October 2011
23 posts
“No matter its contents, no matter how it is imagined, any future lies not ahead in the stream of time but at an angle to it, a right angle probably. When we have moved on down the stream, that future stays anchored to where it was produced, spinning out infinitely and perpendicularly from there.”
—The Next Future - Lapham’s Quarterly
Productive Dystopia
“Our narrative is modernity, and our dystopias are the super-planned, re-planned and unplanned environments of the modern world. The aberrations and abandoned spaces of our modern environments, the margins that are squeezed by the excesses of development, the new natures that are produced in lieu of what was natural, the waste that is left behind after the flight of capital— these are the instable interstices of modern life. They are latent territories that are both the unforeseen consequences of our modern impulse, as well as the raw material for a renewed project on the city.”
Excerpts from the Productive Dystopia essay in Utopia Forever
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Why does time's arrow fly only one way?
Take a few steps forward, turn around and walk back. No problem. Now let a few seconds pass, then turn around and head back a few seconds in time. No luck? Of course not. As we know only too well, time, unlike space, has only one direction - it flows from past to future, and never the other way round. That all sounds like the natural order of things, but if you look closely enough at nature, you will find that it isn’t. A thorough search of the laws of physics turns up no such arrow of time. For example, you can use Newton’s laws of motion to work out where a ball was thrown from in the past just as well as where it will land in the future.
“We can recognise time but we do not understand it. It is remarkable that there’s so little agreement on what time is or even how to investigate a solution.”
—
Julian Barbour
Space Station Architect Designs Out Of This World Trailer →
treehugger.com
Architect and designer Garrett Finney always loved small spaces, and moved to Houston to work on the habitation module (where the astronauts live) of the International Space Station. Wanting to camp with his kids in a little more comfort than a tent, he combined his “NASA experience with his love of the earth” to design the Cricket, “an innovative lightweight, compact, and flexible small environment in which to travel and explore the world we live in.”
a new physics? →
super-collider.com
The forerunner of theories which allow the neutrino to travel faster than light is that of quantum gravity. Here the neutrinos interact differently than light does with the backdrop of the Universe; the foamy space-time upon which Nature in played out. This difference in interaction, effectively sees particles of light – photons – and neutrinos traveling through different subsets of extra dimensions.
