Entries for May 2008
Lots of people bemoan the sexism of bikini drenched beer ads and overtly sexual marketing. Turns out, the marketers might just be rationally exploiting a fact of the male brain:
A recent study shows that men who watched sexy videos or handled lingerie sought immediate gratification—even when they were making decisions about money, soda, and candy.
Authors Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried DeWitte, and Luk Warlop (KULeuven, Belgium) found that the desire for immediate rewards increased in men who touched bras, looked at pictures of beautiful women, or watched video clips of young women in bikinis running through a park.
“It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding,” the authors suggest. Thus, the activation of sexual desire appears to spill over into other brain systems involved in reward-seeking behaviors, even the cognitive desire for money.
From The Guardian:
Scientists have developed a method for reading a person’s mind using brain scans.
Once it has been trained on an individual subject’s thoughts, the computer model can analyse new brain scan images and work out which noun a person is thinking about - even with words that the model has never encountered before.
The model is based on the way nouns are associated in the brain with verbs such as see, hear, listen and taste.
Clive Thompson wonders: Why don’t people invent new sports? He does find the inventor of a fun-sounding game called whiffle hurling:
Whiffle Hurling was invented in July 2005 by a Tom Russotti, an MFA grad student at Rutgers University — and the sole practitioner of what he calls “aesthletics.” So far, only 10 games of Whiffle Hurling have ever been played. I can personally attest that it’s insanely fun and offers up a genuinely new blend of activity: The crazy intensity of Irish hurling mixed with the low-stress, low-injury appeal of Whiffle ball. It manages to be simultaneously casual and intense, which is perfect for nerds like me.
A Slate slideshow about “the greatest manhunt of WWII”:
In his new book, Now the Hell Will Start, Brendan I. Koerner tells the story of an epic World War II manhunt: the quest to find Herman Perry, a black soldier who shot and killed a white commanding officer, then disappeared into the jungles of Burma, where he joined a tribe of headhunters and eluded capture for months.
The latest project from Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and this slightly terrifying wheelchair.
Photos of that postcard America, which even though it’s vanishing, probably none of us have known.
The insanely gimlet-eyed Roberta Smith reviews Anish Kapoor’s newest shows, one in Boston, one in New York. If you’re not familiar with Kapoor but have been to Millennium Park in Chicago, he’s the one that did the reflective bean.
Konstfack is a great design school in Sweden, turning out that slightly chilly, vaguely swiss, simple design that US designers envy. Here, they get a nice, simple, mesmerizing spot. (via Coudal)
A good, concise pep talk from Ira Glass, about sticking with your creative endeavors. He’s talking specifically about story telling, but it really goes for anything you want to pursue seriously. Except math. If you’re still not good at math at 28, just give up already. (via mot cot)
A collapsible, modular greenhouse, which Design Boom says is “especially suitable for small spaces like cityhouses, balconies, roof terraces or town gardens.” What they forgot to mention was that it’s especially suitable for growing weed in small spaces.
Related: A few weeks ago, the unfailingly brilliant Michael Pollan wrote an interesting article about the ethics of small, eco-conscious decisions, like growing your own food. If you live in a city and don’t have a communal garden, maybe that greenhouse is the answer (after you’ve harvested your weed).
A fun premise: A blog dedicated to pipe-dream ideas, broadcast for anyone to pursue. (Though I’m not sure how gratifying it would be to pursue someone else’s pipe dream? What does that make you?) A representative example:
Was at a reading in an art gallery last night and while checking out their lighting set-up I had an idea for a way to do an art show. Hang the work like normal, but, instead of the normal lighting, the gallery should be as near to total dark as possible. When visitors arrive to view the work, they are given miner’s helmets with forehead flashlights on them. I can picture the beams moving about the gallery, the pieces with more than one viewer lighting up with more light, the show’s overall visibility shifting and changing with the way the viewer’s line of sight changes.
The Believer used to have a similar sort of column, with submissions from various literary types. Not sure if they still do, but it was fun when I last saw it.
(via Swiss Miss)
You busy Friday night? Wanna maybe go out, get a drink, maybe chat about hot sea slug action? Sounds fun, if you’re in LA. (thx, Eric)
Some portraits of gypsies/Roma in Lithuania.
