regressive vegetable storage
Sometimes being progressive means being regressive.
30 Photos of a Chinese Sex Toy Factory
dear clusterflock
So, clusterflockstock IV.
Now that we’re nearing March, I’m wondering if anyone has an idea for where the group of us could get together this year. Based on what we’ve learned from previous years’ plannings, the when tends to be less important than the where.
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.
All that’s left here are the remnants of what was
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors of the documentary Jesus Camp, produced a short video at The New York Times about the dismantling of Detroit.
One freezing evening we happened upon the young men in this film, who were illegally dismantling a former Cadillac repair shop. They worked recklessly to tear down the steel beams and copper fasteners. They were in a hurry to make it to the scrap yard before it closed at 10 p.m., sell their spoils and head to the bar.
Surprisingly, these guys, who all lacked high school diplomas, seemed to have a better understanding of their place in the global food chain than many educated American 20-somethings. The young men regularly checked the fluctuating price of metals before they determined their next scrap hunt, and they had a clear view of where these resources were going and why.
dear clusterflock
I don’t mean to go around hawking my wares, but this seemed so relevant and useful to you personally that I thought it would be wrong not to share it. Please keep in mind that I am financially involved with this offer, but even so I think you’ll find I was right to share this marvelous opportunity with you today.
Well now here I’ve wasted a lot of your time with technicalities and jibber jabber, I’ll come to my point quickly. Let me ask you just one question:
Have you ever wanted to have a spleen named after you?
dear clusterflock
Google alternatives.
Update: Why Google is ditching search
“Hit me!”
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)
Sign of the Times (and the Place)
Half a dozen Russian speakers, all under thirty, packed up their car after a weekend rental of one of my neighbor’s cottages here in the Driftless Regional Resort Region. A few may have glanced at me as I scrabbled in the dirt, digging up buried money and muttering, “I am uncovering my wealth.”
Sign of the Times
I just got chided by my 91-year-old mother for not being on Facebook more often.
After Farting
“Who run Bartertown!?”
quote out of context
“What I can promise you is this – when you get out of college, if I’m president, you’ll have a job.”
headline of the day, III
‘Gay Robot’ Heckles Bachmann At Iowa Event
tweet of the day
“Nobody cares about science anymore. They want feelings instead of facts!” “How do you know?” “I got a hunch.”
— Zach Weiner (@ZachWeiner) December 23, 2011
from the comments
Future Joel gets the tiny piece.
from the comments
Up bright and early for the Starvest. We traveled further each year, hopping from system to system in the rickety ship we’d pieced together. In order to keep needs low, artificial water had been rationed since before I could remember, but most of our days were spent gathering the real kind from the seemingly endless brimming galaxies. It got tough to even see stars for what they were after a few years, large gaseous rounds or small immovable solid objects. You just start calculating, as soon as you land how much you can gather. Bryn asked me the other day if we’d ever return to a star she particularly liked. I had never even thought of that possibility. Stars were simply starvested and we moved on, sending back smaller, heavily guarded vessels with the liquids to be counted and stored. The rich could afford the real stuff, but Bryn, my father and myself were given only a small measure on the anniversary of our birth. Father carefully saved his, hoping someday to trade for better parts or perhaps land on Home Planet. I taste the smallest sip every year, feeling the lightening quick effects of even the lightest drop for days, smooth against the tongue, giving courage to the heart and clarity to the mind, and then put my portion with his. Bryn asked why we tried so hard since more work just meant more star water for others, but she’s too young to understand that there are limits to this universe and there’s only a few more years left to gather. New stars are born to replace the old ones that have been harvested, but not quickly enough and they won’t even be ready when my ten-thousandth granddaughter is born and scraping the skies.
dueling banjos
image out of context
headline of the day
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future
Predicting The Future
If Steve Jobs predicted the future, it should also be pointed out that Bill Watterson had the same prescience, just with less optimism.
headline of the day
Army Wants Virtual Training to Really Hurt
image out of context
Black Mirror — Thought Controlled Siri
Some hobbyist hackers have rigged up an iPhone 4S to collect brain wave patterns from some simple ECG pads, translate them into synthesized speech, which is in turn pumped through the 3.5 mm headphone jack, and recognized by Siri as a usable command. Besides pressing the home key to initiate Siri, all you have to do is think your command, and your iPhone 4S will hop to it. The engineers expect that they’ll even be able to eliminate the need to press the home key, making it fully automatic. So far, the guys at Project Black Mirror have been able to link 25 brain wave patterns to specific Siri commands. Of course, right now the project is a bulky Arduino test board hooked up to a Macbook, which also occupies the headphone jack, and makes the user look like he belongs in Clockwork Orange, but these guys are putting up a Kickstarter page shortly to get funding and turn this thing into a real product.
I guess I should say this would be pretty easy to fake, but when Siri was announced I told my sister-in-law in ten years Siri would be in our heads. Maybe I was too pessimistic. Here’s the Black Mirror blog, so you can follow along.
Update: Mind-controlled Siri likely a hoax
(thanks, Joel)
image out of context
