reached Europe and Asia via the Middle East, passing mainly through what is now Turkey into the Balkans. The new finds suggest that their dispersals were not confined to land routes. They may lend credibility to proposals of migrations from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. Crete’s southern shore where the tools were found is 200 miles from North Africa.
…archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.
Read more[This is the reason why “science fiction” has today come to be pretty much the equivalent of social realism. In one sense, the most intense aspect of our lives today is our sense of futurity, of continual innovation and continual product turnover; and yet this futurity has no other content than “more of the same” (or of what Ernst Bloch called “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability… a merely endless, contentless zigzag”). Thus, we are always being urged to upgrade our computers, which fall quickly into obsolescence through the force of Moore’s Law; we are always looking for the next fad, the next cool thing, to such an extent that all fads and fashions seem to exist simultaneously. This urgency without change, or novelty without difference, is an expression of the commercial product cycle that dominates all aspects of our lives; it is the equivalent, on the level of content, of genre-conformity, as an expression of the claim that “There Is No Alternative”, on the level of form. As with every other aspect of its production, the strategy of Gamer in this regard is not to offer a critique, but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push it to the point of absurdity.]
Read moreOne way that today’s media “personalities” differ from nineteenth-century fictional characters, or from twentieth-century selves with interiority, is that media personalities today function so directly as personifications, or embodiments, of impersonal, impalpable, and unrepresentable forces. Indeed, this is not anything really new. It is what Marx already said about capitalists in his own time: that they were not real individuals, but personifications of capital.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 