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Blog Details for "KuiperCliff"
KuiperCliffKuiperClifftechnology, culture, ethics, surveillance Articles
Rocking in the Free World
2007-06-07 11:53:00 Well, perhaps not rocking, but definitely back in the free world. I didn’t expect to be away for so long - nearly three weeks - but now t’internet is up and running and, once I’ve excised all the malware my evil ISP has seen fit to embed in my registry, I reckon KuiperCliff will be ... More About: World , Free
Office Space
2007-05-21 14:21:00 I wouldn’t say the long spells of working in Egypt over the last few years have been entirely edifying, but it can’t all be bad when this is the view from your office: The unmistakeable monument dead centre is the second pyramid at Giza, that of Khafre, Chephren to the Greeks. The photo is taken from ... More About: Space , Office , Office Space , Pace
Intermission
2007-05-18 15:21:00 I’ve been a bit distracted this week, not to mention sick, hence the dearth of posts the last few days. A database snafu c/o an enforced XP re-install (I know, I really do need a Mac) means that my last week in Cairo has necessitated attention elsewhere. On the 22nd, I head back to the ... More About: Sion , Mission , Term , Missi
Tugela Ridley photography
2007-05-13 16:18:00 A photographer friend of mine has just got her website up and running at tugelaridley.com. Currently based in Ghana, she specialises in covering African issues, particularly of late in central Africa and Sudan. If anyone needs to commission a talented photographer in Africa, contact her here. Here’s a short random selection of some of her recent ... More About: Photography , Graph
The Machine is Bleeding to Death
2007-05-12 21:14:00 How about a bit of dystopian, urban poetry at the end of a hard day’s graft? Well, I was listening to my “haven’t-heard-in-a-while, if-ever” playlist on iTunes at work, and Dead Flag Blues by Godspeed You Black Emperor! cropped up, and mighty glad to hear it I was too. From the album f#a#oo, this is ... More About: Machine , Death , Bleed , Mach
Nosedives in Nevada
2007-05-11 19:03:00 In 1957, the US Department of Energy decided it was time to pollute Nevada still further, so began detonating more large atomic weapons. The excellent Airminded blog tells the story of Operation Plumbbob, of which Brett Holman writes, in totally deadpan fashion: Statistically speaking, the radiation released into the atmosphere from Plumbbob would be expected to ... More About: Nose , Dive
Chatbot conversations
2007-05-11 11:25:00 Read what passes between A.L.I.C.E., a young and enthusiastic chatbot, and a rather older and more cynical Jabberwacky, potential Turing machines both [via]. It reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s 1997 short story Jipi and the Paranoid Chip, which I posted about a while back. George can get bored real easy. I had a long chat with George, ... More About: Sati , Conversation
Hisaharu Motoda Neo-Ruins
2007-05-10 23:35:00 For anyone who somehow hasn’t seen BLDGBLOG or Wired in the last day or so, check out this stunning series of lithographs of post-apocalyptic Tokyo by Hisaharu Motoda. They’re almost too good to be believed. There may be no people, but nature carries on. That aspect of these images reminds me of Paul Theroux’s forgotten ... More About: Ruin , Ruins
Paper Scissors Paper?
2007-05-10 19:50:00 Nature reports that German security technologists have developed software algorithms to reconstruct scanned images of shredded documents [via]. In this case, the documents were mainly hand-shredded by the East German State Security Service (Stasi) as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In total, 45 million pages were shredded into 600 million fragments, of which 2% ... More About: Paper
British Earthquake Appeal
2007-05-10 18:58:00 Following the horrendous earthquake affecting the southeast English county of Kent recently, an appeal has been launched to help the victims of the worst natural disaster to hit the UK since the Great Storm of 1987. Locals are comparing it to the Alaskan earthquake of 1964. I reproduce the press release in full: **FOLKESTONE/DOVER EARTHQUAKE APPEAL** A ... More About: Earthquake , British , Appeal
MySpace Disclaimer
2007-05-09 19:13:00 Apparently, there’s a MySpace blog called Kuiper Cliff - some kind of musical undertaking. According to the guy’s profile - and it surely is a guy - he sounds like “some asshole on a piano”. Well, it ain’t me anyway, in case anyone happens to stumble across it. He’ll have as many problems as I ... More About: Myspace , Pace , Disclaimer , Disc
Ed Coolidge - more cities in flight
2007-05-07 19:20:00 I’m not sure whether to file these paintings by Edward Coolidge under ‘art’ or ’speculative architecture’, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. I haven’t been able to find out much about Ed Coolidge, save that I’m pretty sure he’s a Bostonian transported to Los Angeles, and also created Machine Eye View. This ‘City’ series ... More About: Cities , Light , More , Flight
Disorder in the Frozen North
2007-05-06 20:22:00 If I posted a ‘Photograph of the Day’, this might have been today’s offering: Fourth Street, Anchorage, Alaska 1964 [Wikimedia Commons] On Good Friday, March 28th 1964, a massive earthquake hit Alaska. It remains, at 9.2 on the Richter Scale, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America, and the third largest in known history. The foreshortening of ... More About: Order , Diso , Frozen
The Rehabilitation of Philip K. Dick continues
2007-05-06 17:21:00 A friend of mine alerted to me to an article in the New York Times, A Prince of Pulp, Legit at Last, or as she put it, ‘the hagiography goes mainstream’. Apparently our favourite paranoid visionary is to be published in the Library of America Hall of Fame series. I’m not American, so I don’t ... More About: Dick , Phil , Bili , Hili , Conti
Sumer is Icumen In ?
2007-05-05 17:27:00 I’ve just finished reading The Prince of the Marshes by Rory Stewart. Published in 2006, this is the autobiographical account of the year Stewart spent as deputy governor of, first, Amara, and then Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq during 2003-2004. It’s a pretty even-handed description of the situation at the time, from someone who obviously believed ...
