Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
Space Wars - Coming to the Sky Near You?
Topic: Military Technology
5:56 am EST, Feb 23, 2008
Scientific American is apparently not afraid of a little bombast:
Space warfare is not inevitable. But the recent policy shift in the US and China’s provocative actions have highlighted the fact that the world is approaching a crossroads. Countries must come to grips with their strong self-interest in preventing the testing and use of orbital weapons. The nations of Earth must soon decide whether it is possible to sustain the predominantly peaceful human space exploration that has already lasted half a century. The likely alternative would be unacceptable to all.
Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came frighteningly close. In telling the story of Herman Kahn, whose 1960 book "On Thermonuclear War" catapulted him into celebrity, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi captures an era that is still very much with us--a time whose innocence, gruesome nuclear humor, and outrageous but deadly serious visions of annihilation have their echoes in the "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" that guide policymakers in our own embattled world. Portraying a life that combined aspects of Lenny Bruce, Hitchcock, and Kubrick, Ghamari-Tabrizi presents not one Herman Kahn, but many--one who spoke the suffocatingly dry argot of the nuclear experts, another whose buffoonery conveyed the ingenious absurdity of it all, and countless others who capered before the public, ambiguous, baffling, always open to interpretation. This, then, is a story of one thoroughly strange and captivating man as well as a cultural history of our moment. In Herman Kahn's world is a critical lesson about how Cold War analysts learned to fill in the ciphers of strategic uncertainty, and thus how we as a nation learned to live with the peculiarly inventive quality of strategy, in which uncertainty generates extravagant threat scenarios. Revealing the metaphysical behind the dryly deliberate, apparently practical discussion of nuclear strategy, this book depicts the creation of a world where clever men fashion Something out of Nothing--and establishes Herman Kahn as our first virtuoso of the unknown unknowns.
If you enter the search terms “Norman Mailer” and “hammer” on YouTube, you will be directed to a clip titled “Norman Mailer vs Rip Torn—on camera brawl.” Click on the link and an amazing series of frames rolls across the computer screen: Torn, the accomplished and respected actor, bonks Mailer, the novelist and trailblazing New Journalist, over the head with a hammer, drawing blood. The two men tussle on the grass, grunting and cursing. Then Mailer bites Torn’s ear half off in retaliation.
Four of Mailer’s children (three of them under the age of 10) can be heard screaming and crying in terror as Mailer’s fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, bursts into the frame, shouting obscenities at Torn and smacking him repeatedly in the head.
It’s the horrifying climax of Maidstone, Mailer’s third experimental film, which was released in 1971. He called it “a guerrilla raid on the nature of reality.”
Although he is one of the most important American photographers of his generation, Lee Friedlander remains an enigma.
With a repertoire of subjects ranging from street scenes to nudes, self-portraits and factory workers, he has spent decades documenting the warp and weft of the American vernacular. Yet his extraordinary formal composition has always set him apart from his peers.
His new exhibition reveals what happens when Friedlander turns his painterly, avant-garde lens on the landscapes of North American parks. Featuring 36 photographs taken over a 20-year period, the show is devoted to the public spaces, including Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.
A few minutes after entering, you can see why this park attracts so many. Winding trails wrap around a pond. Trees sprout at the top of huge rocks and pedestrian tunnels frame landscapes like works of art. Every curve and each successive space draws you further.
In the 1920´s and 30´s, before the age of air-conditioning, my father once told me that New Yorkers used to leave their apartments to sleep in the park on summer nights. Was America any safer then, or did people take more care of one another during those days?
From the archive:
The looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.
See also, from Adam Gopnik:
New York’s abundance lingers on as rumor and memory, but the city’s ground is intrinsically fertile, and I decided next to get a sense of the natural wealth of New York by eating things that are growing here by accident. “Why don’t you try foraging Central Park with ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill?” Gabrielle suggested. Steve, she explained, could point to everything sauvage that there was to eat in the city. I was taken with the idea of using the Park as a kitchen garden, like those country friends who scamper into the yard for fresh-cut basil.
A Sunday or two later, I found myself, with my children, following Steve on one of his encyclopedic tours of New York’s edible nature.
We're a nation obsessed with being happy, but sometimes feeling bad can do you some good.
What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty.
Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.
This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.
On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.
An enemy without borders hate without boundaries a people, perverted a religion, betrayed a nuclear power in chaos madmen, bent on creating it leaders assassinated democracy attacked and Osama bin Laden, still making threats. In a world where the next crisis is a moment away America needs a leader who's ready.
She tried being mean once, with that prepackaged crack about “change you can Xerox.” The crowd booed, and so, I suspect, did the folks at home. But even before the booing she didn’t look happy about what she was saying. If this was the fun part, she wasn’t having fun. She looked a lot more comfortable, even content in a melancholy sort of way, at the end, when she said, “No matter what happens in this contest -- and I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored,” and the two clasped hands.
That was a game-changer of sorts, but the game it changed was her own.
Barack Obama is a phenomenon that comes along once in a lifetime. Unfortunately for Hillary, it’s her lifetime; fortunately for the rest of us, it’s ours.
Audience: Boo! Boo! Burns: Smithers ... are they booing me? Smithers: Uh, no, they're saying "Boo-urns! Boo-urns!" Burns: Are you saying "boo" or "Boo-urns"? Audience: Boo! Boo! Hans: I was saying "Boo-urns"...
-- Burns' movie flops, "A Star is Burns"
From the archive:
I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.
There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.
I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do. When people are involved and committed and political leaders are honest and have clear vision; that usually happens when things are really, really fucked up. Who are the U.S. Presidents we most admire? What was going on during their presidencies?
Chris Anderson came to TED as a participant. He liked it so much that he bought it. Now he wants to take it to the world.
About Anderson:
Anderson, 51, was born in Pakistan to British missionaries. After studying philosophy at Oxford, he pondered teaching as a career. Instead, he jumped into journalism and publishing, he says, because of their potential to influence many more people.
And:
This year's TED Prize winners are author Dave Eggers, cosmologist Neil Turok and religion historian Karen Armstrong.
Richard Saul Wurman anticipated the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design, and decided to have fun with it.
He says:
"You get to indulge your interests and find out about things you don't know about."
Also:
In Wurman's world, there are absolutely no lecterns. Standing behind one, he says, "allows you to read your speech. It also protects your groin. If your groin wasn't protected, you'd be more vulnerable" -- and able connect with the audience on a deeper, more emotional level.
Although the name is technology, entertainment, and design, there is apparently also some room for a Little Freud.
The technique, which could undermine security software protecting critical data on computers, is as easy as chilling a computer memory chip with a blast of frigid air from a can of dust remover.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which paid for a portion of the research, did not return repeated calls for comment.
A federal magistrate ruled recently that forcing the suspect to disclose a password would be unconstitutional.
