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Festo has created a robotic, though sadly pouchless, marsupial. It will hop on you and take your job. From the company’s release:”With the BionicKangaroo, Festo has technologically reproduced the unique way the kangaroo moves. Like its natural role model, it can recover the energy exerted when jumping, store it and retrieve it efficiently on the next jump.”
alent to taking a life.
Some actors pretend to be nervous during interviews, but John Belushi wasn’t kidding. In 1978, he sat uneasily, along with fellow actor Donald Sutherland and director John Landis, for a brief chat about Animal House, the film that was going to make him a huge star and put even more microphones in his face. Sutherland, conversely, could not give a fuck about this interview, a far healthier impulse.
Tags: Carolyn Jackson
SRI International experimenting with robotic insects that employ swarm techniques for macro manufacturing.
Ridley Scott never really fully left the world of commercials when he started making features–his best work in the field was actually still ahead of him–but here he is in 1979 at the time of Alien‘s release discussing his branching out into full-length films. Footage is awful for the first few seconds.
Tags: Carolyn Jackson, Ridley Scott.
Peter Sellers being interviewed by talk show host/speed reader Steve Allen in 1964 about Dr. Strangelove, revealing how he used the voice for the titular character from the famed tabloid photographer Weegee. Mixed in are a couple of clips of the protean actor’s former employees recalling how he faked an injury to get out of doing the Major King Kong role.
Tags: Peter Sellers, Steve Allen, Weegee
“The machine cannot lie,” said Leland Stanford, which may not be true much longer, but racer Jackie Stewart knew that humans certainly always could–especially to themselves–as he discusses his elaborate preparations for Monaco in 1972 with good friend Roman Polanski.
Predictions about the year 2000 from 1957 Germany. Cooking with punch cards never happened. It was all a lie.
Before technological innovation freed everyone to create whatever they wanted and not get paid for it, TV networks and cable channels exchanged real money for the right to treat you badly. A dozen years before he interviewed the leader of the free world, Zach Galifianakis spent a few months being tortured by VH1 executives who seemed unaware they’d hired an absurdist. In this episode, fatty puts down his bong long enough to do his monologue at a retirement home.
Tags: Zach Galifianakis
From John Brownlee’s Fast Company article about the potential of shape-shifting furniture which can transform with just a wave of the hand:
“What the Tangible Media Lab is trying to prove with Transform is that there are more to just shapeshifting interfaces than just shaking hands over Skype. The future of interface design is that we’ll be able to interface with everything, and the line between what we call a computer and what we don’t will eventually go away entirely. Tomorrow’s computers will be furniture, clothing, and more, and the ways we interact with them–and they with us–will be richer than we can possibly imagine.
As for what’s next for the Tangible Media Group, Follmer tells us that they hope it’s no coincidence that they have been hosted in Milan this year by Lexus, an automobile maker. ‘Imagine a car with a shapeshifting dashboard!’ he says. No need to imagine for long, though: next time we hear from these guys, we suspect they’ll have already tried to build one for themselves.”
Tags: John Brownlee
In 1976, when he was already showing the early, subtle signs of Parkinson’s Syndrome, Muhammad Ali sat for a wide-ranging group interview on Face the Nation, in which he was mostly treated as a suspect by a panel of people who enjoyed privileges that were never available to the boxer. Fred Graham, the Arkansas-born correspondent who’s distinguished himself in other ways during his career, doesn’t come across as the most enlightened fellow here. Ali is even ridiculously criticized for a planned “bout” against Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.
Tags: Antonio Inoki, Fred Graham, Muhammad Ali
While subbing for Mike Douglas in 1970, Sammy Davis Jr., going through one of his phases, discusses Black Separatism and such with dethroned but undefeated boxing champ Muhammad Ali during his Vietnam Era walkabout.
Tags: Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr.
When he’s not busy watching his aunts ants have sex, E.O. Wilson analyzes how they build structures with a communal “brain.” And he’s not the only one interested in this subject. Understanding the hive mentality of these ingenious insects could help humans master swarm robotics and unlock secrets to cellular “behavior.” From Emily Singer at the Guardian:
“Scientists have been studying the social behavior of ants and other insects for decades, searching for chemical cues and other signals that the insects use to coordinate behavior. Much of this work has focused on understanding how ants decide where to forage or build their homes. But new research combining observations of ant behavior with modern imaging techniques and computational modeling is beginning to reveal the secrets of ant construction. It turns out that ants perform these complex tasks by obeying a few simple rules.
‘People are finally starting to crack the problem of producing these structures, which are either made out of soil or the ants themselves,’ said Stephen Pratt, a biologist at Arizona State University. The organization of insect societies is a marquee example of a complex decentralized system that arises from the interactions of many individuals, he said.
Cracking these problems could lead to improvements in swarm robotics, large numbers of simple robots working together, as well as self-healing materials and other systems capable of organizing and fixing themselves. More broadly, identifying the rules that ants obey could help scientists understand how biologically complex systems emerge — for example, how groups of cells give rise to organs.”
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Ant-sploitation from 1977:
Tags: Emily Singer
Two Hunter S. Thompson commercials: One for his 1970 campaign for Sheriff of Piktin County, Colorado, in 1970 and another for Apple Computers in the 1990s. Oddly, the former, a low-budget production, is far more effective.
The Xerox Alto, ground zero for modern personal computing, on display in a 1979 ad.
