unterbahn

The Telephone as Political Instrument: Gardiner Hubbard and the Formation of the Middle Class in America, 1875-1880

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:14:00 -0400

By Bernard Carlson — really good, written in 2001 but a lot (!) of parallels with municipal Wifi efforts and also with Meraki and mesh networking… the idea of consumers setting up independent local shared wifi. The openness of the Internet is in many ways a sham… Comcast and other providers of “last mile” infrastructure are the (1800s) Western Union of the Internet. They and now 3G cell phone internet providers now control access to the net… ironically the latter is now mainly AT&T… Bell.

Pocketbike Racing

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:18:29 -0400

Pocketbike Racing

Usufruct

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:29:00 -0400

Usufruct

"Harry Braverman says in “Labor and Monopoly Capital”: The Hawthorne tests were based on..."

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:22:07 -0400

“Harry Braverman says in “Labor and Monopoly Capital”: The Hawthorne tests were based on behaviorist psychology and were supposed to confirm that workers performance could be predicted by pre-hire testing. However, the Hawthorne study showed “that the performance of workers had little relation to ability and in fact often bore a reverse relation to test scores…”. What the studies really showed was that the workplace was not “a system of bureaucratic formal organization on the Weberian model, nor a system of informal group relations, as in the interpretation of Mayo and his followers but rather a system of power, of class antagonisms”. This discovery was a blow to those hoping to apply the behavioral sciences to manipulate workers in the interest of management.”

- Hawthorne effect

"GPG will then start to print some gibberish while it generates your key pair. During this period,..."

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:53:27 -0400

“GPG will then start to print some gibberish while it generates your key pair. During this period, GPG will also ask you to do something with your computer such as typing on the keyboard, moving your mouse or using your hard disk drive. This serves the purpose of creating more entropy and helps in generating a better key.”

- Robert Sosinski: Link

Curatorialists

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:22:07 -0400

Imagine an Amish-like community which instead of choosing a particular momentbin time to freeze technological development, would pick and choose technologies to include in their lives. How would they reach a consensus on which to include? What would be the guiding principles?

"“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck.” — James..."

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:00:54 -0400

“

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck.” — James Whitcomb Riley

In duck typing one is concerned with just those aspects of an object that are used, rather than with the type of the object itself. For example, in a non-duck-typed language, one can create a function that takes an object of type Duck and calls that object’s walk and quack methods. In a duck-typed language, the equivalent function would take an object of any type and call that object’s walk and quack methods. If the object does not have the methods that are called then the function signals a run-time error. It is this action of any object having the correct walk and quack methods being accepted by the function that evokes the quotation and hence the name of this form of typing.

”

- Duck typing

Franco Sbarro

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:12:42 -0400

Franco Sbarro

Yamaha Tesseract (via Gizmodo)

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:08:12 -0400

Yamaha Tesseract (via Gizmodo)

Sbarro Spokeless Bicycle Patent

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:04:05 -0400

Sbarro Spokeless Bicycle Patent

Drake Passage

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:13:00 -0400

Drake Passage

Mushrooms: a print a day

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:39:36 -0400

Mushrooms: a print a day

Many historians who have responded to Menzies’ hypotheses...

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:18:36 -0400

Many historians who have responded to Menzies’ hypotheses have been strongly critical: “Examination of the book’s central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance.” (1421: The Year China Discovered America)

"Socrates: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the..."

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:35:09 -0400

“Socrates: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.”

- Socrates on books (Plato, Phaedrus)

"Step 1: Feed your lion by sliding his food off a tray and placing the food on the ground. Pet lions..."

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:52:00 -0400

“Step 1: Feed your lion by sliding his food off a tray and placing the food on the ground. Pet lions have been known to take metal or plastic bowls and destroy them in a matter of seconds because they do not understand the concept of eating out of a container.”

- via William Niebling: eHow: How to Feed a Pet Lion

SW 2 HW

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:07:54 -0400

Hardware, fabbed like hydroponic marijuana, will be cheap and sold next to beef jerky in gas stations. Software, customizable and requiring wealth to run on a universal Turing machine, will be for the upper class. This is already the case with $10 Famicom clones in India and China, vs. emulated Nintendo ROMs on a 2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.

Information technology for the masses

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:37:02 -0400

A line of toys which allow for situational awareness at low cost. Can be used for home security or to manage/enable nonviolent protest. Electronics for civil disobedience can help defend civil liberties in an opressive political regime.

"Meanwhile, instead of tankers, how about dirigibles retrofitted with solar panels? During the rainy..."

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:05:51 -0400

“Meanwhile, instead of tankers, how about dirigibles retrofitted with solar panels? During the rainy season, they graze along the canopies of the Amazon, soaking up fresh tropical water. Enterprising landscape architects on an eco-tour of the rainforest will record their mesmerizing whirs of rotating blades — the eco-soundtrack of New Nature — and then sell the DVDs on eBay or at a farmer’s market.”

- Pruned on tanker-aqueducts supplying Cyprus with fresh water.

David Macaulay’s “Through Rome by blimp”

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:20:17 -0400

David Macaulay’s “Through Rome by blimp”

Everyone Forever / Maths / Diffusion limited aggregation

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:40:03 -0400

Everyone Forever / Maths / Diffusion limited aggregation