Steve Jobs lets the Mac out of the bag in 1984.
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2011.
Tags: Steve Jobs
"I'm looking for a real, working way to shrink."
help me find a shrinking potion (reno nv)
im looking for a real, working way to shrink. i know its very strange, but im serious, and i know that there must really be a way. i would like to shrink myself to 3inches tall. no joke. lol. im a 24 year old male. id do anything, anything to get a hold of something that really honestly works. thank you!
Babies with tablets is probably inevtiable, as a piece in the Atlantic about a new $389 model suggests:
“This month, Vinci, the 7-inch touch-pad tablet displayed above, will go on sale through Amazon, which is already accepting pre-orders. ‘The Vinci is not an imitation — it is a real touch-screen Android-based product, bringing the most advanced technology to the benefit of our youngest citizens,’ according to the product’s website.
Designed to compete with LeapFrog’s new LeapPad, a $99 tablet aimed at 4- to 9-year-olds, the Vinci targets an even younger audience (0- to 4-year-olds) — one it could potentially grow up with for some time. With its protective soft-corner case, this tablet is meant to last. And don’t let the non-toxic packaging or the durable handles fool you: This is far different than any other electronics you’ll find in the baby aisle. Vinci lacks Wi-Fi or 3G capability, but, with a Cortex A8 processor and 4GB of internal storage, it still packs a serious punch — it’s even outfitted with a built-in microphone and a 3-megapixel built-in camera to capture that special moment when your child first realizes just powerful our current computing technology is.”
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To mark tomorrow’s release of the Planet of the Apes origin story.
Tags: Johnny Carson, Paul Williams
In “Practical Magic,” Russell Davies of Ogilvy & Mather provides his vision of the Internet of Things, which is borne of regular people futzing around with endless reams of data and cheap physical materials:
“Do you remember Big Mouth Billy Bass – the strange animated fish that became a popular novelty a few years back? It looked like a regular fisherman’s trophy but when you hit a button on the frame it would suddenly come to life and start singing ‘Take Me to the River’ or some other amusing aquatically themed song.
Now imagine that Billy had the intelligence of your average smart phone. He’d know where he was in the world. What the time was. What the weather was like. Who’d won the football. Whether the trains were running late. And, assuming you’d programmed a little bit of profile information into him, he’d know which of your Foursquare friends were nearby, and which of your favorite bands were playing in the area. He’d know a lot. With some simple text-to-speech stuff in his head and a bit of ingenuity, he’d be able to tell you all sorts of interesting and useful things when you pressed that button. And you would press that button, wouldn’t you?
Well, something like Billy will get made. It’s bound to. Cheap electronics, cheap plastics and cheap intelligence are going to get welded together with free, ubiquitous data feeds to make hundreds of products just like him. It’s the warped magic you’ll get when two waves of innovation crash together – the flood of data from the internet and the sea of stuff from Chinese factories. That right there is your Internet of Things.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Big Mouth Billy Bass:
Tags: Russell Davies
Tbilisi, 1911.
Sweltering summer temperatures seem to be just part of the reason why the people of Tbilisi, Georgia, tend to see the apocalypse hurtling toward them from all directions. From an interesting New York Times report by Ellen Barry:
“Word that scorpions had been sighted on her street clinched it, as far as Nana Beniashvili was concerned.
The giant locusts had been bad enough, and the snakes, which are known in Georgian as ‘that which cannot be mentioned.’ She actually hadn’t seen any scorpions herself, but she believed that one of her neighbors had, and in the asphalt-melting, earth-parching, brain-scrambling heat of midsummer, she was not in the mood to be fastidious about evidence.
‘This means the apocalypse is coming,’ said Ms. Beniashvili, 72, who was leaning out of a window. ‘I cannot tell you exactly when, because I am not very knowledgeable about this. But it is clear that the apocalypse is coming. The world has gone crazy.
‘Anyway, I hope we will survive,’ she sighed, and went inside to look for lemonade.”
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UFOs attack Tbilisi:
Tags: Ellen Barry
Harald Haas explains how a simple bulb can outperform a cellular tower.
