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Systems that help men make decisions and exert control

Despite the epistimological drift away from master systems and centralized command and control, the rhetoric surrounding large scale data mining projects has changed remarkably little: The first five minutes of an attack on the North American continent would require the swift response of widely deployed forces. Millions of informational inputs would be automatically channeled into ...

The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions

Above: Drilling for oil; Or, how and learned to stop worrying and nuke the subsurface A history of the USSR’s nuclear geo-engineering programs produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. [link]

Dispatched from the fantasies of an information interface

Regarding the voice of a microwave and other transcendental confusions

William Playfair (1759-1823) bar/line chart: price of wheat and wages It is sometimes said that the 18C, a time of rationalization and the birth of nations, saw the dawn of an obsession with measurement and quantification. The world, whether social or natural, required only application and genius to unlock. So how to visualize, let alone hold in ...

The hertzian space of RFID

In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read an RFID tag. The readable volume is not the same as the radio field, instead it shows the space within the field in which an RFID tag and an RFID ...

With the right geometry, one can tangle into near anything

Above: AM Radio made from everyday materials that requires no power supply. The radio is powered from the energy in the radio waves themselves and utilises public spaces by latching onto the nearest pole, tree or lamppost, in order to give it structure and a place to be listened to. (How this actually works I ...

Searching for the bottom

A delightful little interview with the author of “Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth”. Even though I do not get the sense that Talbor, the author, is himself an explorer of caves, there is a bit or two for the imagination to alight upon for a moment. Most people think ...

Curating the globe, Part 1

Off the coast of Western Australia Container port, Long Beach, CA Nile River Delta, Egypt Oil fields (left), near Odessa, TX Oil tanker disgorging, Long Beach, CA Farm land in Ukraine

My other tounge is a Cymothoa exigua

Radiolab this week treats the ever fascinating topic of parasites. In the hour long podcast, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich diffuse into the wondrous world of zombie cockroaches and cordyceps ladden ants (really this one is a must see!). Cordyceps is particularly surreal because, of its hundreds of varieties, each has evolved to commandeer the ...

Trance states and ethnographic film

NeuroAnthropology rounded up a discussion on the Medical Anthropology listserve that collected suggestions about examples of trance states in ethnographic film. Some captivating links came out of it: “Holy Ghost People” by Peter Adair, which shows folks in Appalachia (in what very much looks like trance-like states) handling snakes. You can also get this documentary ...

Doggerland – Mapping a lost world

Next nature featured one of those discoveries to emerge out of archeology that cannot help but give one a smile of pause and a thought that this too, indeed, will pass. Doggerland is the name of a vast plain that joined Britain to Europe for nearly 12,000 years, until sea levels began rising dramatically after ...

DARPA brings Web 2.0 prowess to the battlefield

An interesting interview about TIGR, a recently deployed DARPA project in Afghanistan and Iraq. With a timeliness which is impressive for its contemporary awareness, TIGR integrates many layers of data (satellite photos, census data, road conditions) with metadata generated by military patrols (attack reports, experience with certain houses, etc). In this way, knowledge that is ...

The ephemeral sights of shortwave radio

Shortwave radio must have been an extraordinary technology to really have been in the capture of. You order plans, build a ham radio, and suddenly, as if you have been imbued with some occult power, you become aware of these stratosphere-bouncing conversations that encircle the globe. This when there was much more of a global ...

A sampling of the post-war visual culture of tech

An assortment of science and technology ads from the 1950s and 60s has been collected on this flickr page. Many of the modernist illustrations used by the ad agencies are quite fantastic. I suppose that thoughts of intercontinental ballistic missiles, vacuum tubes, thin ties and cigarettes lend themselves to this sort of thing:

Know your government: Instances of Use of US Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2008

The Congressional Research Service generously compiled and published the following itemized report on the history of the US’s deployment of its armed forces abroad [link]: The following list reviews hundreds of instances in which the United States has utilized military forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict to protect U.S. citizens or ...

