housingworksbookstore:

Happy birthday, Jules Verne (born February 8, 1828)!

I have a print of this hanging in my house, it is my favorite Kate Beaton cartoon. AND the title: “Come Dream with Me.” (via Hark, a vagrant: 213)

Semiotician and philosopher Roland Barthes believed that this degradation, which was initiated by the invention of the camera, would result in the creation of a new social value: “the publicity of the private” – that is, the public consumption of private information.

The Privacy Wars: Goggles That Block Facial Recognition Technology | Design Decoded *knotesy

A special place in the history of the Soviet children’s book belongs to a loose grouping of Leningrad writers who are best known by their erstwhile moniker “Oberiu,” which roughly signified The Association for Real Art. Oberiu included Daniil Kharms (pseudonym of Daniil Iuvachev, 1905-1942), Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1904-1941), and Leonid Lipavskii (1904-1941), who published children’s books under the pseudonym L. Savel’ev.

explore-blog:

A fascinating meditation on the shortcomings of memory, necessary for the creative mind, by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

In Japan, he says, people love the anthropomorphic robots that give Americans the willies. Factories in Germany have big, splashy media junkets to announce their latest automation investments, moves their North American counterparts dare not publicly divulge.

Raging (Again) Against the Robots - NYTimes.com *knotesy

The replacement of the word “torture” with “enhanced interrogation technique” is an extension of politically correct logic: brutal violence practised by the state is made publicly acceptable when language is changed.

Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s gift to American power | Slavoj Žižek *knotesy

Its eighty-seven tons of precious metal strands were zealously guarded by a lusty crew of trained cable hands and engineers under the command of Chief Cable Engineer H. Benest, who has the general supervision of all the work. This man. gray and weather-beaten and bronzed by the suns of many climes, was the life and mainspring of the whole enterprise

The Commercial Pacific Cable Company *knotesy

new-aesthetic:

“The design of our new map was inspired by antique maps and star charts, and alludes to the historic connection between submarine cables and cartography.”

Submarine Cable Map

The more I thought about it, the more I decided that there are huge swaths of existence that would be impenetrable- indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented—to a creature that did not eat or shit.

Programming the Post-Human | Harper’s Magazine *knotesy

the animal lashes out with its two long tentacles, dragging its prey within reach of its eight shorter arms and, ultimately, the wicked-looking, parrotlike beak in the center of its thicket of limbs. The beak is sharp as a bolt cutter, its upper jaw scissoring neatly into the prognathous lower one. Shearing off chunks of living flesh, the squid uses a rasping, tongue-like organ called a radula, covered with tiny teeth, to push its food down its gullet.

The Kraken Awakes: What Architeuthis is Trying to Tell Us - Boing Boing *knotesy

After its discovery, everyone presumed that something so energetic as radiation just had to be beneficial.

Marie Curie: Why her papers are still radioactive - CSMonitor.com *knotesy

Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman - the oldest ever found. *knotesy