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As the Information Age began to supplant the Industrial Age in America, a market developed to provide physical fitness for a new generation of desk-bound commuters. From 1975.
A Japanese design engineering firm was tasked with creating a water bottle that would be effective in a post-apoclyptic landscape. Realizing that such environs would presuppose water scarcity, Takram took things several steps further, creating an alternative human organ system that would allow us to survive on a drastically reduced water intake. It may the future. You go first. An excerpt from the proposal:
“We were given a vision of cathartic future. A world in which humanity experiences a cataclysmic sequence of events that will bring us to the brink of annihilation. Afflicted by manmade causes, the rising sea level, radioactive emissions and release of hazardous materials into the environment, art and culture cease to exist. This provides an opportunity, not lament, to re-evaluate what constitutes art, design, culture and the quality of life itself when all prejudices and preconceptions vanish.
With this premise, Takram was tasked to design a water bottle. After a period of thorough research and analysis, Takram reached an uncanny solution. Our conclusion was that it would make more sense, in fact, to regulate how much water the human body can retain and recycle in this dire environment. This revelation resulted in the Hydrolemic system, a set of artificial organs.”
What technology has exploded (in a couple of senses) more in the last decade than drones? In the new Wired article, “How I Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom,” Chris Anderson looks at what this brave new world of autonomous aircraft means. An excerpt:
“Look up into America’s skies today and you might just see one of these drones: small, fully autonomous, and dirt-cheap. On any given weekend, someone’s probably flying a real-life drone not far from your own personal airspace. (They’re the ones looking at their laptops instead of their planes.) These personal drones can do everything that military drones can, aside from blow up stuff. Although they technically aren’t supposed to be used commercially in the US (they also must stay below 400 feet, within visual line of sight, and away from populated areas and airports), the FAA is planning to officially allow commercial use starting in 2015.
What are all these amateurs doing with their drones? Like the early personal computers, the main use at this point is experimentation—simple, geeky fun. But as personal drones become more sophisticated and reliable, practical applications are emerging. The film industry is already full of remotely piloted copters serving as camera platforms, with a longer reach than booms as well as cheaper and safer operations than manned helicopters. Some farmers now use drones for crop management, creating aerial maps to optimize water and fertilizer distribution. And there are countless scientific uses for drones, from watching algal blooms in the ocean to low-altitude measurement of the solar reflectivity of the Amazon rain forest. Others are using the craft for wildlife management, tracking endangered species and quietly mapping out nesting areas that are in need of protection.
To give a sense of the scale of the personal drone movement, DIY Drones—an online community that I founded in 2007 (more on that later)—has 26,000 members, who fly drones that they either assemble themselves or buy premade from dozens of companies that serve the amateur market. All told, there are probably around 1,000 new personal drones that take to the sky every month (3D Robotics, a company I cofounded, is shipping more than 100 ArduPilot Megas a week); that figure rivals the drone sales of the world’s top aerospace companies (in units, of course, not dollars). And the personal drone industry is growing much faster.
Why? The reason is the same as with every other digital technology: a Moore’s-law-style pace where performance regularly doubles while size and price plummet. In fact, the Moore’s law of drone technology is currently accelerating, thanks to the smartphone industry, which relies on the same components—sensors, optics, batteries, and embedded processors—all of them growing smaller and faster each year. Just as the 1970s saw the birth and rise of the personal computer, this decade will see the ascendance of the personal drone. We’re entering the Drone Age.”
Tags: Chris Anderson
From the January 10, 1890 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Bossi’s bologna factory, at Newtown, is doing a rushing business. Now steam sausage cutters and appliances for drying the beef have been added to the establishment. This week twelve horses have been converted into dried beef and bologna.”
From a Washington Post piece by Sarah Kliff that charts the things that kill us now as opposed to 200 years ago, a passage about the 1812 New England Journal of Medicine worrying over death by cannonball and sponteous combustion:
“Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them. Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of ‘brandy-drinking men and women,’ received serious, if skeptical, consideration. And physicians were obsessed with fevers — puerperal, petechial, catarrhal, and even an outbreak of ‘spotted fever’ in which some patients were neither spotted nor febrile.”
Tags: Sarah Kliff
A 1983 California ad offering DeLoreans at the closeout price of $18,895.