Related: A book review in the New Yorker, from a while ago, about a book penned by a woman who lived with Roma for a time. The bare threads of Roma society are disturbing:
Evidently it’s a miserable life, for the shiftless, jobless, largely illiterate men, and twice as bad for the homebound women, generally married in their teens to other teens, who will bully, betray, tyrannize, and most likely beat them. As for their children, they stay up so late watching television and hanging out on the street that they are usually too sleepy to go to school; Gypsies must be the only significant ethnic group in France that actively discourages literacy and encourages truancy. Compared with them, the embattled immigrants from the Muslim world are models of aspiration to bourgeois order and enlightenment. One of Eberstadt’s more hallucinante chapters describes a conference on education held at College Jean Moulin, a junior high school for preponderantly Gypsy students. “The occasion is pretty merry,” she writes. “People who work with Gypsies tend to laugh a lot. It’s a laughter of hysterical exasperation, because if you didn’t laugh, you’d hang yourself or quit.” The school’s principal, a “barrel-chested, crewcutted Catalan” named Paul Landric, is quoted:
“If an Arab kid cuts school, he stays in the street so his parents don’t find out. If a Gypsy plays hookey, it’s in order to stay home. Here, it’s the parents who are the disruptive influence, mothers who want to coddle their sons, fathers who don’t want their daughters to be seen hanging with boys at school. The girl is a commodity, and they don’t want her to lose her market value.”
Her value, as a virgin, is ascertained not by the young groom on the wedding night but, according to archaic folk custom, by the probing finger of a tribal crone: Eberstadt’s partially renegade Gypsy friend Linda explains, “For Gypsies, it’s a nasty old woman who is paid to penetrate the girl, like a gynecologist but with dirty hands, in front of all the husband’s family. It’s terrifying, it’s inhuman.” Landric sums up: “People talk about preserving Gypsy culture. But what am I as an educator supposed to do when the comportment of my students is frankly pathological?”
Buy the book here.
An interesting story on the “original Indiana Jones”:
Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.
However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that - if it ever existed - had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.
I always try to stay away from linking to Boing Boing, because they’re so huge you’ve probably already seen whatever it is. But check out this video of dogs reacting to a mechanical toy dog. It’s amazing: Dogs experience the uncanny valley too! The dog might be utterly toy-like to us, but you can tell from the dog’s expression that it’s startled and confused by the likeness—maybe even horrified. I wonder if apes also experience the uncanny valley with something like this. To all you primatologists: Please try this. I bet Wowee would sponsor it. Give me a heads up (cliffkuang @ gmail.com) and I’ll write a piece about it.
Update: Hilarious clip from the most amazing show on TV, 30 Rock, explaining the Uncanny Valley. (thx, Michael)) “Salieri?” “No thank you. I already ate.”
The neat-o Illusion of the Year Contest has wrapped. “Ghostly Gaze” and “Rolling Eyes” are pretty kewl.
A GPS unit for bikes. Although its still kind of nasty looking for my silvery beauty.
Displacements is an installation by Michael Naimark. First, he placed a camera in the center of a room on a turntable and recorded scene in the round. Then he spray painted the room white. Then he put a projector where the camera was, to project the previous colorful scene.
Anybody out there see The Prestige? Here’s a real lab where scientists can fool with electrical currents of two million volts. The “impulse generator” is beautiful.
Related: Some crazy tesla coils.
It’s not just because I grew up eating this stuff: If you like beef jerky, you owe it to yourself to buy the classic peppered jerky, from the venerable New Braunfels Smokehouse. It’s the ideal mix: Peppery, not sweet at all, with the savoriness of real beef, not a beef-like product. And it requires refrigerating, because it hasn’t been preserved into leathery proteins.
Via 3QD, an interesting essay on crowd-sourcing in historical research. It seems not to have yielded a signature finding—in the way that much of political reporting has—but the possibilities are pretty interesting:
Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, “crowdsourcing,” as it’s increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives.
