Cachagua
She thought about it for a minute and then told me a remarkable story about her relationship with technology during the last 40 years living up the mountain a bit east of where we stood. She did not exactly answer my question, but made a point nonetheless.
“I pretty much stayed on the mountain. There are no phone lines. There is no electricity,” she said. “I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I’ve been off the grid forever. Now, I have the small solar panel and I can turn on the light and charge my cell phone. I’m not used to it. My daughter tells me, ‘You can plug things in!’ And I say, ‘I don’t have anything to plug in.’ Blow out the lights, not turn out the lights, is my thing.”
Her boss, the chef Michael Jones, filled in the rest of Liz’s story on his blog (punctuation all his). “Liz lives in a trailer on the mountain with no power and no water…two horses, a goat and two dogs. Cats don’t count. She carries water in plastic buckets to the critters….and to her own self,” he wrote. “She pays child support to a scumbag in Missouri or one of those other M states or square states…..Her daughter that I know is an honor student at Davis…….Because she has no power or water, Liz hangs with us after working her 10 hr shift at The Store. We are her TV.”
I’ve ridden my bike out past Cachagua Road and I can attest to the beauty and isolation of the area. It was very near Jamesburg that, climbing a long hill, I passed a man in a cowboy hat and boots, his back to me, urinating. The two cyclists coming down the hill had a much better view and the man made no attempt to stand behind cover.
This particular excerpt reminds me of the photos I’ve seen and the stories I’ve heard about my mother-in-law’s family when they lived in the mountains above Big Sur – a kind of lifestyle that seems almost extinct.
Wormhole
When I lived above that chocolate shop on Haight Street, it was impossible to receive a package or a repairman. I had to be at home at the exact moment the doorbell rang, then I had to tear down the hallway, around the stairs, and fling myself outside before it was too late. Often the delivery man had such poor luck with this building, (s)he wouldn’t even ring the doorbell. Which was great. I’d stay home all day, waiting, and emerge at dusk to find the “Sorry We Missed You” slip right there, taunting me. Nine times out of ten I had to take public transportation 20 miles out of town to pick up the package.
Now I live two blocks away, one block off the Haight, and my apartment complex has this awesome, fancy doorbell system that calls my cell phone to buzz open the lobby door. When I see the right number calling, I answer the call, press “9″ and in goes the delivery man. It works great.
So a few days ago I had my iPhone in the back pocket of my jeans and, oh!, it fell in a coffee shop toilet when I sat down to pee. After a couple days of the rice trick failure, I surrendered myself to fate and late last night I ordered a refurbished iPhone from AT&T.
Just over 12 hours later it dawns on me: I need a cell phone if I’m going to buzz in the delivery of a cell phone.
Historic Tale Construction Kit Recreated
A recreation in HTML and JavaScript of Historic Tale Construction Kit, a now-defunct Flash application.
There’s a description of the original (ein Authoring Tool basierend auf dem Teppich von Bayeux); it’s auf Deutsch.
The Amish Project
A 24-year-old student went 90 days without using a cell phone, email or social media. Yahoo News interviewed him about the experience:
I definitely just lost complete contact with people that normally would have been part of my life. I mean it’s also an interesting metric for your life to see who some of your closest friends are, you know, and who’s willing to take the time.
I find it an interesting thought experiment to contrast this idea with Clusterflock, which is the clearest example in my life of the relationship-building power of the internet and social technology. The internet made it possible to seek out an entirely new tribe of people – people with which I have so much in common and so much to talk about, but that I hadn’t realized existed.
But then there are social networks like Facebook, which at their worst takes all of the people who are already part of your life – your co-workers, your school chums, your family – and hands them a level of intimacy about our lives that they haven’t really earned and don’t particularly deserve. I think that’s why it’s so interesting when these online relationships predicated on intimate knowledge but passive communication go bust when one party pulls out of Facebook – we’re just learning a hard lesson about the differences between that kind of intimate knowledge and true friendship, which for the longest time I thought were one and the same.
A couple relatives recently found me on Google Plus (I use it primarily for the sad remnants of what was once Google Reader). I hadn’t even acknowledged their existence before they were already commenting on every single piece of information attached to my name. This, I’m told, is keeping in touch.
Listening to the Atomic Age
From the Canada Science and Technology Museum, sounds of the Algonquin hand-cranked Geiger counter detecting low-level emissions from another Atomic Age artifact, the Algom Uranium Marketing Sample.
Sounds like geckering to me.
this is a metaphor for something
Cristóbal Vila, Fallingwater
Cristóbal Vila created a beautiful CGI fly-through — from construction to completion — of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
(thanks, Chris)
And he also has a fuckable butt
The trailer for Matt Lenski’s Meaning of Robots:
The benevolent Mike Sullivan, age 65, has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands of them.
(thanks, Sarah)
Apple’s New Authoring Platform
I’m a little slow on this this morning, but Andrew sent me the AllThingsD overview of Apple’s iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and Digital Textbooks announcement this morning. I’m particularly excited about iBooks Author.
Update: Tim has a good analysis of what it all means over at Wired:
Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a development and publishing ecosystem that begins and ends with Apple. Amazon may offer more eyeballs, but Apple offers an easier workflow. And the multimedia enhancements baked into the new iBooks will tempt everyone creating an e-book to add bits that will be specific to Apple’s platform — creating accidental exclusives.
Censoring Wired
Wired has a good overview, explaining their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act:
Under the current wording of the measures, the Attorney General would have the power to order ISPs to block access to foreign-based sites suspected of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit goods; order search engines to delist the sites from their indexes; ban advertising on suspected sites; and block payment services from processing transactions for accused sites. If the same standards were applied to U.S.-based sites, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Google and Wired could all find themselves blocked.
Such requests would need to be reviewed and approved by a judge. But accused sites would get little notice of a pending action in U.S. courts against them, and, once blacklisted, have little effective means of appeal.
As you probably know, sites like Wikipedia, Wired, and BoingBoing are going black today, or censoring their content in protest, but for those in need @FakeWikipedia is going strong on Twitter.
Update: If you would like to register your discontent, Google can point you in the right direction, or simply call your representatives.
Not my super-heroine persona,
but I am thinking that somebody should assume the mantle of The Sanitizer.
dear clusterflock
Google alternatives.
Update: Why Google is ditching search
headline of the day
Monkeys Devise a Tool to Break Out of Zoo in Brazil
New Math
Craig Damrauer put together a slideshow at The Atlantic Monthly demonstrating the math of the technology he expected by now:
When you get right down to it a lot of the ‘future’ things I saw in cartoons, TV shows and movies while growing up have come true. We have instant food (TV dinner + microwave), video phones and 3D television. Robots help fight our wars (drones) and the cops are armed with guns they can set on stun. So it’s helpful to see this as a glass half full kind of scenario. However, there are a few things I’d hoped for that I’ve yet to see. Here’s a small selection.
(via @tcarmody)
wait for it
Vizio laptops and all-in-ones
Vizio plans to enter the laptop and all-in-one market and undercut competitors’ prices while they’re at it. While the design certainly falls within the current Apple aesthetic, if I were looking for a non-Apple PC, I’d definitely consider one.
headline of the day
Swedish Government Recognizes File-Sharing Faith as a Religion
You can’t just toss an old surplus turbojet engine into a homemade chassis anymore and go for it
Waldo Stakes wants to build a rocket car to beat the current land-speed-record of 763.035 by 1273 mph.
Moving his family to Southern California in 1984 to be closer to the aerospace industry, Stakes was soon scouring scrapyards for parts he could use to build a rocket car. His most impressive find is a set of XLR99 rocket engines designed for NASA’s legendary X-15, the stub-winged experimental plane that grabbed the flight speed record of 4520 mph in 1967 and has never let go. “Back in the ’80s this stuff was considered scrap metal, and everyone was melting it down to recover the silver and gold from the brazed tubing,” Stakes says. “But these engines weren’t built that way. They’re made from Inconel-X [an exotic alloy] and virtually indestructible. I think they cost $1500 each for four. I have two left. One for the car and a spare.”
headline of the day, II
Amazing Motion Controlled, Cat-Grooming Robot Demonstrated
Daddy’s Plane
My daddy went to work at the aircraft firm of Chance Vought in 1935, I think, when he was nineteen or so. Jobs were hard to come by, but he was smart and mechanically inclined and he had a high school degree.
When the US entered WWII, my daddy was exempted from the draft on account of his working in a ‘critical industry’. Vought’s biggest customer was the US Navy.
After the war, Vought’s military contracts must have dwindled. Or maybe moving operations inland seemed like a good idea. Anyway, the company transferred 1300 key personnel from Connecticut to the right-to-work state of Texas. It was the biggest-ever US corporate move at that time. A Hollywood film inspired by the move even went into pre-production, and Spencer Tracy was said to have been cast. I imagine my mother in a Katharine Hepburn role.
The F4U Corsair (1940-1952) was Vought’s triumph.
The Japanese are said to have called the plane Whistling Death.
the inverse of the American Dream
Photographer Doug Rickard used Google Street View to find pictures for his latest show at the Museum of Modern Art.
According to Rickard, this epiphany fused immediately into a crystal-clear idea: He would use Street View as his camera and, working from a room in his home, travel the roads of neglected American cities and neighborhoods in a 21st-century “road trip.” This single idea would utterly consume his life for close to two years, resulting in the important body of work “A New American Picture,” a selection of which hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Christianity and the Future of the Book
Alan Jacobs writes a beautiful exposition on the importance of understanding technology and theology, underscoring what makes books so incredible:
Consider the moment in the Confessions when, after hearing and obeying the voice telling him to “take it and read,” Augustine sees the words in what he calls “the book of the apostle” that changed his life. Note first that he can open the book to a random place, something that would have been difficult with a scroll; then, after reading the momentous passage, he closes the book, with his finger inserted to mark the place. He goes, “with a face now at peace,” to tell his friend Alypius what has happened, bringing the book with him, and when Alypius asks to see the passage, Augustine simply opens the book to the place marked by his finger and shows it to his friend. To us such a set of movements is absolutely natural — and yet not so many generations before Augustine the incident could not have played out in anything remotely resembling this famous scene. Nor, to anticipate a later stage in this exposition, would it have played out in the same way had Augustine been using a Kindle.
(thanks, Josh)
from the comments
My Aunt Audrey was a telephone operator in the sticks of Tennessee. We would visit relatives and I would get on the phone to act out, forgetting about Aunt Audrey or just being defiant. Until I heard a distinctive voice that I was sure was her say, “No playing on the telephone, Miss.”
Mr. C. said that even earlier, all calls had to go through the operator. So if you were trying to reach them, the operator might say things like, “You won’t be able to talk to them until Tuesday. They’ve gone to the river to see Nam Becky,” or some such.
I still am convinced telephone operators know everything.
Google Image Search: Carlo Mollino Polaroids
Phonograms
Patrick Feaster studies the culture of early phonography (the recording and reproduction of sound) and blogs at Phonozoic, where I’ve been hanging out for the past hour or so. At the 2011 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Feaster shared “Phonogram Images on Paper: 1250-1950.” You can listen to his presentation and download slides here. Just scroll down a little ways and you’ll find the links.
(via Excavated Shellac)