More DeLorean posts:
Tags: John DeLorean
In a smart NPR post, Amanda Katz wonders what the advent of e-books will mean to the generational passing down of volumes, using as an example a boyhood copy of War of the Worlds owned by pioneering rocketeer Robert Goddard. The opening:
“In 1898, a man bought a book for his 16-year-old nephew. ‘Many happy retoins [sic]. Uncle Spud,’ he wrote on a blank page at the front.
The book: H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, then just out in America from Harper & Brothers.The ripping tale of a Martian attack that set the mold for them all, it’s almost more striking to a reader today for its turn-of-the-century detail: carriage-horse accidents, urgent telegrams, news only via newspapers. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator gets ahold of a first post-attack copy of the Daily Mail: ‘I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the ‘Secret of Flying’ was discovered.’
This was, of course, science fiction. But it was also prophetic. Uncle Spud’s teenage nephew — who stamped his name on the first page of the novel and read it religiously once a year — would himself go on to discover many secrets of flying. That nephew was Robert Hutchings Goddard, inventor of the liquid-fuel rocket.” (Thanks Browser.)
See also:
Tags: Amanda Katz, H.G. Wells, Robert Goddard
Iris scans are only the start of the souped-up technology at Dallas’ Love Field airport, which aims to make check-in a paperless, stopless process. From USA Today:
“At a terminal being renovated here at Love Field, contractors are installing 500 high-definition security cameras sharp enough to read an auto license plate or a logo on a shirt.
The cameras, capable of tracking passengers from the parking garage to gates to the tarmac, are a key first step in creating what the airline industry would like to see at airports worldwide: a security apparatus that would scrutinize passengers more thoroughly, but less intrusively, and in faster fashion than now.
It’s part of what the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, which represents airlines globally, calls ‘the checkpoint of the future.’
‘The goal is for fliers to move almost non-stop through security from the curb to the gate, in contrast to repeated security stops and logjams at checkpoints.'”
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President Kennedy and the First Lady arrive at Love Field, November 22, 1963, less than an hour before he was assassinated.
A 1975 portrait of photographer Ansel Adams.
Tags: Ansel Adams.
“He found the remains of Margaret Fuller lying on the beach in her nightgown.”
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was the Susan Sontag of her day–America’s original Susan Sontag, actually. The first female book critic of great acclaim, Fuller was not exactly modest about her brilliance. “I find no intellect comparable to my own,” she offered to all who would listen. She was a prominent member of Brook Farm, George Ripley’s failed experiment in Utopian living, and reportedly inspired the “Zenobia” character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, who commits suicide by drowning. Fuller herself died by water, perishing in a shipwreck that she seemingly could have escaped but chose not to. Her body was never recovered. Some 35 years after her death, an odd (and likely apocryphal) story appeared about her in the Boston Traveller, which was reprinted in the September 6, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The article in full:
“As every topic comes up at the elegant lunch and dinner tables of Newport, so I was not astonished to hear a lady say that she ‘knew of the grave of Margaret Fuller.’ Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, who was present, and who had written a life of Margaret Fuller, was astonished, as it is reputed in all the lives written of that extraordinarily resurrected person, the Marchesi Ossili, that her body never reached land. An old fisherman at Fire Island, however, told a lady who was in the habit of going there several years ago, that he found the remains of Margaret Fuller lying on the beach in her nightgown, which was marked by her name, and that he wrote to the brothers Fuller and Horace Greeley about it, without receiving any answer; that he went up to New York to see Mr. Greeley, but he seemed to take no notice of the fact; and that he then buried Margaret Fuller at Coney Island; and could identify the spot.”
“It’s none of anybodies buisenss if I drink a 16 ouncs soda.”
Soda ban
It’s none of anybodies buisenss if I drink a 16 ouncs soda. This is just the dumbest law ever passed next to prohabiton. We know how that worked out.
From “If They Could Only Talk,” Hannah Bloch’s new National Geographic article about the elemental questions we need to ask about Easter Island:
“Easter Island covers just 63 square miles. It lies 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest inhabited neighbor. After it was settled, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai—which range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80 tons—came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Tuki’s question—how did they do it?—has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century.
But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past—and of humanity in general. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuity—one example being their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain.”
