Jacques Ellul: anarchist, would-be situationist, theorist of technology and propaganda, theologian. This the fifth of a six-part series of youtube clips. It has charmingly bad camerawork, a brief look at the man’s library, and a minute of virtuoso accordion (harmonium?) playing at the end.
A Video News Release of the first flight of the Terrafugia Transition. The Transition achieved first flight on March 5th, 2009 in Plattsburgh, NY. The Transition is a roadable aircraft, or a “flying car”.
From this article:
With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.
This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.
This project to make biodiesel from algae seems like a good idea to an extent. The problem with using corn to make biodiesel or ethanol is not so much the use of water and land though, it’s the use of fertilizers, which are largely products of the petrochemical industry. The transportation for the fertilizers, which sometimes comes from far-flung parts of the world, burns an awful lot of fuel as well.
I’m assuming everyone knows that the whole ethanol business has been a huge scam, and is not a real alternative fuel at all. If the algae uses less equipment to be farmed, and doesn’t require as much (or preferable any) fertilizer, it would be a real viable alternative. However, since the article mentions only water and land as resources, i’m skeptical.
Wired has a post on recently released documents on HAARP. I’m brokenhearted that there’s nothing in there connecting HAARP to barium sulfide and chemtrails.
Neglected to mention a story about barium sulfide in the environment suspected to be from chemtrails up in Shreveport last month.
Obviously, the transhumanists are going to be all over this Muscular Thin Films technology. The technology is coating a silicon-based organic polymer with heart muscle cells that react to electrical stimuli, which are then easily cut off into sheets. The video shows that the sheets have semi-motility in swimming with this simple motion.
It would be most interesting to see if this can be used to create probes for deep sea exploration. There will be more advanced applications (artificial arms in ten years?) but when i see “swimming” robots, no matter how small, that’s what pops into my head.
It’s odd that i was reading Cope’s Japrocksampler last night, to run across this story about “melody roads” in Japan. They already realized that they had the rhythm, so on some roads, they have cut grooves so that tones can be created while driving over them. A driver can adjust the car to create a song of sorts. They are going to out-literalize the concept of motorik in Krautrock!
