British Telecom made these predictions of a picture-phone future. Check out how you will one day make copies of images sent to your phone!
Category Archives: Technology
Ford Magic Skyway Film from 1964
At the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, Walt Disney built the Ford Magic Skyway ride which took visitors on a ride in Ford cars through history and into the future. It makes me realize that all we are really doing when we visit Disney theme parks is celebrating nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s. Were we ever naive enough to actually attend a World’s Fair?
A is for Atom – Nuclear Documentary by Adam Curtis
This is a five-part documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis about the rise of nuclear energy in the United States. These sections make up A is for Atom which is a 1-hour segment of a much longer science and politics television series called Pandora’s Box. It chronicles the development of the nuclear power industry and shows clearly how little was ever understood about what would happen or what should be done during a nuclear accident.
Parts 2 – 5 after the jump
Pixel Art Documentary
I loathe geek culture. Its practitioners and reporters consistently talk about pixel art and steampunk. But removing the pixel art from their smartypants realm and into the realm of the artist does have its merits. It seems useful to at least consider what small blocks of light have to offer.
Man in Space – 1955 Disney Documentary
Disney’s lavish history of rockets leading right up to a pre-Sputnik 1955!
Parts 2 – 8 after the jump
The Future of Art
How is technology changing the way we make, view and distribute art? Gabriel Shalom made this film by interviewing artists at the Transmediale festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany. It was produced by KS12.
Road to the Stars – 1957 Soviet Space Vision with Stunning Special Effects
Excerpt 1 – First Men in Space:
The film is in Russian but you absolutely do not need to know Russian to enjoy it! Unfortunately, I can’t find the entire film, only these three excerpts.
Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 film, Road to the Stars, features astoundingly realistic special effects that were an inspiration and obvious blueprint for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years later. The film is an extended form of science education, building upon existing 1950s technology to predict space exploration of the future. The sequences with astronauts in zero gravity are incredibly realistic. The second excerpt from the film features the construction of and life aboard a space station in earth orbit that is not only convincing but also beautiful. There are several scenes with space station dwellers using videophones that anticipate the famous Kubrick videophone scene.
Excerpt 2 – Space Station:
Excerpt 3 – Moon Landing:
Futurama 1964!
Now that’s a future I can get into! Let’s do another ride like this today.
I Think BP is Faking its Spill Fix
Fake. It should be obvious. Any twelve year old child can look at the volcano of oil and tell you that it will never fit inside a narrow pipe. This is just public relations for the sake of the video feed. President Obama should get into a military posture immediately and remove BP from the Gulf. It is time to start arresting BP employees. This is terrorism. The ideas and execution on display from BP make no logical sense and therefore must represent something beyond what we are being made aware of. Obama needs to ask Congress to convene specifically to authorize a takeover of all BP assets and physical property worldwide by the United States. They need to basically declare a state of war against a multi-national corporation. And if they refuse, then Obama needs to move without them. I’m dead serious in my opinion on this. This is one of the worst attacks ever perpetrated against the United States. The reason I call it an attack is because what started as an accident has changed now into an ongoing effort to confuse observers of the situation and mislead them into thinking that BP is trying to stop the leak. What are other BP people doing around the world right now? What is going on in their banks? Where are they moving their money? Obama is missing the big red ball here and he’s never going to recover. I think it would be wise to very quickly and quietly remove all BP personnel from any offshore oil rigs near the U.S. and shut those rigs down asap. NASA engineers need to be pulled into this emergency and the military must provide logistics and hauling support for the effort to shut the gusher down.
The entire southern and eastern coasts of the U.S. are at severe risk and the volume of oil in the Gulf is far beyond what BP or the government have stated. This company has absolutely no concern whatsoever for what happens to the Gulf waters or the U.S. coasts. It concerns itself only with limiting financial losses and maximizing oil profits. Cleanup and stopping the spill are completely irrelevant to this company. Obama needs to consider what he would do if he wakes up tomorrow and realizes that BP is falsifying the entire operation at the spill site. What would you do, Mr. President?