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Leonard Nimoy applies his spooky gravitas to Easter Island, 1977:
Tags: Hannah Bloch, Jared Diamond, Leonard Nimoy
Short profile of Alex Haley in 1977, after the novel Roots made him a household name. Previously best known as an ace interviewer for Playboy, Haley would later face charges of having plagiarized passages (which the author copped to as part of an out-of-court settlement). Whatever the origins of the work and despite a simplification of the subject, the novel and subsequent TV miniseries had a powerful effect in awakening America to its past.
Read also:
- Haley interviews Miles Davis. (1962)
Tags: Alex Haley
LeRoy Neiman, a fashion-world illustrator who eventually made wealth and fame from loud, distinctive depictions of prizefighters and placekickers, just passed away. From “Leroy Neiman’s Work Reveals Him, In Some Ways, As A Carbon-paper Dali,” Pat Jordan’s largely dismissive 1975 Sports Illustrated profile of the man and his mustache:
“Neiman began his art career in sewing rooms, as a fashion illustrator for designers like Yves St. Laurent. His work appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Bride’s Magazine. Over the years, through persistence and the cultivation of a highly distinctive style—he is known as ‘a flamboyant colorist’—he became a personality as gaudy as those he portrays. In fact, at a poor showing of the New York Jets one Sunday in Shea Stadium, fans began to yell, ‘Put LeRoy in!’ Often, Neiman’s mere presence at an event overshadows it and the work he produces there. Such status now brings him as much as $25,000 for a painting. He is best known for his sporting canvases and lithographs.
‘LeRoy has style,’ said a publisher of coffee-table books-while sipping a drink at 21. ‘He discovered it 10 years ago and it’s made him a lot of money. He’s a very wealthy man you know, extremely. He has some beautiful suits. Still, I don’t think he’s put his soul into a painting in 10 years.’
At 44, Neiman has a lion’s mane of lustrous black hair, a surprisingly wispy, up-curled mustache and pale, puffy good looks. Perpetually clamped between his teeth or propped between his fingers is a long, thin cigar the length of an artist’s paintbrush. Maddeningly, the cigar never seems to diminish. Like plastic firewood, it appears to be an electronic prop that never sheds an ash.
Neiman’s friend and mentor, Salvador Dali, is also a believer in image-making props and elaborate mustaches, and, like Dali, Neiman has been accused by critics of expending more energy on the creation of his public character than on his art.”
Tags: LeRoy Neiman, Pat Jordan, Salvador Dali
From the April 19, 1876 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“This morning Officer Maloney of the Washington Street Precinct found a human finger lying in the gutter in front of No. 310 Hicks Street. The finger appears to have been chopped off with some sharp instrument, and does not look as though it had been amputated.”
Tags: Officer Maloney
Eugene Selznick, who just passed away, was one of the fathers of American volleyball and no slouch at ballyhoo, either. He recruited basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain to play on a tour in the early 1970s, which helped further popularize the game and make it an Olympic sport. An excerpt from Selznick’s New York Times obituary, which was written by Paul Vitello:
“Chamberlain, the 7-foot-1 N.B.A. star, was near the end of his basketball career in the early 1970s when he took up beach volleyball to help rehabilitate his battered body. Selznick proceeded to cajole Chamberlain into joining him and other top players for a nationwide exhibition tour in the summer of 1973, the year he retired from basketball.
The publicity generated by the Chamberlain tour, as it was known, brought a new generation to volleyball and laid the groundwork for a boom in popularity that began in the ’80s. Beach volleyball became an official Olympic sport in 1996. Selznick coached the men’s Olympic beach volleyball team of Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel to a fifth-place finish in Atlanta in 1996, and the women’s Olympic team of May-Treanor and McPeak to fifth place in Sydney in 2000.”
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Home-movie footage from the Chamberlain-Selznick tour.
Chamberlain visits Ed Sullivan after scoring 100 points in a game, 1962.