Some venerable research institutions are already starting to harness the power of crowds in an organized way. The Library of Congress recently launched a project on the photo-sharing site Flickr that invites visitors to identify and analyze photographs in its collection, while the National Archives, working in partnership with a for-profit company, is inviting people to do the same to online versions of its documents. And a growing number of projects are taking the logical next step, creating “raw archives” of photographs and documents for momentous events: Sept. 11, for example, or Hurricane Katrina.
I don’t know which is more interesting: The prospect of “flavor tripping parties,” or this berry, which after consumption makes everything sweet:
Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”
They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.
The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket.
You can buy them here.
Update: The Times actually seems to have been a year late to the game. Check out this story in the WSJ.
Zoologists are studying stray dogs in Moscow, and the ways they’ve adapted to city life:
Back in the lean Soviet era, restaurants and the now-ubiquitous fast-food kiosks were scarce, so dogs were less likely to beg and more likely to forage through garbage, the zoologists say. Foraging dogs prospered best in the vast industrial zones of Moscow, where they lived a semiferal existence. Because they mainly relied on people to throw out food, and less on handouts, they kept their distance from humans.
Now, old factories are being transformed into shopping centers and apartment blocks, so strays have become more avid and skillful beggars. They have developed innovative strategies, zoologists say, such as a come-from-behind ambush technique: A big dog pads up silently behind a man eating on the street and barks. The startled man drops his food. The dog eats it.
Key is the ability to determine which humans are most likely to be startled enough to drop their food. Strays have become master psychologists, says Andrei Poyarkov, 54, the dean of Moscow’s stray-dog researchers. “The dogs know Muscovites better than Muscovites know the dogs.”
A homemade “sonic camera.” Hopefully some clever designer will seize on this—it seems promising, given the dual textures of sound and moving visuals. (via Everyone Forever)
More throwback movie references: Remember how Riggs in Lethal Weapon is always throwing his shoulder out to get out of a jam? He’s got nothing on the “horror frog”:
“Amphibian horror” isn’t a movie genre, but on this evidence perhaps it should be. Harvard biologists have described a bizarre, hairy frog with cat-like extendable claws.
Trichobatrachus robustus actively breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog’s toe pads, probably when it is threatened.
Do you remember the plot of of the Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta-Jones movie Entrapment? Where the last heist was predicated on using a computer glitch to extract tiny amounts of money from thousands of bank accounts? Some guy pulled something similar, and he’s been indicted:
A California man has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months — a few pennies at a time.
Michael Largent, of Plumas Lake, California, allegedly exploited a loophole in a common procedure both companies follow when a customer links his brokerage account to a bank account for the first time. To verify that the account number and routing information is correct, the brokerages automatically send small “micro-deposits” of between two cents to one dollar to the account, and ask the customer to verify that they’ve received it.
Update: The older precedent was, of course, the “salami technique” used in the stridently awful Superman 3. (thx, Bart!)
It’s strange going back on things you loved as a kid, finding out how cheesy they were. Here, a collection of (unintended?) sex puns on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Related: Sam Anderson’s very funny piece from a while back on bountiful homo-eroticism in He-Man.
Amazon has been coy about Kindle sales, even though the buzz has been excellent. Now, the price has dropped $40, to $360. That can’t be a good sign, especially since, as Jason noted, the Kindle just recently came back into stock on Amazon.
Jeffrey Goldberg, crackerjack political reporter and would-be screen-writer, has the most vivid and concise account of Sydney Pollack I’ve read. Goldberg arrives with a screenplay to review with Pollack, and gets savaged:
The script at that point was 132 pages long, and, weirdly, there was something wrong on every page. We emerged from the conference room five hours later, completely wrung out. For a while inside, we had fought back:
Sydney: “Fellas, I just don’t get this. How could she be flirting with a guy you told us three pages ago was dead?”
Me: “Well you see, Sydney, he wasn’t really actually dead, the death was just a metaphor—”
Sydney: “Yeah, okay, now on page four…”
After a while, we stopped fighting, because he exhausted us—the Sydney Pollack you see on screen (Ross has an excellent, and illustrative, clip) was the Sydney Pollack we saw in his office. And also because he was right.