The evolution of American counterintelligence

The US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive recently published a four-part reader as an accompaniment to the lectures they conduct: Our reader’s three volumes cover counterintelligence’s past and present. Nevertheless they form a whole: the first volume provides material elucidating counter- intelligence’s antecedents from the American Revolution to World War II. Volume two focuses ...

The economics of a botnet

Schneier on Security linked to an excellent paper on the economics of spam. Interestingly, the authors were able to infiltrate the Storm worm network and monitored its doings in the course of their study. After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. ...

Anatomy of a trojan hack

An analyst at Websense Security Labs did a study of the “wolfteeth bot catcher”, a tool coming out of China that allows a user to specify a particular range of IP addresses and then search for and exploit the MS08-067 bug in Windows, installing any malicious code they may choose. Careful though! It seems the ...

A hidden chronicle of horrific destruction

A rather entrancing article, published originally in the Guardian, meditates on the hidden images of America’s “last good war.” Following the surrender of Japan in WWII, the US issued a strict writ of censorship stating that “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.” Consequently, the atomic bombings in Japan ...

Links for 2 November 2008:

Links for the week of 2 November 2008: Tree of Life Web Project – The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and ...

Resolving the Golden Shield

Throwing a bit dye into the geist, a group of programmers have developed a Firefox plugin that will route your websurfing through a Chinese server, thus allowing you to get sense of what sort of Internet the Chinese state security services have in mind for their citizens. [Link to the plugin project website] The control ...

Links for 25 October 2008:

Links for the week of 25 October 2008: Smithsonian Libraries : Digital Library – Webcasts, lectures Journal of Biological Engineering | Full text | Engineering BioBrick vectors from BioBrick parts – We define a biological part to be a natural nucleic acid sequence that encodes a definable biological function, and a standard biological part to ...

Along what dimension is cyberspace?

In 2001, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin published an Atlas of Cyberspace, described by Vint Cerf as “explor[ing] a remarkable universe of visual representations of the Internet’s diversity, structure and content.” The atlas locates cyberspace along many dimensions: geographic maps of core fiber optic back bones, logical maps of network organization and hierarchy, social maps ...

Discrete circuits; or, Trojan architecture

IEEE Spectrum published an article this past May about the growing concern within defense circles about the loss of oversight along the military hardware supply chain. With many of the semiconductor components manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, rumors and fears of maliciously implanted “backdoors” abound: According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke ...

Dreaming of the future at 11km per second

India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess. Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a ...

Links for 17 October 2008:

Links for the week of 17 October 2008: YouTube – Journey by a London Bus (1950) – in the event you needed a bit of a refresher, please take note of this film, kindly produced by the colonial film board, on how to ride a london bus The Things He Carried – The Atlantic (November ...

Project Grey Goose report released

Accompanying the recent military action on the ground in Georgia was a cyber campaign that took down many government sites and generally impeded the dissemenation of information throughout the country. Shortly after things cooled down in Georgia, a collection of security researchers in and around the intelligence community got together under the banner of “Project ...

Links for 11 October 2008:

Links for the week of 11 October 2008: Kent’s Imperative: Intelligence and financial crisis, historical edition – “The system of mutual espionage and rivalry which exists amongst joint-stock banks is another source of security to the public. That a system of espionage exists upon every joint-stock bank, at least in Scotland. by their sister banks, ...

Links for 5 October 2008:

Links for the week of 5 October 2008: The Tilt-Shift Miniature Fake Technique in Photoshop CS: A Simple How-To – 23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself | FlowingData – Applications spring up every month that let people track, monitor, and analyze their habits and behaviors in hopes of gaining a better understanding about ...

Links for 28 September 2008:

Links for 28 September 2008: Estonian Ministry of Defence – Estonian Cyber Security Strategy – http://www.mod.gov.ee/static/sisu/files/Estonian_Cyber_Security_Strategy.pdf DARPA Mathematical Challenges – Federal Business Opportunities – DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of DARPA Mathematical Challenges, with the goal of dramatically revolutionizing mathematics and thereby strengthening the scientific and technological capabilities of DoD. File2HD.com ...

