November 2011
1 post
“Sarah, a transsexual, explains that before her operation, “London was...”
– Londoners by Craig Taylor - review
December 2010
1 post
Chernobyl: now open to tourists →
“From next year the heavily contaminated area around the Chernobyl power plant will be officially open to tourists with an interest in post-apocalyptic vistas, late-period Soviet history, or both. […] Ukraine’s emergency situations ministry said today that visitors would be offered tours inside the 30-mile exclusion zone set up after reactor four at the plant exploded on 26 April 1986,...
October 2009
1 post
“What would happen if a state was to physically disappear but people want to keep...”
– Increase in sea levels due to global warming could lead to ‘ghost states’
May 2009
3 posts
Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris →
“Now of all the things presented for the inspection of that faithful servant of the public, the museum curator, the most romantic, and the least likely to be true, is ambergris. I say inspection, because identification is preconceived in the mind of the finder. His treasure, stumbled upon along the sea beach, recognized with the sudden surmise that dawns like knowledge from a previous...
BART swings →
“Somebody decided to make the world just a little bit more interesting, and three red swings appeared on the BART Public Transit System in San Francisco for the public to enjoy.”
Scotch Modern →
“Recontextualizing the 10-point type of a scientific report published in 1870, Shinn has produced sleekly refined, micro-detailed vector drawings by eye, without the assistance of scans, thus presenting an ironic critique of the way in which mechanical imagery beguiles us with the trite veracity of simulacra.”
April 2009
2 posts
Where's the remotest place on Earth? →
“Very little of the world’s land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness. The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. […] Less than 10% of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.”
The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown →
“The problem goes back more than a decade, to the mid-1990s, when Brazilian radio technicians discovered they could jump on the UHF frequencies dedicated to satellites in the Navy’s Fleet Satellite Communication system, or FLTSATCOM” … “Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.”
July 2008
1 post
High Power Job →
A beautiful, mesmerizing video about the Faraday-encaged linemen of the sky. Please do watch it.
June 2008
14 posts
“Perhaps the answer lies in greening the cities — not in a vertical direction —...”
– The Guardian: ‘Farming: vertically challenged?’
“No one I know has clicked on a fucking ad in years while rushing through a...”
– Amen: A Night With Bill Gates’ New Big Hairy Vision (Brian Lam)
“The <hr> element now represents a paragraph-level thematic break.”
– The web evolves by rewriting its own history: HTML 5’s differences from HTML 4
code_swarm – Python →
A beautiful graphic visualization of the progress and evolution of the open-source Python programming language.
Fake Marshall McLuhan →
Marshall McLuhan Twitter bot (?).
(Automatic) Oblique Strategies →
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, vended hourly & freely via Twitter.
“The Gulhane was for the lost, the doomed, for people too low-caste to sleep...”
– Istanbul: Days That Were
“[There are] approximately 30 engineers and programmers at NASA who are tasked...”
– NASA: ‘Extreme programming’ controls Mars Lander robot
Tricked-out transportation from Pakistan →
These trucks and buses are simply beautiful.
“People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And...”
– New York Times: Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average
“The enthusiasm for seeing a city from the outside is the exotic or the...”
– Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, describing Walter Benjamin
“Istanbul is a place where, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to feel...”
– Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
Google To Launch Large Scale Geo-Services →
Very cool: a self-healing, self-modifying, distributed database:
Once the [geo-location] database has been boot-strapped with initial data and launched to developers via an API, users of the service will further refine and improve the service by having devices submit information on towers and signal strength (along with location) back to Google. This means that over time, the service improves...
China’s All-Seeing Eye →
Almost cyberpunk in its exposition, this amazing article from Rolling Stone details the development of the visual surveillance in Shenzhen, China. It shows how short a distance it really is to this sort of thing happening in other parts of our world.