It wasn’t all misery, of course. He was a wonderful storyteller, and also a world-class obsessive. He took a fifteen-minute break to explain how he packs for overseas trips. I started writing down the monologue, it was so captivating: “You see, fellas, what I do is I check the weather averages for each place I’m heading, and that way I can know exactly what sock I’m going to need for each destination, so I don’t pack any more socks than necessary, just the socks of appropriate weight for the prevailing weather conditions…” And so on. The business with the socks struck me as unnecessary, by the way, because he flew his own plane and could bring three suitcases of socks, but never mind…
Things happen in Hollywood and Sydney didn’t get the chance to make our movie. Rich and I are cautiously pessimistic about its chances. We hope, of course, that it gets made. If it does, and if it’s any good, it will be because Sydney Pollack laid his hands on it.
The Biggest Drawing in the World, a self portrait of the creator, was made by sending a suitcase with a GPS tracker around to various sites, using DHL. (via Core 77)
Update: Lots of people are calling BS on this one, including Atanas, who insists the sailing routes are bogus, and others, claiming the GPS won’t transmit through the case. Fooled by a viral for DHL? Even so, not a bad one, as viral videos go.
Update 2: Yup, it’s BS. What I find disappointing about this is that it could easily have been real—sure, the lines might not have been as precise or expressive, but he could have done it. I’ll bet DHL offers to foot the bill. But come to think of it, I don’t know how I feel about all that carbon for one project like this.
An interesting-sounding documentary, on a row between two schools of balloon twisters. (Some examples of the craft.) From the NYT:
“Twisted: A Balloonamentary” examines the world of professional balloon twisters, who make everything from life-size racing cars to their own wedding dresses. It also exposes the rift—who knew?—between the “gospel twisters,” who use their craft as a way to teach Bible lessons, and the “adult” twisters, who use balloons for more prurient entertainment.
“I refused to see the movie” when it first played, said Ralph Dewey, a prominent gospel twister from Deer Park, Tex. “There’s just too much unclean stuff in there.” He and several other like-minded twisters boycotted a screening of “Twisted” at a balloon convention in Texas last year.
The scenes that might make Mr. Dewey squirm take place at a gay men’s party in Las Vegas, where balloons are fashioned into parts of the male anatomy that are most logically suited for this purpose.
According to the twisters themselves, the two factions have long co-existed, however uncomfortably, at conventions and other gatherings, but the film is bringing simmering resentments to the surface.
Via Make, a video of Audio Cubes in action. It joins the Tenori-On and the Monome, all of them part of a new wave of interesting music interfaces. As a side-note, check out Golan Levin’s spectacular Scrapple.
Continuing on the theme of a self-sustaining belief system, a computer scientist is studying the uptake of religious belief, in an evolutionary computer model. From the New Scientist:
God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved.
By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out, perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.
“If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community,” says James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, who wrote the program, called Evogod.
Update: Pohl and Rob righted me on that one. There’s no typo, I don’t think.
Hold on, don’t worry. I’m not about to write about how you should eat your children. And I’m not going to advocate either Satanism or Libertarianism. I don’t subscribe to either.
But like a lot of people, the Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey caught my imagination in the 1980s, for morbid, adolescent reasons. Yet when I finally got a copy and cracked it, I was always surprised at how mainstream its precepts were. That’s probably unavoidable, since you can’t really found a self-sustaining creed on psychopathic principles. Who would want to join up, if there were simply the promise of being betrayed and injured? Recently, I got interested in the Satanic Bible again, because of this profile of Gaahl, a prominent Satanist in Norway, and the singer in a notorious black metal band. And what’s striking is that its philosophy, more than anything else, resembles libertarianism with some magic thrown in. It’s less Jeffrey Dahmer, and more Ayn Rand. To wit, from the excellent Wikipedia entry:
LaVey makes it very clear that although Satanism is an uncompromisingly selfish religion, he defines selfishness according to what an individual truly wants. Therefore, if a person should honestly care for another person and wishes to express love, then he should do so wholeheartedly; a truly selfish person can acknowledge that if a person is loved by him, then they are important by virtue of his love. This can be compared favorably to the arguments of ethical egoism—that what sometimes benefits others can be beneficial to oneself, but that one must always have one’s own interests first in mind. LaVey never suggests that love is not a natural emotion in man, and on the contrary suggests that loving select individuals is very natural, but he does claim that to love all people is not only a philosophical mistake but is in fact impossible and even damaging to the ability to truly love those few individuals who deserve it.