On rogues of the high seas and the hunt for bounty

Marvelously fluttering around the margins of the mediascape during the past few days has been news of a hijacking by a group of Somali pirates of some heavy old world war-fighting technology. Piracy on the high seas is certainly something that excites the imagination filled with tales from yesteryear’s maritime literature and folk stories told ...

On the Kodak Instamatic 800 Camera

This past weekend, at a flea market, I came across a Kodak Instamatic 800 manufactured in 1964. From the aspect of design and material culture, I rather liked the aesthetic packaging that the camera came in. There was something very classic, very tasteful and not at all kitschy about it. So, I thought I would ...

J. Craig Venter on booting up a chromosome

J. Craig Venter is a highly prominent synthetic biologist and entrepreneur whose research into the human genome and cellular biology has placed him as one of the main public faces of this rapidly unfolding field. I just recently came upon www.fora.tv which, for any of those who do not know it, really promises to tickle ...

Links for 21 September 2008:

Links for 21 September 2008: Chinese hacker “Milk Rebellion” – As the scandal over melamine laced food products widens, Chinese hackers seem to be taking up the cause to punish guilty corporations. Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk – On the most basic, most appealing social level, steampunk is a way to masculinize romance. ...

An elegy thought over the carrion of a nighthawk

This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a ...

The bottom of the barrel, or a brief anatomy of an oil well

It was not until the fantastic rise in energy prices of the last several years (remember: a decade ago a barrel of crude was less than $15) that companies that do oil exploration and production (E&P) began a serious consideration of extracting the very low grade bitumen (essentially the most expensive part of a barrel ...

Links for 17 September 2008:

Links for 17 September 2008: Duchenne – Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne was French neurologist, who was first to describe several nervous and muscular disorders and, in developing medical treatment for them, created electrodiagnosis and electrotherapy. He applied electrodes for recording the path that electricity took in a contracting muscle’s fibres. Duchenne investigated every major superficial ...

On farming data shadows and other aluminium sleakness

Schneier on Security has an interesting bit on identity farming today. The idea essentially runs that one can incubate rock solid fake identities if they have 25 years during which to fabricate the birth of children, open bank accounts in their names, fill out the relevant paper work to have them home schooled, and otherwise ...

Links for 16 September 2008:

Links for 16 September 2008: Noam Chomsky: Towards a Second Cold War? – The typical reactions recall Orwell’s observations on the “indifference to reality” of the “nationalist,” who “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but … has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” Moscow Journal – ...

Links for 15 September 2008

Links for 15 September 2008 Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life – The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

Biomolecularists develop sewer system for Liliputians, Entomologists promptly crash party

In a new bit of biomimicry (those instances where sciences takes its cue from the structure of systems in the natural world), researchers at Cornell have developed a synthetic system for transpiration. Scientists theorize that as evaporation occurs on the surface of a tree’s leaves, the resulting drop in water pressure propels water from the ...

Tall tales emerging from the shadows

Wow is this real? Or some sort of misinformation about US military technologies? Perhaps being spread in some attempt to reflect the total fear of terrorism that is nurtured within the US as a tool to demoralize those communities abroad that the US considers its enemies. By analyzing the movements of human shadows in aerial ...

Resolving the unresolvable cosmos

I believe it was Derrida who referred to nuclear warfare as a ‘remainderless event’ — something that could exist only as a fabulous bit of text, always just a fantasy of images standing in for the unimaginable. In light of such notions, this is a rather fun project that our civilization has spawned. A network ...

The audacity of rhetoric

Slavoj Zizek on audacious words and how Barack Obama is reshaping acceptable language: His greatest achievement to date is that he has, in his refined and non-provocative way, introduced into the public speech topics that were once unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity ...

Regarding a technical comparison of popular music

Mark Wieczorek wrote an interesting piece a few years back trying to characterize what it is about the ‘sound’ of a certain decade’s popular music that makes it so. He does this by looking at frequency trends common to songs of a particular era, finding that changes in the fidelity of recording technology as well ...

