The answer not just to Shepard Fairey but to “Obamamania” that was to be expected – exactly.
Culture & Entertainment
Scrap It and Start Over
A failure presents a limited range of options: scrap, salvage, or repair. Though it feels like we’ve done this before, let’s try “repair” one more time. Why? The site makes no sense as an enterprise – decreasingly as any kind…
Posted in Developing Ordinary Times, Internet
Google Deletes Dennis Cooper’s Blog, Erasing Years of Artistic Output – artforum.com
Cooper is not certain whether Google merely disabled the blog or completely erased it. The latter would mean he has lost years of artistic output that included writings, research, and photographs, as well as a platform through which he engaged…
Posted in Internet, Noted & Quoted
The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule – Quartz
In the same file, there’s also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to “crank the silly thing around.” CAF CODE500 # ASTRONAUT: PLEASE CRANK THE TC BANKCALL # SILLY THING AROUND CADR GOPERF1 TCF GOTOP00H # TERMINATE TCF P63SPOT3…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Technology
The Oldest Song in the World – Open Culture
The piece, writes Richard Fink in a 1988 Archeologia Musicalis article, confirms a theory that “the 7-note diatonic scale as well as harmony existed 3,400 years ago.” This, Fink tells us, “flies in the face of most musicologist’s views that…
Pseudoerasmus: The Empire of Cotton: A Reductionist Summary
In other words, the Beckert recipe is: start with Marx and “primitive accumulation“, both domestic and international. Marx had gleefully welcomed the imperialists’ destruction of the “semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities [of Bengal], by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the…
Carbon nanotubes too weak to get a space elevator off the ground – New Scientist
The team’s simulations show that the kink acts as a weak point in the tube, easily snapping the normally strong carbon-carbon bonds. Once this happens, the bonds in the adjacent hexagons also break, unzipping the entire tube. The effect on…
A First Look at America’s Supergun – WSJ
In conventional guns, a bullet begins losing acceleration moments after the gunpowder ignites. The railgun projectile gains more speed as it travels the length of a 32-foot barrel, exiting the muzzle at 4,500 miles an hour, or more than…
The fall of Salon.com – POLITICO Media
“We were inmates who took over the journalistic asylum,” David Talbot, who founded the site in 1995, wrote on the Facebook page. “And we let it rip — we helped create online journalism, making it up as we went along.…
Posted in Internet, Noted & Quoted
Scientists weigh in against the NFL’s war on physics and Tom Brady – Quartz
“We provide this analysis to explain what the ‘science’ used by the league is not,” they write in their brief. “It most assuredly is not scientific proof that the Patriots’ footballs lost pressure beyond the drop caused naturally by the…