Throw-Away Society

"Actual sea-battles were rare, and even then were fought close to shore. Ships were roped together in lines to face an enemy fleet and showers of arrows and missiles would have been exchanged. Each side then resorted to hand-to-hand fighting as they attempted to board their opponents' ships. The warriors in the prow were specially selected for this task. The aim was not to destroy enemy craft, but to capture them if possible, as they represented a considerable investment in time, resources and labour."
BBC

This description of the Vikings not destroying enemy ships due to their value made me recall Toffler's theories on Transience and the Throw-Away Society:

"Anti-materialists tend to deride the importance of "things." Yet things are highly significant, not merely because of their functional utility, but also because of their psychological impact. We develop relationships with things. Things affect our sense of continuity or discontinuity. They play a role in the structure of situations and the foreshortening of our relationships with things accelerates the pace of life."
Future Shock, Chapter 4

Arthur Frommer buys travel guides back from Google to keep print editions alive

Google acquired Frommer’s Travel Guides from Wiley in 2012 — and then, last month, reportedly decided to stop publishing them as print editions. Now Arthur Frommer, the 83-year-old founder of the brand, has bought Frommer’s back from Google and will continue publishing the travel guides in print and digital editions.
The AP reported the news Wednesday night and quoted Frommer saying, “It’s a very happy time for me. We will be publishing the Frommer travel guides in ebook and print formats and will also be operating the travel site Frommers.com.” Google confirmed the news to Engadget, saying, “We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.”
The purchase price was undisclosed. Google reportedly paid Wiley $22 million for Frommer’s last year. The travel site Skift first reported that Google would stop publishing the Frommer’s guides in print.
Frommer’s had published over 300 guidebooks since its founding in 1957.

paidContent

The first cellphone call was made 40 years ago today

Martin Cooper changed the world when he made the first cellphone call 40 years ago.
The former Motorola vice president and division manager made the call on the company's DynaTAC phone while standing in front of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue. His first call: to the head of research at Bell Labs, which had also been racing to build the first cellphone.
Cooper's call did more than untether people from their traditional fixed phone lines; it opened the door to true mobility and continues to affect virtually every aspect of our lives.

cnet

Goodbye Steve Jobs

Apple

The Annotated Toffler

Think you've heard it all about the global financial crisis, the Internet distracting us into stupidity, dysfunctional and self-destructive politics, the demise of the nuclear family, and degenerating cities? Well imagine having predicted, written about, and imagined the consequences of all of these postmodern maladies -- before they ever happened. Meet Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the accidental futurists who have lived to see so many of their foresights become our daily reality.

Foreign Policy

The Modular Man would like to tell you that we told you so.

My Life is My Own

Radiohead: Live from the basement show

Stephen Colbert Speaks With EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn

Electronic Frontier Foundation - Cindy Cohn

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

EFF

Memorial Day: "Dulce et decorum est"

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.


In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

Wilfred Owen

"This book is not about heroes.
English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might,
majesty, dominion, or power, except war.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may
be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets
must be truthful."

Metropolis

Metropolis

No. 12 Looks Just Like You

Happy Veteran's Day

The 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student said he was walking home from work about 1:15 a.m. Tuesday when he was pulled into an alley and told to lay face down and with a gun to his neck. Four men took his wallet, $16, keys, his cell phone and even a PowerBar wrapper from his pants pockets, he said.

But the hostile tone quickly changed when one of the robbers, whom the reservist presumed was the leader, saw an Army ID in the wallet. The robber told the others to return the items and they put most of his belongings on the ground next to him, including the wrapper, the reservist said.

"The guy continued to say throughout the situation that he respects what I do and at one point he actually thanked me and he actually apologized," said the reservist, who asked not to be identified Tuesday because the robbers still had his keys.

The reservist said he asked the men, who all had hoods or hats covering their faces, if he could get up and they said he could before starting to walk away.

"The leader of the group actually walked back, gave me a quick fist bump, which was very strange," he said.

FOX News

Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System

Everyone surfing for last-minute Halloween costumes and pictures of black Lolcats today—what you might call the 40th anniversary of the Internet—can give thanks to the simple network message that started it all: "lo."

On October 29, 1969, that message became the first ever to travel between two computers connected via the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet.
The truncated transmission traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute.(Watch video about the birth of the Internet.)

The electronic dispatch was supposed to be the word "login," but only the first two letters were successfully sent before the system crashed.


National Geographic News

The Abolition of Man

In order to understand fully what Man's power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes—the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct—the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.

The Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis

Thanks to Jonathan for this post.

The Prisoner

If you have never seen the cult classic show The Prisoner, you're missing out. AMC is redoing it, and although I am skeptical it can ever live up to the classic, I am curious...

AMC also has a great site dedicated to the original, where you can watch the old episodes. Bitchin! Check it our here.

And that's the way it is.

Walter Cronkite, November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009

Twitter Tracker

In Honor of Memorial Day (Observed)

The Dragon and the Undying

ALL night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurls their martyred music toppling down.

Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,
Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder’d seas.
Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,
And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.
Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,
They wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,
To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.

Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

Sassoon has written some of the best war poetry that I have read. Brutal, touching, and so visceral you feel as if you are in the bloody trenches with him, haunted by the ghost of his slain younger brother. You can read more at Bartleby.com. Also, check out Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. I forget what Memorial Day is all about other than a long weekend until I read this stuff. Let us not forget that though they may fade away into anonymity, and though their names no longer ring, the slain in battle are the very bands that made this human engine we now pilot possible. They were the first modular men, and we salute them.

Crash!

Crash! is a short film directed by Harley Cokliss, based on J. G. Ballard's short story Crash! Starring J. G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake.

Tesla

``We are confronted with portentous problems which can not be solved just by providing for our material existence, however abundantly. On the contrary, progress in this direction is fraught with hazards and perils not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of the atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind... The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land...''

A Battle to Preserve a Visionary's bold Failure

Tesla at Wikipedia

Wardenclyffe