April 7. 2002 - Hans Andreas Navrestad, Airborn in 1825WallPosting [unconditional consequences] Project/archive
April 7. 2002 - Hans Andreas Navrestad, Airborn in 1825In 1825, an airborn event took place at Navrestad in Lund kommune, Norway. The local watchmaker Hans Andreas Navrestad performed a glided flight using a homemade flying device. According to stories told, he took off from a mountain top nearby the Navrestad Farm and continued across the Navrestad Lake, covering a total distance of about 400 meters. 68 years later, the german Otto Lilienthal made the world aware of aviation.
April 6. 2002 - Friedrich A. Kittler: Technologies of Writing/Rewriting TechnologyAn Interview with the German Guru of Technology and Media
Studies Friedrich A. Kittler.
By Matthew B. Griffen and S.M. Herrman
April 5. 2002 - Karen Ross: British Situation ComedyOne of the first British shows to take a serious and sustained interest in race themes was Till Death Us Do Part, originally broadcast in the mid-1960s on BBC1. Five weeks into the first series the show had already toppled its immediate competitor, Coronation Street, in the ratings war. Although the idea for the series had been in the mind of its creator, Johnny Speight for several years, it wasn't until Frank Muir took over comedy at the BBC that production began, initially as a pilot but subsequently as a fully-fledged series. The comedy centred on the Garnett family, with the main "star" of the show in the person of the patriarch "Alf," sometimes known as "Chairman Alf" for his ready willingness to engage in scurrilous diatribes against the Conservative party. The other significant target of his rantings were black people and it is for the extreme views expressed by Alf on issues of race that the programme is most remembered (and denounced).
March 9. 2002 - Bernard Berenson [1897]Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
February 17. 2002 - An Interactive Ready-Made for Richard Mutt?US Patent No. US4773863.
A urinal with amusement features. Discourages the inadvertent or intentional diversion of urine outside the proper receptacle. Urine is detected by pressure or temperature sensors 12, sending an electrical signal to a control unit 16. This activates a loudspeaker 28 and video screen 24, to provide audio and visual signals. The combination of sight and sound may be varied by the user upon proper direction of the urine stream, and the user is actively involved in his own amusement.
February 16. 2002 - U.S. Marshals Service plays vital roles in federal executionsAmid a maelstrom of media representatives and protesters, the Marshals Service played two vital roles in the June executions of federal prisoners Timothy McVeigh and Raul Garza.
Deputy marshals provided security along the perimeter of the execution chamber and Southern Indiana Marshal Frank Anderson gave his court- ordered consent to proceed - thus enabling the warden of the Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind., to administer lethal injections to both prisoners in accordance with the law.
February 11. 2002 - Lee De Forest: Radio Trailblazer [1957]«Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances.»
In his final years de Forest was disillusioned at what radio programming had become. Believing himself to be the "Father of Radio" he asked reporters in the early 1950s, "Why should anyone want to buy a radio . . . nine tenths of what one can hear is the continual drivel of second-rate jazz, sickening crooning by degenerate sax players, interrupted by blatant sales talks?" Yes, Lee, why should anyone indeed?
January 29. 2002 - Paul Feyerabend: Against Method [1975]«There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge. The whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory.»
«No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.»
«...science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without having ever examined its advantages and its limits.»read more...
January 25. 2002 - The Internet as a tool to create "critical mass" of intellectual resources.To appreciate the importance the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of "critical mass", as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the most creative people are often not the best team players, and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy. Let them go their separate ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week's communicating. There has to be some way of facilitating communicantion among people without bringing them together in one place.
January 24. 2002 - As We May Think [1945]As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coördinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar", this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.
Or just read the extract [vision of hypertext, etc.]...
January 22. 2002 - The GOLEM Project & MATRIX (the movie)
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The field of Artificial Life examines "life as it could be" based on understanding the principles and simulating the mechanisms of real biological forms. Just as airplanes use the same principles as birds, but have fixed wings, artificial lifeforms may share the same principles, but not the same implementation in chemistry. Every feature of living systems seems wondrous until it is understood: Stored energy, autonomous movement, and even animal communication are no longer miracles, as they are replicated in toys using batteries, motors, and computer chips.
Complex biological forms reproduce by taking advantage of an arbitrarily complex set of auto-catalyzing chemical reactions. Biological life is in control of its own means of reproduction, and this autonomy of design and manufacture is a key element which has not yet been understood or reproduced artificially. To this date, robots - a form of artificial life - are still designed laboriously and constructed by teams of human engineers at great cost. Few robots are available because these costs must be absorbed through mass production that is justified only for toys, weapons, and industrial systems like automatic teller machines.
In the Golem project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) we conducted a set of experiments in which simple electro-mechanical systems evolved from scratch to yield physical locomoting machines. Like biological lifeforms whose structure and function exploit the behaviors afforded by their own chemical and mechanical medium, our evolved creatures take advantage of the nature of their own medium - thermoplastic, motors, and artificial neurons. We thus achieve autonomy of design and construction using evolution in a limited universe physical simulation, coupled to off-the-shelf rapid manufacturing technology. This is the first time robots have been robotically designed and robotically fabricated.
A tagline from the movie states that the future will not be user friendly, but a more adequate question could very well be: will the future need users?
January 15. 2002 - Telautomata (Robots)Telautomats will be ultimately produced, capable of acting as if possessed of their own intelligence, and their advent will create a revolution.
Nikola Tesla, 1921
Well before the race for wireless telegraphy and as far back as 1893 in St. Louis, Tesla demonstrated remote control of objects by wireless. This was two full years before Marconi began his experiments. His demonstrations of remote control climaxed in an exhibition in 1898 at Madison Square Garden in which Tesla caused a small boat to obey commands from the audience. Of course, it was Tesla interpreting the verbal requests and sending appropriate frequencies to tuned circuits in the miniature ship, but to the audience it was magic.
To the press, Tesla prophesied a future in which telautomatons (robots) did man's bidding, perhaps some day exceeding mankind. Tesla had already decided that men were "meat machines", responding only to stimuli and incapable of free will, so to him the succession of man by machine seemed less preposterous. He also chose to join others in the race to use America's newfound technological superiority to devastate the Spanish in the the Spanish-American War. He offered his remote controlled boat to the military as a new kind of "smart-torpedo" that would make war so terrible nations would cease to wage it.