Further thoughts: Extreme language and extreme action are required in this very odd situation with the Gulf disaster. I think it is only this kind of extreme, left-field thinking that will somehow break the massive inertia that is apparent in our government’s response to a major world emergency. I continue to hear high government officials, including the President, talk about what the government, military, and BP can’t do. Everyone seems to think that there’s not much that can be done that BP isn’t already doing. This thinking is very dangerous and indicates a total collapse of the nation’s intellect and general technical infrastructure. That is not the way the United States expresses itself. We are seeing what is either an anomaly or an indication of failure on a massive and existential scale. The United States that has existed up until recently would never say that it could not plug a hole 5,000 feet below the sea. Never. It would turn all of its technical, military, industrial, and intellectual resources toward filling that hole immediately. I’ve heard reports that President Obama has an IQ of 160. Really? Really? I’m not sure which test was administered to this guy, but it is quite apparent that somebody got paid a little extra to score it.
This country is bleeding out of its asshole. And our President is modeling business casual slacks on the oil-slicked shores of a destroyed southern coast.
The President should be using extreme language and taking extreme actions to get this hole filled instantaneously. He should be reacting in very much the same way he would react if a nuclear bomb had exploded somewhere on American soil. Nothing less will suffice. What is wrong with our President and what is wrong with America?
Watch Astounding Deepwater Submersible Work to Fix Gulf Oil Gusher
Update June 4 10:00 am: The BP robot operators are trying to close the valves on the gusher cap they installed last night. Meanwhile, oil blasts out through those valves while some channels up to a surface ship. It remains to be seen if by closing the valves BP can stop the uncontrolled gusher and channel all of the oil to their ships.
Update June 3 10:00 pm: It does not appear to be working. I think BP keeps insisting on using rather narrow pipes to handle this gusher which is putting out enormous loads of pressure. Why don’t they fit a large sewer pipe around this blowout preventer? A large diameter sewer pipe could simply hang around the gusher without even making a tight fit. Then the gushing oil would be gradually corralled into a somewhat narrower pipe leading to the surface. Blockages of frozen matter seen in the original effort to put a big box around the gusher must be a product primarily of using too narrow gauge a pipe for this job. You can’t try to push all this high-pressure oil into a narrow pipe leading to the surface. You have to gradually ease it up into a very wide pipe.
The cap BP is trying to fit on the gusher simply doesn’t have enough weight to press its rubber gasket tight enough to the pipe, so too much oil is leaking around it. BP’s robot operators are wonderful, but I’m having very serious doubts about the competence of its engineers. Very serious. It may be well past time for President Obama to get NASA involved. There’s no way that a good engineer is going to be trying to fit a narrow pipe over a high-pressure volcano. It’s silly.
By the way, this planetary level disaster is quite likely to wipe out most of the coast of the United States. The greatest superpower nation on earth is about to lose most of its coastline from the south all the way up the eastern seaboard to New York. A single company with a single 24-inch hole in the ground has done this. It is this event, not 9/11, that is the turning point. We have reached the end of the era of global corporations. They are too dangerous. Governments must retool and rethink. Companies like BP must be destroyed, either financially or legislatively.
Original post below:
If you want a few heroes out of this horrendous Gulf Oil Disaster, you should start by watching the work of whoever is controlling the deep water submersible arms. It’s fascinating and highly educational to observe the careful thought process that goes on in advance of every single minute movement made by this machine. Remote control at 5000 feet of depth is a rare skill indeed. BP is attempting to place a cap and pipe onto the cutoff top end of the pipe that is spewing oil into the Gulf waters. So the robots will need to be carefully controlled to aim this device and place it right into the center of the gusher.
This approach has a high probability of success. But if they miss the hole and bend something, they will need to try again. This could well be one of the great feats of engineering in modern times. Well worth watching patiently.
Artificial Life Created for the First Time
Scientists announced today that they have created the first artificial life form in human history.
The J. Craig Venter Institute has informed the White House of the incredible achievement and the possible environmental and military repercussions are already being debated.
Researchers used computers to create an artificial sequence of DNA. Then they inserted that DNA into hollowed-out cells which began to grow and replicate.
That’s a new form of life created by human beings. This may be a far more important development than going to the moon.
Delete Your Facebook Account
See the insipid goober just to the left. That’s Mark Zuckerberg. He runs Facebook, the site that gathers tons of your personal and public information to form what he hopes will be an all-pervasive social network. Being young is no excuse for this guy. A young a-hole grows into an old a-hole very quickly. This is what the Web’s leading a-hole said recently:
And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.