You can see it in the eyes, phantom planet syndrome it is

Brainloop is an interactive performance platform that utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the rehearsal of a motor act without the overt motor output; a neural synapse occurs but the actual movement is ...

Sliding down the refractor’s tube

Because seeing things you haven’t seen before, imagining structures outside of one’s usual scale, has the tendency of increasing conceptual elasticity and being generally salubrious and delightful, this Flickr microscopy pool might be of interest: A spec of pollen Transverse section of an orchid root with large fungal masses in the cells.

If it is true that the devil is in the details…

then god must be in the nanoparticles: Stained glass windows that are painted with gold purify the air when they are lit up by sunlight, a team of Queensland University of Technology experts have discovered. Associate Professor Zhu huai yong, from QUT’s School of Physical and Chemical Sciences said that glaziers in medieval forges were ...

A vintage computer museum on the line

The ‘Working Computer Museum‘ is an organization run by a group of net artists in Sicily.  The Museum “is an interactive permanent exhibition where visitors can not only look vintage computers, but also try them, ‘put their hands on them’ using their old Operating Systems, softwares or reading their original manuals. Most interestingly, however, for ...

An upright and locked position: early aviation

In an old brief case, I came across a map of Western Europe published by National Geographic in 1929. One of the plates published in the margin included a map of the passenger airline service as it existed at the time. [Link to full map ~1MB] I imagine that the Budapest –> Vienna flight must ...

The relation of practical experience and conceptual structures

The Archimedes Project, an online library under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute, has made available a searchable database of machine drawings from their digitizing efforts: The database DMD is part of the research project The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science: Mental Models in the History of ...

Setting explosives along the margins of consumption

The two images below, interestingly composing the interiors of household appliances, are part of a larger thesis project by Brittney Badger. Picture above: an iron Picture above: an electric mixer Perhaps we can imagine a sort of parallel continuum of the world, a type of google-maps overlay to the condensation of this historical moment, where ...

The chilly curiosities of nation states

Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit has drawn up the first ever ‘Arctic Map‘ to show the disputed territories that states might lay claim to in the future. The new map design follows a series of historical and ongoing arguments about ownership, and the race for resources, in the frozen lands and seas of the ...

Bracing the satellite infrastructure for a solar superstorm

From Scientific American: As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead. From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights ...

And a happy birthday to the late Herman Melville

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul;whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral ...

Surfing on Titan and other saturnalian abandons

Scientists have confirmed that at least one body in the solar system, other than Earth, has a surface liquid lake by using an instrument on NASA’s Cassini orbiter. The 235km long lake, situated near the moon’s south pole, is ringed by a dark beach, where the methane rich lake merges with a bright shoreline. Titan ...

From the recesses of a gilded bureau

A flâneur especially, gliding along the arcades of the network, takes the utmost of delight in repairing to one of the fine restaurants for the taking of a small snack and the enjoyment of the scenes. What will it be today? The Lamb Stew à la Parisienne at the Hotel Manhattan (cost: $0.60) could be ...

Lithographic inscriptions, old and new

May we first start with a passage from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “The limits of state action” (1810): Now man never regards that which he possesses as so much his own, as that which he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who ...

Mercenary optics come to a blog post near you

Attributor, a silicon valley start up a few years and 32-million dollars in the making, provides an impressive panorama of cyberspace. Employing similar techniques to Google’s search indexing process, Attributor dispatches spiders across the web that search all new content published in the blogosphere and social networks. Its objective in this exploration is to monitor ...

When does one capitalize “Never”?

In a bizarre twist brought about by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Pripyat (((1985: population 50,000))) is getting a new lease on life. People will never move back into the deteriorating Soviet-era apartments. Instead, scientists are planning to use the radioactive ghost town as a unique laboratory for modeling the dispersal of radionuclides by ...

A compendium of new airship projects

1918: View from a French dirigible approaching a boat There has been a recent flurry, coming up here and there, of interest in dirigibles as a carbon-neutral stand in’s for the usual high-octane, bone-soup, fire-eating jetplanes. While this seems to be no more than a nostalgic, steam-punk, flight of the imagination, return to earlier fantasies ...