Lazarettos - pesthouses and the plague
2007-05-04 20:05:00 I was idly reading the introduction to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1787), and I noticed that, although his designs were intended principally for use in penitentiaries, they were also perceived to be of benefit to “any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection”. In the title of the ... More About: Pest , Azar , Ouse
We Control Your Street
2007-05-04 14:37:00 Geoff Manaugh wrote an interesting piece about streets a couple of days ago, in which he lamented the missed opportunities afforded by American streets, particularly those in Los Angeles where he lives. I was reminded of this statement by Kevin Slavin and Adam Greenfield: Even considered solely as thoroughfare, the richness of the city street is ... More About: Street , Tree , Control
To the Kuiper Cliff and beyond ?
2007-05-03 14:15:00 Roughly a decade from now, NASA’s robotic spacecraft New Horizons will have finished its business with Pluto and be hurtling further into the Kuiper Belt, 2.8 billion miles from Earth. This 2 billion mile wide zone of extra-solar space contains all manner of trans-Neptunian objects - cubewanos, twotinos and plutinos, as well as Pluto and ... More About: Beyond , Cliff
Early obituary for Tony Blair
2007-05-02 20:52:00 The Economist has just published an early career-obituary for departing British PM Tony Blair , in From Bambi to Bliar. He will be remembered most in the UK for rejecting the empassioned voice of the British electorate in embarking on a disastrous war in Iraq. His public epitaph will be able to choose freely from any ... More About: Obit , Early
Scott Teplin: Heavy Water
2007-05-02 17:47:00 Over at Life Without Buildings, I saw an old post about Scott Teplin, a New York-based artist. The press release for his Heavy Water paintings contained the following statement: For this series, Teplin was inspired by Hezbollah strategies implemented during the last war in Lebanon. The Islamic ...
Early Earth
2007-05-01 16:11:00 “The Earth circulating in space in the state of a gaseous star”: From Louis Figuier, The World Before the Deluge (1872) [link via BibliOdyssey] More About: Early , Earl
?The Rise of Network Culture?, in byte-sized chunks
2007-05-01 15:50:00 Today is May Day, and an Egyptian holiday, which affords me the opportunity to actually tackle my RSS reader and reduce things to manageable levels. Always near the top of the to-read list is Kazys Varnelis’ blog. Appropriately, for all of us challenged by information overload, he is serialising his essay on The Rise of ... More About: Culture , Network , Size , Byte
A New Patron Saint of Architects?
2007-05-01 14:15:00 Archinect has an irresistible story about Antoni Gaudí, and the idea that he could be canonised for his services to the Roman Catholic church. The focus of the Pro-Beatifying Gaudí Association and its president José Manuel Almuzara is the evangelical nature of Gaudí’s Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, and its reflection of the ... More About: Archi , Tron , Saint , Architects , Architect
International Labour Day
2007-05-01 08:58:00 It’s May 1st, and Labour Day rolls around again. In 1994, the disputed Georgian Republic of Abkhazia issued these postage stamps, albeit not for May Day itself: Obviously, the stamps depict Groucho Marx and John Lennon, rather than their rather more famous socialist namesakes, and were designed to have some fun at the expense of ... More About: International , Intern
Request: Mark, release The Fall
2007-04-25 06:22:00 Hey, Mark , you’re spoiling the paintwork. I’ve been buying/ acquiring/ begging/ downloading/ buying gig tickets, for The Fall for twenty years. If you really want to be the Hip Priest, ditch your entire back catalogue in the public domain. It’ll be a riot, I promise you. How about it? Update: bizarrely, this has been dugg. Go ... More About: Request , Release , Quest , Lease
Communication networks: past, present and future
2007-04-23 21:24:00 Over the last week or so, I’ve been joyfully ploughing my way through a series of lectures from the Long Now Foundation. Their excellent series of Seminars About Long-Term Thinking (SALT) is an ongoing outreach program of public presentations designed to foster interest in, and debate about, responsiblity for the common global future. The mp3s ... More About: Communication , Networks , Future , Works , Past
Electromagnetic skyscrapers
2007-04-21 20:04:00 A bit late on this one, but anything worth it’s salt is more than a passing fancy, right? It’s also a curious beastie, not so much for the imagining, but the presentation. Let’s face it, speculative architecture is often no more than unreasonable architecture, but that’s no reason not to design. Hence the fact that ... More About: Crap , Scrap , Roma , Rape , Magnet
Do You Fear Intelligent Machines?
2007-04-19 14:36:00 Any regular readers may have discerned that I’m no fan of Digg. It’s not the theory behind the site, just the present state of it. However, Hrafn at Inkblot Earth emailed this morning to tell me about a question he wants people to digg and comment on: Do You Fear Intelligent Machines ? I’m as interested in ... More About: Chine , Gent
Suburban and Industrial Monuments
2007-04-18 20:37:00 I’ve had vague plans to write a short post about Bernd and Hilla Becher for a while. A post on A Daily Dose of Architecture gives me a good excuse to do so now. It links to photographer Mark Luthringer’s Ridgemont Typologies, a series of image arrays documenting the “American suburban landscape of consumption, status, ... More About: Industrial , Trial , Tria , Rial , Monuments
Space elevator: LiftPort closed?
More articles from this author:2007-04-17 21:24:00 It looks like LiftPort , one of the companies leading the field in developing viable space elevator technology, is no more. There is no official word yet from LiftPort itself, although founder Michael Laine announced the loss of the company’s offices at the Conference on World Affairs on Saturday [transcript]. The LiftPort Staff Blog has also ... More About: Space , Space Elevator , Close , Pace 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