Do you learn to talk like a corporate dick by accident or is it something they teach in business school?
In other words: Facebook thinks making your information public is the new default norm. Private information is a thing of the past. They’ve basically just taken away users’ ability to keep their information private. Public is Facebook’s new ‘norm.’
So let’s show this pre-pubescent nincompoop that we like our privacy. Delete your Facebook account. I did. Start a blog. It’s much more fun than struggling through a crappy interface just to tell people about your latest haircut.
Some students at New York University have funding and are working on a new open-source social network with freely distributed code. You know, like the Firefox browser. Their service is called Diaspora. That’s the best idea I’ve heard about in years. Open source social networking… with privacy.
Here’s the WikiHow article on how to permanently delete your Facebook account.
Here’s an update: The students working on Diaspora have raised over $115,000 via online donations. This is a great start for their development project and means they don’t have to answer to a corporate investor.
Another open-source effort at social networking is OneSocialWeb which actually has working open-source code. Their software works sort of like the open-source blogging software, WordPress. You can install your own version of it on a web server if you want.
Here’s an excellent Wired article on the up and coming alternatives to Facebook.
CellStories Brings Short Fiction to Your Phone
CellStories is a ridiculously simple service that brings you a little story each day. You just open up the link to the CellStories.net site in your cell phone browser and the story shows up, well-formatted and easy to read. The site was started by former magazine editor Daniel Sinker, who has used his many contacts in the publishing field to acquire a continuing stream of worthwhile and entertaining stories.
The main problem for me that this service solves is my inability to remember to keep reading long-form works on a cell phone. I just can’t remember to keep going, no matter what the book. It’s something to do with the small screen and my feeling that all handheld units are for very temporary work and pleasure. When I read long works I use a book or a Kindle e-reader. I have no problems with continuity there. But CellStories only offers short fiction. It’s the perfect little pocket literature gizmo. I actually feel a tiny sense of accomplishment when I finish a short story on my Droid phone. I feel that I have filled some time well that might otherwise have been spent checking my hair.
So if you want some grown-up short fiction, try CellStories.
Obama and FCC Give Full Remote Control of Your TV Hardware to Corporations
U.S. President Barack Obama and his Federal Communications Commission have given media corporations the legal power to remotely disable functions and outputs in your television, DVD players, and content receivers. This decision means that when you buy equipment it will have a shut-off and control mechanism built into it allowing Warner Brothers or Disney to flip a switch that will turn off various parts of your equipment so that you cannot do certain things with what you are watching. A lot of equipment currently sitting in American households already has this circuitry built in and now it can be activated by the entertainment companies. The Obama administration is going after more than television equipment though. It’s putting this control stuff into computers and operating systems.
This is a new form of fascism. Corporate fascism. When the government allows total control of what the population is allowed to do with its own media equipment and content you have in place all the machinery of totalitarian control of expression, both artistic and journalistic.
Smash your TV and throw it over the fence onto the White House lawn. Better yet, open Obama’s mouth up wide and shove your TV down his throat. I’ve had just about enough of this corporate-owned jerk in the White House who is more concerned about finding his cigarettes than saving the Gulf of Mexico from an outrageous act of ‘accidental’ terrorism by British Petroleum. Obama should have a swim in the new Gulf. The man who vowed to stop all the secret torture and military clown tribunals and needless wars has inflicted more grotesque harm in these areas than his monkey-brained predecessor. Obama’s teeth drip baby blood. He’s a human predator drone. And now he’s disabling our televisions sets.
No media company is going to shut off part of my television, I can tell you that now. I don’t give a damn what President O says. He’s done in 2012. It doesn’t matter who runs against this nitwit in 2012. I’m voting for them. I’m too angry to give a crap anymore. Let’s give Hillary a shot.
See, you don’t need a tea party to be angry about a guy who steals for Wall Street. You can do it all by yourself.
Alice In Wonderland For iPad
I’ve got lots of grumps against Apple’s iPad, like the lack of support for Flash, one of the greatest web technologies in existence. But this Alice in Wonderland eBook looks fantastic. I’d love to make all the pictures move around and I think kids will too. This must be right because when I was a kid I fervently wished for every illustration to wake up and start moving.