April 2012
34 posts
“And the future, to be honest, is already the past. Futurism is a very old...”
– Uwe Schmidt - The Ecstasy of Simulation (Wire 793)
1 tag
North Korea Spent a Whole $15 Making Its Website →
Take a look at the source code. A keyword search for “envatowebdesign” will turn up a prompt comment from the site’s theme seller telling the person who bought it how to customize. Only whomever built the thing for Pyongyang didn’t bother. It’s a bit like leaving the plastic overlay on your fancy new TV telling you about the screen size. A quick check on the source code of the IgniteThemes...
Shuttle exits and with it America's dreams? →
I also think about the morning of May 5, 1961, the day that Alan Shepard was scheduled to become the first American to fly into space, an act that would help commit his country to a full-fledged moon race. That same morning, newspapers all over the country showed a picture of a bus set ablaze by white racists wishing to quell a movement by black and white civil rights activists to ensure racially...
The modernist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the final cohesive chapter in the culmination of linear history. When post-modernism was ushered in following WWII, philosophical and aesthetic movements ceased to develop according to linear trajectories, and instead diverged into a multifold network of parallel and intersecting paths. But even the end of linear time has an...
“Time moves in one direction, memory in another. We are that strange species that...”
– William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor
[source]
(via naranzarian)
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Technologies that we've lost - and the quest to... →
Greek fire. Damascus steel. These are two technological innovations whose secrets are said to be lost to time. Even the original schematics for the Apollo missions have disappeared into the mists of history, forever hidden inside hopelessly obsolete computers. How do we lose technologies that were once so important? Some say that they aren’t really lost, and are working on rediscovering them.
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“If anything’s missing, it’s actually more the explanation. I mean there is some...”
– Technologies that we’ve lost - and the quest to find them again
Eyeballs flattened: brain scans put long-term... →
Doctors examined 27 astronauts who had flown long-duration missions with the US space agency and found a pattern of deformities in their eyeballs, optic nerves and pituitary glands that remain unexplained.
NASA is too poor to help Europe go to Mars →
Welcome to Beyond Apollo 2.0 →
In this blog, I will describe many space missions and programs that never were. I’ll seek to place them in historical context, and to explore why they failed to make the difficult jump from plan to reality. Along the way, I’ll write about our evolving knowledge of the Solar System, NASA’s symbiotic relationship with the Soviet space program, and intricacies of the U. S. political process. My posts...
