Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb

Artificial Immortality

A song by Christian progressive death/metalcore band Becoming the Archetype.





Technology will conquer, Biology will fall
Machines provide the means for the chosen few
To rise up and be "immortal"
Discard the body to elevate the intellect
Remove the head, remove the soul, implant the artificial
Remove the head, remove the soul, dehumanize…NO!

Shake off the chains
The constraints of your mortality
This new evolution puts "perfection" within our grasp
Discard the body to elevate the intellect
Remove the head, remove the soul, implant the artificial
Remove the head, remove the soul, dehumanize…NO!

I am not a mechanism
I am part of the resistance
I am an organism
An animal, a creature, I AM A BEAST!

The Mother of All Invention

The most unsung birthday in American business and technological history this year may be the 50th anniversary of the Xerox 914 photocopier. Although it was introduced at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel on September 16, 1959, commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with “key operator” training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, “It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine.”

The Atlantic

The Campaign for Phonetic Spelling

The campaign for simple spelling, which activists say started more than 100 years ago, is experiencing a revival with kids who have taken wholeheartedly to phonetic spelling in electronic messages.

"I think right now the young people are sending us a text message," said protester Roberta Mahoney, a former Fairfax County school principal who was dressed in a yellow-and-black-striped bumble bee costume. "They're saying enough of this foolishness."

Washington Post

Missile Silo Confessions

The Titan II missile silo complex was first carved out with dynamite in the early ’60s and manned by a crew whose job it was to ensure our enemy’s mutual destruction should we enter nuclear war. It was later dismantled and sealed up to comply with international treaties. After sitting buried beneath rubble for two decades, the site was ready to be explored.

Wired

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."

The Eyes Have It

An excellent article about the erosion of privacy and its profound social, and spiritual, implications.

"The private life is dead in the new Russia," said a Red Army officer in the film of Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago." There were many scarifying things in that great movie, but that was the scariest, the dry proclamation that the intimate experience of being alive would now be subordinate to the state. An odd thing is that when privacy is done away with, people don't become more authentic, they become less so. What replaces what used not to be said is something that must be said and is usually a lie.

When we lose our privacy, we lose some of our humanity; we lose things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as, actually, children of God. We also lose trust, not only in each other but in our institutions, which we come to fear. People who now have no faith in the security of their medical and financial records, for instance, will have even less faith in their government. If progressives were sensitive to this, they'd have more power. They always think the answer is a new Internet Privacy Act. But everyone else thinks that's just a new system to hack.

At technology conferences now they say, "Get over it." Privacy is gone, get with the new world. But I'm not sure technologically focused people can be sensitive to the implications of their instructions.

Peggy Noonan, WSJ

Thanks, Andrea.

How to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Original Star Wars Trailers

Carmen of the Spheres

Transforming orbital data into phase minimalism.

Greg Fox takes orbital frequencies of the (at the time) nine planets, transposes them into octaves audible by the human ear, and then sets them to music by applying the same data to the duration of the notes. The result is an empirically-based representation of the real music of the spheres.



Greg Fox
Carmen of the Spheres on Archive.org

Distress of 9/11 may have led to miscarriages, research says

The shock and stress felt by pregnant women after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, may have contributed to an increase in miscarriages of male fetuses in the United States, according to a study released Monday.

Researchers found the male fetal death rate increased in September 2001 and subsequently affected the ratio of boys born in a later month, according to the study published in the journal BMC Public Health.

The authors hypothesized that this might be a case of "communal bereavement." Even without direct relationships with the deceased, pregnant women may have been distressed by the attacks, resulting in miscarriage, according to the research.

CNN