If you want an apocalypse with amenities, Survival Condo is for you. While others are dying from infections to their searing flesh, you’ll be poolside below the earth in a luxury condo development. From D.C. Stewart’s new Discover piece about the post-apocalyptic playground:
“Larry Hall, a former software engineer who bought his 174-foot-deep hole in the ground from the government for $300,000 in 2008, plans to convert it to calamity-proof condos by 2013. The silo is one of 72 built across the country to deter a Soviet attack during the Cold War. Tucked into an empty stretch of rural Kansas, it once housed an Atlas F nuclear ballistic missile that could travel more than 7,000 miles. To withstand a Soviet strike, the silo’s concrete walls are up to nine feet thick. But it’s not some ‘dreary concrete basement hideaway,’ Hall assures visitors to his website, survivalcondo.com. It’s a place to enjoy ‘the coolness of a missile base, the protection of a nuclear-hardened bunker, and the features of a luxury condo.'”
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“Well meet again / Don’t know where / Don’t know when”:
Tags: Larry Hall
Michio Kaku holds forth on the most dangerous technology imaginable.
Tags: Michio Kaku
From Alexis Madrigal’s new Atlantic article about Facebook’s attempt to govern its “nation” of users, a succinct description of the origins of technocracy:
“The original technocrats were a group of thinkers and engineers in the 1930s who revived Plato’s dream of the philosopher-king, but with a machine-age spin. Led by Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott and M. King Hubbert, they advocated not rule by the people or the monarchy or the dictator, but by the engineers. The engineers and scientists would rule rationally and impartially. They would create a Technocracy that functioned like clockwork and ensured the productivity of all was efficiently distributed. They worked out a whole system by which the North American continent would be ruled with functional sequences that would allow the Continental Director to get things done.
Technocracy, as originally conceived, was explicitly not democratic. Its proponents did not want popular rule; they wanted rule by a knowledgeable elite who would make good decisions. And maybe they would have, but there was one big problem. Few people found the general vision of surrendering their political power to engineers all that appealing.”
Tags: Alexis Madrigal, Howard Scott, M. King Hubbert, Thorstein Veblen
Ground zero for modern personal computing was the Xerox Alto, seen here in a 1979 ad.
“The fashion of wearing birds in the hat is, it seems, to continue in spite of its cruelty and its shortsightedness.”
A 1880s/90s fashion trend whereby women wore bird feathers and sometimes entire stuffed birds in their hats as ornaments meant trouble for woodpeckers and such. Song birds were legally protected but milliners coveted them regardless, so it was off with their heads. Until their heads could be stuffed and sewn back on and placed on a hat, that is. Numerous editorial writers and preservationists railed against the idiotic fashion until it finally abated. From the September 23, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The youthful gunners of Astoria and Bushwick and other outlying regions north of Brooklyn have suddenly discovered the presence in the woods and gardens of numerous woodpeckers, and have committed great havoc among them, although these birds are among those which the state considers as song birds and protects by special statute. But the fashion of wearing birds in the hat is, it seems, to continue in spite of its cruelty and its shortsightedness. Many small birds, and particularly those of the woodpecker family, are insectivorous, and under the greatest services to humanity by unremitting war upon our insect pests. The shade trees of Kings County have suffered so terribly this Summer from the saw fly, the borer and the din beetle, that many horticulturists have been almost driven to despair. And now when some of these wretched creatures are hibernating, particularly the din beetle that infests our elm trees, and fall an easy prey to insectivorous birds the sound sense of the law becomes plainly manifest, and its observation in the most stringent manner is of paramount importance. Yet it is not observed, and young lads have been seen in the streets of Astoria with scores of these beautiful and yellow shafted flicker and the downy woodpecker, all of which have been butchered to adorn the hats of ladies. And it is to be feared that as long as milliners find a sale for such hats. so long will they give big prices to the young fellows in Long Island.”
need the ladies honest opinions
I’d like to send the ladies my naked pics and get their honest opinions if I’m hot or not. Let me know if you ware willing to help. Thanks.
Buckminster Fuller agitating against customary geometry inculcation.
Tags: Buckminster Fuller
For its 150th anniversary, Timex sponsored “The Future of Time,” a competition that imagined timepieces 150 years from now. One entry was a thumbnail watch. From the competition copy: “TX54 is a disposable timepiece that is worn on the user’s thumbnail. While its translucency makes it blend seamlessly with the hand, a selection of text color options and a glow feature that activates on command make it easy to read.”
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Live Timex commercial for the waterproof version: