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 showing the relationships between individual users in virtual worlds, hierarchy trees of web page design, world maps from 3-d shooters, etc. While some of the visualizations, designed to shock and awe through their graphical sophistication, have become curious artifacts in their own right, almost like a first generation iPod, harkening back to simpler times, the book itself promises not to disappoint. The good news is that it has been re-released under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here. There is a 20MB low-res version and a 200+MB high-res version.
Arpanet’s geographical configuration, 1975
Submarine fiber optic cables in the Caribbean
“Great Circle” map designed as a bit of marketing ephemera for the Cable and Wireless Company, showing the global connectivity of its telecommunications network, with Britain centered representing its position as “hub of the world”, 1945
The huge and dense mesh of connections shows the social geography of LambdaMOO, a multi-user dimension, by mapping how over half of the 4,800 or so players related to each other. LambdaMOO was a well-established and well-known virtual environment created at Xerox PARC in 1990. The map was created using social statistics gathered by Cobot, a software agent that “lived” in LambdaMOO, sitting in the “living room” and observing the social interactions of players. 2000
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 boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.
The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.
The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.
Fresh on the steps of the confidence that comes to any nation that can launch a few thousand pounds of metal faster than the 11km/s velocity needed to escape the earth’s gravitational pull on towards the moon is the Indian culture industry. To be released this summer is what seems to be a Bollywood take on the intense, high budget, the future is now Hollywood sci-fi film.
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 the fancy, and to kill the time. It seems that they have done a very good job positioning themselves as a major repository of lectures and intellectual discussions by forging content relationships with universities, think tanks, public forums and cultural institutions.
That said, I found Fora by way of this presentation (see below) given by Craig Venter about the recent history and future trends of synthetic biology. For those who may have missed it, we are rapidly approaching the moment when, entirely novel forms of life can be designed on a computer and brought to life through a combination of DNA sequencers and other laboratory techniques. This has doubtlessly started to cause much in the way of both ethical concern and concern for the possibility of garage biohackers designing all sorts of killer bugs.
The exciting part was we took this piece of DNA and inserted into the bacteria E. coli and what had happened was E. coli recognized this as a piece of software and started making viral particles. And true to form in nature when the viral particles were released from the cell. They turned around and killed the bacteria that had made it. So, this is a process that we see all the time in nature. I was just speaking to oil executives and I said they clearly understood that process. But this was pretty exciting: just taking a piece of DNA and having it activated, making viral particles. So we view this as the software actually building its own hardware. This is an important concept as we’re trying to go forward in this field, that even most people that are working in this area have not truly grasped the implications of this, that we don’t have to design life from scratch. We just have to design the software appropriately. [link to the presentation video - many of the latter chapters are of particular interest]
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 blocked at the corticospinal level. Motor imagery such as “move left hand”, “move right hand” or “move feet” become non-muscular communication and control signals that convey messages and commands to the external world. In Brainloop the performer is able - without physically moving - to investigate urban areas and rural landscapes as he globe-trots around virtual Google Earth. Through motor imagery, he selects locations, camera angles and positions and records these image sequences in a virtual world. In the second half of the performance, he plays back the sequence and uses Brainloop to compose a custom soundtrack by selecting, manipulating and re-locating audio recordings in real time into the physical space. [link]
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 the usage and propagation of copyrighted material and to use this information either to intervene or to study the pathology of viral content.
As might be expected, this business model has quite a bit of traction in the market today. Indeed, Attributor has scored some large contracts for their wide-net surveillance system including Reuters, The Associated Press and the Conde Nast Group.
But what does this type of system foretell about the relationship between the producers of media and those who comment upon and critique it? The arguments posed on the web run rather simply: A. Surveillance technologies like Attributor impede the flow of information by creating circumstances of a de facto, abusive restriction of fair use OR B. Content management technologies like Attributor allow content creators to benefit from their work by having total knowledge of its online uses and either (1) being able to collect credit\revenue from it or (2) to better appreciate the reception of their own work by the public.
Both sides certainly have some points in their favor, but regardless of the synthetic arguments that can be eloquently presented on the issue, there are some underlying creepy forces at play. Marketing materials for Attributor proclaim a near real time awareness of content across 19 Billion pages throughout the web. What are the implications of such a vast, mercenary optics? What do the designators private and public mean when one is applying them to discourse on the web? Certainly everything published and accessible by means of an open hyper text transfer protocol is offered up to the public, but what about an industrial-automated surveillance robot? Is such an entity entitled to interface with the public? Does it have rights? An old world analogue of what Attributor does would involve, let us say, an author writing about new airship technology who quotes a Boeing press release. Consequent to this, Boeing dispatches a van to sit in front of said author’s house and photograph it for a few minutes before driving off.
One must ask, is this a reasonable research initiative on the part of Boeing so that they may understand the architectural and design environments of those people that write about them, or a a type of coercive invasion? How do things change when the case becomes one computer connecting to another instead of men in vans with cameras? Is it more seemly because it is simply a relationship of two machines? Or is something of the first moment preserved? Since it is an actor upon the stage, who is this virtually unknown visitor, what is Attributor?
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 the detonation of a dirty bomb. [Article from Science: PDF]
Will people never live there again? 24,000 years from now - if the zone’s keepers are right, and if the reactor’s extra-human carcinogenic hell raising center is safely interred, not having leaked into the River Dneiper, then half of the plutonium 239 buried at Chernobyl will still be there. If this does not inspire the journalist to capitalize the designation never, can it ever in good grammar suffer such aggrandizement? To capitalize a letter out of turn, what is this act of writing? The shortest answer would be for emphasis. But to do so to a common word is to possibly conflate it with a Proper noun (if this is the case, then what the hell is an iPhone?). Is such a conflation desirable under any circumstance? What would the proper noun Never refer to? Is it a collective will of humanity? A hope for a collective will expressed by an author? But who except the most depraved amongst the humans would contradict a foreclosure of such disaster? Is this not a natural position of the human? An indelible position that suffers no history and knows no abberation?
Well let US meditate on the matter, recalling the facts at hand:
Nobody has to twist the facts of Chernobyl. One by one the Ukrainian, Belarus and Russian health chiefs recite their litanies of loss. The figures are on an unimaginable scale. Some 23 per cent of the land of Belarus is contaminated, and on that land live 20 per cent of the population. More than 250,000 hectares of farmland have been closed down; 130,000 have had to be resettled.
Childhood thyroid cancer is 90 times the levels before 1986. There will be 140 cases of thyroid cancer every year. Breast cancer is on the increase; so are disorders of the blood circulation. Almost 2 million people in 3,331 towns and villages need “special attention”. The republic needs “clean” food, diagnostic equipment, radiation instruments and rehabilitation centres, and will need to spend $400-500m between now and 1995.
The Ukrainians tell a similar story: 190 people have acute radiation sickness; 20,000 have lost the capacity to work; there are 130,000 evacuees; there are 1.5 million children whose thyroid glands received radiation doses. There are people with respiratory disease, heart troubles and nervous system disorders. There are increased digestive problems, tonsilitis, anaemia and stress. There is an increase in suicide. There are children with “Chernobyl syndrome”.
The Russians, too, tell of 2.6 million people in 7,608 contaminated towns; of a 25 per cent increase in tumours; of a 50 per cent increase in cardiovascular disorders; of locomotor apparatus diseases.
Scientists refer to the zone as a “unique laboratory” and scientists from 28 nations have worked there. But it is difficult to feel objective about it. Here is a landscape so contaminated by its only heavy industry that it has been turned inside out: used as its own graveyard, buried within itself. Most of the iodine 131 disappeared long ago. In another 20 years, the strontium 90 will have fallen to half its original burden. In another 20 years, half of the caesium 137 will have disintegrated.
But 24,000 years from now - if the zone’s keepers are right, and the stuff is safely interred, and hasn’t leaked into the River Dneiper - half of the plutonium 239 buried in it will still be there. [link]
An abandoned village house near Chernobyl
There are even tantalising footprints of a bear, an animal that has not trodden this part of Ukraine for centuries.
“Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition,” says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak.
“A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986. [link]
The Red Forest is located in the “zone of alienation”: this area received the highest doses of radiation from the Chernobyl accident and the resulting clouds of smoke and dust. The name ‘Red Forest’ comes from the ginger-brown colour of the pine trees after they died following the absorption of high levels of radiation from the Chernobyl accident on April 26, 1986. In the post-disaster cleanup operations, the Red Forest was bulldozed and buried into ‘waste graveyards’. The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl No. 4 reactor contaminated the soil, water and atmosphere with the radiation equivalent to 20 of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
BAE intends to test-fly a 22-meter-long airship designed by balloonist Per Lindstrom(((That is the same Per who flew around in a balloon with Richard Branson, with whom he briefly got stranded when their balloon crashed in the Canadian tundra)))). Known as the GA22, it is scheduled to fly in September.The vehicle could become a regular feature of the skyline, providing civil and military surveillance and communications-relay capabilities.BAE started out looking for a platform that could provide communications relay for the military, Williams said, but quickly realized the airship could have a great future as a civil surveillance platform - policing events like the Olympics and shipping lanes like the English Channel. [via]
Hello Sky Hook, good-bye “Ice-Road Truckers”
The Boeing Company and SkyHook International have engaged in a joint venture to develop the JHL-40 (Jess Heavy Lifter), a new commercial heavy-lift rotorcraft designed to address the limitations and expense of transporting equipment and materials in remote regions. The neutrally buoyant feature allows SkyHook to safely carry payloads unmatched by any rotorcraft in existence today.
The helium-filled envelope is sized to support the weight of the vehicle and fuel without payload. With the empty weight of the aircraft supported by the envelope, the lift generated by four rotors is dedicated solely to lifting the payload, leaving the aircraft neutrally buoyant.
The Lockheed Martin High Altitude Airship (HAATM), an un-tethered, unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle, will operate above the jet stream in a geostationary position to deliver persistent station keeping as a surveillance platform, telecommunications relay, or a weather observer. The HAA also provides the Warfighter (((thats with a capital W))) affordable (((yep, even warfighters got to watch the old AmEx… wait, no they dont))), ever-present Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and rapid communications connectivity over the entire battle space. The technology is available now and ready for integration and flight test ((((yippy?))).
This updated concept of a proven technology takes lighter-than-air vehicles into a realm that gives users capabilities on par with satellites at a fraction of the cost (1 to 2 orders of magnitude less). The HAA will also integrate reconfigurable, multi-mission payload suites. HAA is significantly less costly to deploy and operate and other airborne platforms, and supports critical missions for defense, homeland security, and other civil applications. Its operational persistence eliminates the need for in-theater logistic support. In position, an airship would survey a 600-mile diameter area and millions of cubic miles of airspace.
High-strength fabrics to minimize hull weight, thin-film solar arrays for the regenerative power supply, and lightweight propulsion units are key technologies ready to make a high-flying airship a reality. The combination of photovoltaic and advanced energy storage systems delivers the necessary power to perform the airship functions. Propulsion units will maintain the airship’s geostationary position above the jet stream, propel it aloft and guide its takeoff and landing during ascent and descent. Lighter-than-air vehicles, operating at altitudes above controlled airspace under the control of a manned ground station, give users the flexibility to change payload equipment when the airship returns to its operational base to perform different tasks. [link] [brochure]
Prototype air-yacht for those ponderous sky cruises over the mercury filled skies of Shanghai
Set to be launched next month, the whale-like Aeros ML866 uses a combination of buoyancy (like a blimp) and lift (like a plane) to cruise comfortably through the air with over 5,000 square feet of interior room. It can take off vertically, without taking up runway time at crowded airports, which is perfect for your plutocrat on the run who cannot be bothered with the delays of mere millionaires. And although the Aeros ML866 is designed to fit a “business center” with video conferencing, perhaps it should rather perfer to have a swimming pool with adjoining hot tub, and a few of those 103-inch plasmas that Panasonic is so proud of.
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 nastiness that might arise (see Corvette ad below) all while simultaneously pushing forward a cutting edge, revealing the futures to come. It seems that immediately after LCD technology became commercially scalable a huge proliferation of it spread across all forms of consumer products, bringing with it an amulet of mystique and promise to the consumer device adorning it. A mystique and promise, mind you, unavailable to those lousy Soviets.
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 of oil, it has certainly embedded itself within the world’s imagination. Combining with the reinvigorated consciousness and concern about the planet’s ecological future that emerged around Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (May 2006), there has been a 5x increase in sustainable energy investments, from USD 33B in 2004 to USD 148B in 2007. (Aside: Do global capital flows correlate to the underlying currents of the zeitgeist or just to the lunatic fringe of a handful of tightly wound technocrats? )
These investments have led to an array of artifacts that all seem to imagine some different type of energy and cultural future for the world. They would have to, in some ways, do this. They are the products not only of the lives of the engineers whose time is consumed in their design and implementation, but as part of a grand strategy for the fund managers who provide the capital for their development. Each party has some claim to the future; a future towards which all their efforts are directed to unfold. But what do they dream along the way to the future?