B.F. Skinner, the famed Behaviorist who plays a central role in one of my favorite-ever New Yorker articles, Calvin Trillin’s “The Chicken Vanishes” (subscription required), is responsible for these two videos: 1) A 1954 demo of his pre-personal computer Teaching Machine, which provided automated instruction and 2) Boids playing ping pong.
Glenn Gould, on a 1969 episode of Telescope, already retired from the concert hall, predicting sagely that new technologies would allow for the sampling, remixing and democratization of creativity. Sort of stunning for someone to see the distance so clearly.
In video-game parlance, members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who committed suicide 17 years ago, hoping in their collective delusion that their well-calibrated deaths would enable them to hitch a ride on Hale-Bopp’s tail, weren’t choosing “Game Over” but trying to get to the “Next Level.” The gaming lingo is particularly apt because those shrouded, Nike-wearing true believers earned a living (until their dying) in the nascent field of website design. From Claire Evans at Vice:
“On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in a San Diego suburb. They were members of a religious group called Heaven’s Gate, and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. In each of their pockets, authorities found a five-dollar bill and three quarters—interplanetary toll fare.
Their motive was to hitch a ride to the ‘Next Level’ on a heavenly spacecraft hidden behind the rapidly-approaching Hale-Bopp Comet. They didn’t believe they were committing suicide. Instead, they were abandoning fallible physical ‘vehicles’ in order to progress to the ‘Next Level’ above human, a commitment they’d honed while living in isolated compounds in Salt Lake City, Denver, and the Dallas Forth-Worth area, before moving to their final resting place in Southern California.
Beyond the spectacle of their exit from this world, what’s most interesting about Heaven’s Gate, looking back, is their complicated relationship to technology. While we remember the Nike sneakers, the purple shrouds, and the bunk-beds meticulously lined with bodies, what most people don’t know about these 38 devotees and their leader, Marshall Applewhite (known to them as ‘Bo’ or ‘Do’), is that they paid for their lifestyle by building websites.
Yes, Heaven’s Gate were web designers. The group ran a firm called Higher Source, and counted the San Diego Polo Club, a local topiary company, and a Christian music store among their clients. In the heady early days of the World Wide Web, this crew of androgynous roommates in matching close-cropped haircuts and baggy, modest clothes practiced what they called ‘Higher Source-computer programming’ in Java, Visual Basic, SQL, and C++.”
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“You’re only chance to evacuate is to leave with us”:
Tags: Claire Evans, Marshall Applewhite
As David Letterman heads into the victory lap of his TV career, I think back on Brother Theodore, one of my favorite guests during the host’s early great years, when the brilliant tandem Steve O’Donnell and Merrill Markoe were working their magic behind the scenes. Theodore had previously guested on many other talk shows–Merv Griffin gave him the “Brother” moniker because of a collared shirt the performer wore–but it was with Letterman that the stand-up tragedian left his most indelible impression.
If the mad monologist Theodore Gottlieb’s biography was true, he a had enough drama for ten people: a prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp, a chess hustler in Switzerland, a friend of Albert Einstein (who reportedly was his mother’s lover) and a stage performer unlike all others in New York. He passed away at 94 in 2001.
For those moments when it seems we’re being fed bread and Kardashians nonstop, when the culture has have never been so dumb, let us refer back to 1979’s Playboy Roller Disco & Pajama Party, which aired in primetime on ABC. The show starred Richard Dawson, the Village People, Dorothy Stratten, Wayland Flowers and Madame (and a crudely racist puppet), the San Diego Chicken and lots of good, wholesome cocaine. Meanwhile, the hostages in Iran waited for help.
Tags: Dorothy Stratten, Hugh Hefner, Ricard Dawson, The Village People, Wayland Flowers
R. Crumb, who likes cans (and LSD), and Al Goldstein, the late admirer of beaver (and electronics), compare hairy palms in the latter half of the ’80s in Northern California. Prior to the interview, Goldstein kindly offers Sean Penn an ass-whooping.
Tags: Al Goldstein, R. Crumb
Whether we’re talking about American Graffiti or J.G. Ballard’s Crash, we’re discussing freedom and power. And when no person handles the wheel anymore, how will we replace that sensation of controlling time and space? Virtual reality? Something else?
Ballard, tooling around.
An amazing 1966 British Pathé newsreel about a jetpack that was tested in the U.K. at the Brand’s Hatch race circuit. It was apparently intended for use by astronauts.
Gary Numan performing his 1978 technology cautionary tale, “M.E.,” in which he envisioned the Singularity arriving and then running out of juice.
And M.E. I eat dust
We’re all so run down
I’d call it my death but I’ll only fade away
And I hate to fade alone
Now there’s only M.E.
We were so sure
We were so wrong
Now it’s over, but there’s no one left to see
And there’s no one left to die
There’s only M.E.
Why should I care?
Why should I try?
Oh no, oh no, I turned off the pain
Like I turned off you all
Now there’s only M.E.
In a 1960 episode of Face to Face presented by John Freeman, Evelyn Waugh made his television debut. The novelist was nervous, and it was considered at the time that he gave his interviewer the business. Of course, the definition of “rude” has changed a lot since then.
Tags: Evelyn Waugh, John Freeman
Roger Ebert, as a part of “Cyberfest ’97,” interviewing Arthur C. Clarke via computer.
Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Ebert