In a Spiegel interview, Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell discusses Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik and the nature of evil. To counter Mankell somewhat, I do think that some people may have a greater proclivity to violence based on biological makeup, and there may be neurogical reasons that arise which can trigger violent impulse. But, yes, these probably are exceptions, and extreme environments can certainly lead to extreme behaviors. An excerpt from the interview:
“SPIEGEL: Does our consternation over the mystery of evil also stem from the fact that Breivik, as the police put it, literally came out of nowhere?
Mankell: We want to recognize the characteristics of evil early on, and we search for marks of Cain and stigmata, the warning signs of the horrific before it occurs. But that kind of thinking is based on magic.
SPIEGEL: But it isn’t just a question of the banality of evil, but also of our fascination with evil.
Mankell: You address an important aspect. What I fear most of all is that a new discussion will emerge about the concept of innate evil. That was the way people thought 500 years ago. No one is born evil. People become evil through external circumstances, which provoke evil behavior.
SPIEGEL: But everyone has the inherent capability to be evil?
Mankell: In the Balkan wars, following the breakup of Yugoslavia, neighbors who had lived together in peace until then suddenly began attacking one another. I saw child soldiers in Africa, 14 and 15-year-old boys, who slaughtered their parents after someone had held a gun to their heads. I’m not sure what I would have done, as a child, in their situation. The explanation for evil lies in its circumstances and conditions, not in its diabolical nature. That is what Hannah Arendt taught us.”
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Mankell at the Strand Book Store in Manhattan in 2010:
Tags: Henning Mankell
A predictive 2000 Nightline doc about overpopulation, which was far too dire.
Tags: Ted Koppel
KFC in Lagos, Nigeria. (Image by Qasamaan.)
From “Megacity,” an excellent 2006 New Yorker article by George Packer which deflated the recent romantic reconsideration of large-scale slums by Western intellectuals:
“When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homicidal bus drivers awaited you.
Recently, Lagos has begun to acquire a new image. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Third World’s megacities have become the focus of intense scholarly interest, in books such as Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities. Neuwirth, having lived for two years in slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and other cities, came to see the world’s urban squatters as pioneers and patriots, creating solid communities without official approval from the state or the market. ‘Today, the world’s squatters are demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a more equitable globe,’ he wrote. What squatters need most of all, he argued, is the right to stay where they are: ‘Without any laws to support them, they are making their improper, illegal communities grow and prosper.’
Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, goes even further. ‘Squatter cities are vibrant,’ he writes in a recent article on megacities. ‘Each narrow street is one long bustling market.’ He sees in the explosive growth of ‘aspirational shantytowns’ a cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity. ‘How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?’ Brand asks. ‘One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.’
In the dirty gray light of Lagos, however, Neuwirth’s portrait of heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow seems a bit romantic, and Brand’s vision of a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs seems perverse. The vibrancy of the squatters in Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: George Packer
"Vulgar."
Free mother-in-law (CT)
I am willing to give away for free my mother in law. . Let me tell you about some of her “charms”
Pushy
Nasty
Loud
Vulgar
Fat
Big “ego”
Self-centered
Major “controll freak”
If you love being put down every chance she gets then.. she is for you
If you love being kicked in the ass when you are down then.. she is for you
If you love being told how to run your life then………………… she is for you
If you love someone who is nasty towards you then………….. she is for you
If you love being “blamed” for everything then……………………. she is for you
If you love getting “no respect” then she is for you
Will consider FREE shipping if you live in any one of these remote locations:
Canada (past the artic circle)
Russia (siberia)
North or south poles
The outback
If you are an ET and would like her for research on your home world.
If you like hunting wild game
For the love of god or anything else out there in the universe PLEASE!! take her off my hands.
Leon Theremin playing his namesake instrument.
From a 1967 New York Times interview with Theremin: “He ushered the visitor into a room in which a small dance floor had been constructed. Mr. Theremin stood on the floor, raised his arms, made motions, and started to play the Massenet Elegy on nothing at all.
The room was filled with sound, and it was positively spooky. No wires, no gadgets, nothing visible. Merely electromagnetic sorcery,
‘I made my last public appearance in 1938,’ Mr. Theremin said. ‘I sometimes think it would be nice to come back once more to United States and show my latest instruments.'”