Point to point, a laser scans the radiohead

Shot in three-dimensions, using 64 laser beams scanning a 360 degree radius approximately 900 times per second, Radiohead today released their music video for the song House of Cards off of In Rainbows. The result is a very old school, almost Atari-class rendering of the scene. A result somewhat disturbing for the animus it inserts ...

Liquid crystal dreams of an asphalt frontier

The “Digifiz” add-on, pictured above, was first introduced in the Volkswagen Golf in 1985 and was continually offered as a feature until 1992. Such product design emerged from the days when the future was being reborn, when electronic synthesizers pumped out 8-bit staccato and glistening liquid crystal offered the masculine promise of evading any nuclear ...

A ghost image from a cosmic disaster

The “Pillars of Creation” may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. Located in the Eagle Nebula (google sky), the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being born. However, recent discoveries indicate these pillars were destroyed by a massive nearby super­nova some 6,000 years ago. This ...

A craftsman of fountain pens

Pingmag has an interview with a very Japanese (read: mind-bogglingly intense) fountain pen craftsman. The sense of a methodical and utterly intimate relationship he has to pen nib’s commands a type of respect that is difficult to muster in a post-Fordist developed world. Q. So when you adjust a nib, you can make it write ...

Usyodom

Clippings from the future of energy

There is a belief that we have reached a new paradigm in the cost of energy [see also: historical us gas prices]. Whether or not this outlook is, in large part, a consequence of a hysterical assessment of political instability in the Middle East and a nonstop flood of images and words heralding the end ...

Spectral interventions visited upon tourists

Julius von Bismarck with his creation The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards. In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby ...

We rate the toy “Not Acceptable”

Consumer Reports has put up a collection of photographs taking during the history of their product testing lab as far back as 1936. The composition, and findings, of many of these pictures is a little thing of marvel. [link] Permanents, 1938 – Getting a permanent wave is “almost a national pastime” and the price has ...

Planning for the apocolypse through anticipatory archeology

In a nicely conceived act of anticipatory archeology,The Rosetta Project, funded by the Long Now Foundation, is creating and disseminating a unique record of human language. The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major ...

Eleven dollar bills, but you only got ten

Researchers at MIT recently discovered an Amazonian language with only 300 speakers that has no word to express the concept of “one” or any other specific number. The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express ...

The frontier of history and lost cities

For part of the 10th century, this pocket of northwestern Cambodia was the capital of the famed Angkorian empire, a sprawling city studded with homes, irrigation channels, and more than 1,000 temples. Satellite photography helps archaeologists survey this land mine laden and largely unexplored site. [via ] Bit-rot, book worms, city swallowing hurricanes. The archaeologist ...

Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur?

Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, a new exhibition currently making its rounds in the United States, features meticulous copies several sculptures from the Hellenist period using chemical analysis to accurately render the original coloration. The catalog from the exhibition, when it was at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, provides some nice background: The ideal ...

Mapping infrastructure, part 2

Just came across this advertisement from a September 1914 edition of Modern Mechanix [via the Map Room] that shows all of the telephone exchanges that existed in the US at that time. (Aside: in a North American phone number, the “555″ is the exchange: 1-XXX-555-YYYY). Propoganda value asside, it is quite a fascinating map. We ...

Infrastructure visualization

Ben Fry, a data visualization artist and teacher, compiled the above image of the US. As he describes it, All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge ...

Geospatial imaging and human rights

Wired today featured a profile of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) efforts to bring satellite reconnaissance photography to bear upon human rights violations within closed societies like North Korea and disputed territories like the Gaza Strip. They work with NGO’s and regional groups to help provide and disseminate documentary evidence of ...

Static images reimagined

It will be interesting to see how, or if, this technology is used commercially. Encountering this perspective for the first time, before it has had time to absorb into one’s common place, certainly rings with a bit of the “oh cool” factor. The so-called “Direct Image Manipulation” has the effect of interrupting the way we ...