A Scottish company, Pelamis Wave Power, is launching the first commercial ocean energy project this summer off of the coast of Portugal. A single snake, which is 120m long and 3.5m in diameter, must get rolled and buffeted by the waves for the internal pistons to compress and generate electricity. It is an interesting frontier upon which this device is deployed. A creature so much so of human construction placed and asked to integrate into the torrent of the ocean, bobbing up and down. It is a violent frontier that we scarce recall, the explosions inside our engine’s pistons, the rolling of the iron snake as the light bulb comes on. We have in truth forgotten the moments of energy creation.
Three snakelike wave-power generators built by Edinburgh’s Pelamis Wave Power will deliver 2.25 megawatts through an undersea cable to the Portuguese coastal town of Aguçadoura. Within a year, another 28 generators should come online there, boosting the capacity to 22.5 MW. That may be a trickle of power, but the project represents a new push into wave and tidal power as governments eye the oceans as a way to meet their renewable energy targets.
On the other side of the globe, New Zealand already gets 60 percent of its electric power from renewables but wants to raise that figure to an amazing 90 percent by 2025. Among the ocean-power projects under consideration is an array of 200 tidal turbines that would be anchored to the seafloor across the mouth of the 900‑square-kilometer Kaipara Harbor near Auckland. Crest Energy, the project’s Auckland-based backer, estimates that the turbines would yield 200 MW, or 3 percent of the country’s energy demand. Getting ocean-power projects going in New Zealand was made easier thanks to an initiative introduced in October 2007, says Anthony J. Hopkins, codirector of Crest Energy. It places a 10-year moratorium on the construction of new fossil fuel power plants by state-owned utilities and creates an emissions-trading scheme. “This levels the playing field quite a bit,” says Hopkins.
[link]
Tracing circles, its only divine right
The Crown Estate of England has decided to acquire the prototype of the world’s biggest wind turbine, Clipper’s 7.5 megawatt MBE turbine. The turbine, known as the Britannia, will be located in deep waters near the UK. The marine interests of The Crown Estate include almost the entire UK territorial seabed out to 12 nautical miles, about 55% of the UK’s coastal foreshore. The blades on these mills extend at least 50m in the radius they draw pulling the current from the air.
Crystalline obelisques
The above pictured solar tower in Seville is illuminated by an array of 600 reflectors used to concentrate the sun’s energy. This second sun emerges from the landscape atop a forty story collecting tower where fluids are turned to steam in order to power a generator. The mirrors appear almost as supplicants to the tower, keeping a daily vigil of perfect alignment betwixt the two suns, transferring one to the other. The pictures make it out to be quite an impressive and beautiful artifact. The sort of thing that would make one proud were they to dig it up after we all kill ourselves.
The 11MW PS10 solar power plant will generate 24.3GW/hr per year of clean energy. It will have 624 heliostats that track the sun, each with a 120m² surface area parabolic mirror. The mirrors are focused on a 115m tower, heating water pipes that provide 200m² of water-cooled energy exchange surface area. The thermal energy produces steam which drives a turbine to generate electricity. During the day, the power drives the air conditioners that cool buildings in the city of Seville.
Heat is also stored as steam to allow generation at half load for an hour or longer after dark. This is a relatively short storage time, partially because the tower uses water rather than molten salt for heat storage. The water is held in thermally clad tanks and reaches temperatures of 250°C – 255°C (instead of around 600°C for systems using salt). Solucar has opted for water to reduce fatigue on the system components and to ensure simplicity and robustness for the project. [link]
Skimming along the current with a thunder-bang dam
There is a sort of elegant absence to this project. Located in a scene of deep wilderness, to come upon it with no one around, to see such a grand alignment of human will with the environment in the midst of a frightening human absence, would be rather sublime.
The dam, which would be located over a gorge at Lake Lagoda in north-west Russia, includes a cup-shaped spinnaker sail, believed to be the first of its kind, which will generate renewable energy by funnelling the wind through an attached turbine.
The spinnaker shape is similar to the mainsail of a yacht, and is thought to be particularly effective in capturing wind.
Project architect Laurie Chetwood, said that the shape of the sail was influenced by functionality and a desire to produce something “sculptural”.
He added: “The sail looks like a bird dipping its beak into the water, which will be much less of a blot on this beautiful and unblemished landscape.
“But it is also highly effective at capturing the wind because it replicates the work of a dam and doesn’t let the wind escape in the way it does using traditional propellers.” [link]
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 nastiness that might arise (see Corvette ad below) all while simultaneously pushing forward a cutting edge, revealing the futures to come. It seems that immediately after LCD technology became commercially scalable a huge proliferation of it spread across all forms of consumer products, bringing with it an amulet of mystique and promise to the consumer device adorning it. A mystique and promise, mind you, unavailable to those lousy Soviets.