One of the best opening sentences I have read in a while comes from Avi Steinberg’s excellent new Paris Review piece about a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky. Here’s that opening line plus the rest of the first two paragraphs:
“I’m waiting for the elevator in a medieval-themed hotel in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, when the elevator doors open to reveal a heated exchange between a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt and a puppet shaped like a toucan. My presence brings an uncomfortable end to their private imbroglio. Both stare at me silently as I enter the elevator, and for five awkward floors I’m brought into direct contact with what George Bernard Shaw described as the “unvarying intensity of facial expression” of puppets, an attribute he believed makes them more compelling actors than humans.
I’m at the Vent Haven ConVENTion where, each July, hundreds of ventriloquists, or “vents,” as they call themselves, gather from all over the world. For four days, they attend lectures on the business, getting advice on AV equipment, scriptwriting, or creating an audience through social networking. They listen to a keynote address by Comedy Central’s ventriloquist-in-residence, Jeff Dunham, who exhorts his notoriously defensive colleagues to ‘quit complaining that people say we’re weird. We talk to dolls. We are weird, ok. Just own it.’ They eat at a Denny’s off the highway and visit the creationist museum down the road. And they don’t go anywhere without the accompaniment of their alter egos.”
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Magic trailer, 1978:
Dumbstruck, a documentary about Vents:
Tags: Avi Steinberg, Jeff Dunham
From the Escapist comes a report about Brewster Kahle’s Herculean effort to collect every book every published, in original dead-tree form:
“Kahle, a computer scientist with a degree from MIT, is most famous as the creator of the Internet Archive, a non-profit group formed in 1996 with a goal of preserving every web page ever created.
In that same archival spirit, Kahle has recently set his sights on preserving the existing written history of mankind, and he’s off to a pretty solid start.
To date, Kahle’s warehouse in Richmond, California houses 500,000 books. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 130 million tomes collected by Google in its efforts to digitize the entirety of our literature, but Kahle is heartened by the speed at which his group has been able to accrue their half-million books.
The existence of Google’s aforementioned project also causes one to question Kahle’s motivations. After all, if we’ve got the text available online, why keep their archaic dead tree iterations?
‘There is always going to be a role for books,’ Kahle says. ‘We want to see books live forever.'”
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Kahle discusses his work in digital archiving at TED:
Tags: Brewster Kahle
Tags: Abraham Lincoln
"Frequently the reptile climbed up into her throat."
Vital news about a lizard-related death in Pennsylvania arrived at the offices of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1900, and those newshounds wasted no time in using it to fill space in the paper’s July 24 edition. An excerpt:
“Philadelphia–Some time ago Mrs. Anna M. Jones of Marcus Hook, Pa., accidentally swallowed a lizard while drinking water. Frequently the reptile climbed up into her throat, but at all times successfully resisted all attempts at ejectment.
Mrs. Jones was a prey to the constant fear that in one of these excursions of the lizard she would be choked to death. Last night after complaining of a choking sensation, she suddenly expired. It is believed that her dread of an imminent violent death had a fatal effect upon her heart as there is no evidence of strangulation.”
Tags: Mrs. Anna M. Jones
"Eating peach."
blonde/gray woman in sandals, cuffed blue jeans, eating peach (Upper West Side)
Older blonde/gray woman in sandals, cuffed blue jeans, eating peach at Central Park Summerstage. You’re at the age where you shouldn’t wear a thong anymore. And I don’t mean “go commando.”
Richard Feynman, in 1964, discussing the possibility of UFOs.
Tags: Richard Feynman
Alternet has a report about the development of a slew of so-called “non-lethal weapons systems” that can be used to control crowds. One example:
“The Invisible Pain Ray
It sounds like a weapon out of Star Wars. The Active Denial System, or ADS, works like an open-air microwave oven, projecting a focused beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to 130 degrees. This creates an intolerable burning sensation forcing those in its path to instinctively flee (a response the Air Force dubs the ‘goodbye effect’).
The Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) says, ‘This capability will add to the ability to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary, providing an alternative to lethal force.’ Although ADS is described as non-lethal, a 2008 report by physicist and less-lethal weapons expert Dr. Jürgen Altmann suggests otherwise:
‘… the ADS provides the technical possibility to produce burns of second and third degree. Because the beam of diameter 2 m and above is wider than human size, such burns would occur over considerable parts of the body, up to 50% of its surface. Second- and third-degree burns covering more than 20% of the body surface are potentially life-threatening – due to toxic tissue-decay products and increased sensitivity to infection – and require intensive care in a specialized unit. Without a technical device that reliably prevents re-triggering on the same target subject, the ADS has a potential to produce permanent injury or death. ‘”
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Active Denial System demo:
Look at that punk kid go. (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
Tags: Milton Friedman
Four decades after his brazen crime and complete disappearance made the inscrutable man known as D.B. Cooper into an American folk hero, the FBI has credible evidence as to his identity. The opening of a well-written new article by Katharine Q. Seelye and Charlie Savage in the New York Times:
“He smoked Raleigh cigarettes, wore a black clip-on tie and drank whiskey, and when zero hour came, he was one cool cat.
From Seat 18C on a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, he passed a note to the stewardess — this was 1971, pre-‘flight attendant’ era. She slipped it in her pocket, unread.
‘Miss, you’d better look at that note,’ the passenger calmly advised. ‘I have a bomb.’ He opened his briefcase and showed her what could have been a bomb, nestled in a mass of wires.
With that, the man known as D. B. Cooper hijacked the plane, later parachuting out of it and into the unknown. His body was never found. Mr. Cooper became a folk hero, and the case remains the only unsolved hijacking in American history.
Now, 40 years later, comes what seems like a tantalizing new tip. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has a new suspect, one whose name has never surfaced in the ocean of tips that has washed in over four decades.”
••••••••••
Treat Williams as D.B. Cooper:
Promotional video by Motorola, from just 25 years ago.
"WTF!"
Magenta Uggs on 5th Ave. (Midtown)
Did anybody catch the hillbilly chick on 5th Ave. and 35th St. around 5:30PM in magenta Uggs with her inked up, ponytailed husband? WTF!
Early in his career, Peter Watkins made documentary-style narrative films that were so politically charged as to be almost unreleasable. Two of these were particularly great. The War Game, from 1965, shows the horrors that would befall Britain if the nation engaged in a nuclear war. It was so convincing that it was banned from broadcast in its native country and won a Best Documentary Oscar despite not being a documentary. Punishment Park, from 1971, takes things a step further. Set in America in the wake of Kent State, Watkins exaggerates the truly tumultuous divide between conservatives and radicals, creating a landscape so brutal and bitter that nuclear devastation might seem the lesser evil.
In America, young, anti-establishment activists who oppose the Vietnam War or support Black Power are arrested, interrogated and tried before a jury of peerless right-wingers. The convicted can either do decades in prison, or they can try their luck in Punishment Park. A punitive expanse of cracked earth in the California desert, Punishment Park is an obstacle course of sorts in which prisoners must complete a 53-mile trek with armed officers in pursuit. If they successfully finish the course in sweltering temperatures and reach an American flag at journey’s end, they will supposedly be released. But the sweet release of death seems more likely with the numerous threats to their well-being.
There’s a scene in which a young officer opens fire on a group of the political prisoners, and is almost immediately interviewed by the faux documentary crew, as he cries and pleads in confusion. The passage comes as close to recreating the visceral pain of the tragedy at Kent State as is imaginable. During an era when the news was the scariest show on TV and the pseudo-documentary was the perfect approach, Watkins presented a searing vision intended to jolt those who were sleepwalking through the nightmare.•
Recent Film Posts:
- Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: The Intruder (1962)
- Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: They Came Back (2004)
- Classic Film: The Rapture (1991)
- Recent Film: Somewhere
- Recent Film: Another Year
- Classic Film: The Truman Show (1996)
- Classic Film: Salesman (1968)
- Classic Film: Night of the Living Dead (1968)
- Classic Film: The Conversation (1974)
- Classic Film: King of Comedy (1982)
- Recent Film: Dogtooth
- Classic Film: RoboCop (1987)
- Recent Film: Marwencol (2010)
- Classic Film: Being There (1979)
- Classic Film: Woman in the Dunes (1964)
- Classic Film: The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Tags: Peter Watkins
From Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, comes this conversation between company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin:
“It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”
“That’s true,” said Brin. ‘Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them.”
Page said, “Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.” (Thanks NYRB.)•
Tags: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steven Levy