Month: May 2015

  • He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch. Jean-Luc Godard (via kadrey)

  • smartercities: Urban Farmers Say It’s Time They Got Their Own Research Farms Whitney Pipkin, npr.org About 80 percent of Americans now live in urban areas, and more and more of us are growing food in cities as well. But where’s an urban farmer to turn for a soil test or when pests infiltrate the fruit…

  • Vonnegut’s letter to a book-burner

    mostlysignssomeportents: In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut learned that Charles McCarthy, head of the school board that governed Drake High School in North Dakota, had burned 32 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five in the school furnace, offended by the book’s “obscene language.” Vonnegut wrote a private letter to McCarthy, a heartfelt, low-key, scathing recrimination that could be repurposed for…

  • where is this from?

  • nprbooks: Neal Stephenson can be a divisive writer – his science is, indeed, merciless, but some readers feel it can overwhelm his storytelling. Our reviewer Jason Sheehan has some choice thoughts: “The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason.” That’s the beginning of Neal Stephenson’s newest epic,Seveneves. And in terms of…

  • Engineering a Better Future with Neal Stephenson

    davidnaimon: Listen in to my nearly hour-long chat with Neal Stephenson whose latest book is Seveneves. Our conversation touched on so many great topics: why women are better equipped to survive long-term in space, why so many SFF novels and films create humanoids with race-based character traits and the limitations of this, advances in epigenetics…

  • robertogreco: Statement and Counter-Statement, posters by Experimental Jetset for a show at the Walker Art Center, 2011 (ht referencescout) Let us explain the concept. As one of the themes, you mentioned “the culture of making”… which immediately made us think about “the culture of unmaking”, or better said, the relationship between creation and destruction (creation as destruction,…

  • The situation at U.S.C. is a small scene in a much larger drama, one concerning the place of art in the new, more corporate university order. Traditionally, art education has been a little too vocational to fit in with the rest of the humanities. But lately it seems that art education isn’t vocational enough. Or,…

  • futurescope: Electroloom – First 3D Fabric Printer Interesting 3D printing use case with potential. Electroloom uses an electrospinning process to convert liquids into solid fibers which are then deposited onto a 3D mold. It’s basically a machine that shoots fibers onto a 3D shape, where they bond together. The Electroloom Developer Kit is a tool…

  • vjeranski: Robert BarryOne Million Dots (detail) via