LaVey explains that hatred is likewise a natural emotion in man and therefore not to be shunned. He makes clear that hatred should be directed at those who deserve it by virtue of their actions to offend the individual, and like love, it is senseless to universally apply hatred to all mankind. He muses that while Satanism strongly advocates both individual love and hate, because white-light religion has such a strong aversion to acknowledging hate as a natural feeling in man that to merely mention that Satanism permits individuals to hate their enemies, Satanism is automatically portrayed as a hateful religion, a claim he maintains is false and ignorant of the true ethics of Satanism.
Ah, to be young and broke in New York. Some astounding stories of discipline and ingenuity about what it takes to make ends meet in the city. What’s striking is that some of these people are literally starving and probably malnourished. And yet they still come to the city.
Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make.
“For a little while I only ate grapefruits for my lunch,” said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, “because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day.”
Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.
“To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city,” he said. “You’ve got to forget about brands, you’ve got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what’s out there.”
An excellent article and slide show about Alison Elizabeth Taylor, an artist who uses marquetry, the craft technique of covering objects in fanciful wood veneers, which hit its high point in the Renaissance-era. Taylor works on flat surfaces, “painting” scenes of hipsters and lovelies in a desert landscape that recalls Sergio Leone. Her show is up now through June 21 at James Cohan Gallery, in Chelsea.
Update: The Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio that Taylor mentions as her inspiration is one of my favorite things in New York. -jkottke
Stunning, even glamorous, sea slugs.
Life’s tough in the Minor league. Just ask the guy that got traded for 10 bats.
Well hello there. As Jason mentioned before, I’ll be house sitting here for the coming week, feeding the beast that is Kottke.org. Don’t worry. My idea isn’t to change things up. I’ll just be sticking to the web curation formula, with some occasional sallies into greater depth. So thanks to Jason for inviting me on, and thanks for reading.
A cellphone in the microwave, unexpectedly amazing. And probably toxic enough to sterilize a stallion. (via Dark Roasted Blend)
UPDATE: It’s a fake, obviously. Should have watched with the audio on. (thx, Mike)
I’m off on holiday this week and I’ve invited Cliff Kuang to help keep that kottke.org groove going in my absence. Cliff is a journalist and has written/edited for I.D., The Economist, Wired, Print, Monocle, and GOOD on culture, design, and technology. When he’s not writing for money, he blogs for fun and wonderment at Delicious Ghost (may be NSFW). Welcome, Cliff!
Photos of pajamas as outerwear in Shanghai.
The prevalence of pyjamas, Guariglia explained to me, was due to both the extreme summer heat and the lack of plumbing. Most Shanghaians share outdoor communal toilets and thus the boundaries of what was considered one’s home have expanded past people’s houses to the public bathrooms. Once that relaxation of the dress code became acceptable (starting around the 1980s) the perimeter for p.j.-wear just kept expanding until many people were wearing them day in day out.
Rave review of the Kindle by Justin Blanton, who is a gadget freak of the first order.
I love the Kindle, and totally see myself using and enjoying it (and its progeny) for many years to come. I’m reading more because of it, and seriously doubt I’ll ever read a paper book again.
It still looks like the Pontiac Aztek of e-readers but it solves one of the things I dislike about reading in bed:
One of the nicest things about the Kindle, and something that is inherent in such a device, is that, unlike a regular book, its orientation and weight aren’t constantly shifting. With a paper book, you are made to move [it] around as you shift from the left to the right page, flip pages, etc. With the Kindle however, all of that shifting disappears and you can hold your chosen position indefinitely.
Such a “feature” generally allows you to expend less energy when reading. For example, I like reading in bed while lying on my side. With a paper book you have to constantly hold the book to keep it open and to move it slightly depending on whether you’re reading the right or left page; with the Kindle, you can just let it rest on the bed and then tap the next-page button as needed. I realize that this may sound like a trivial thing to devote a paragraph to, but it really is amazing how such a device can change the way you read, or make the way you’re used to reading that much better.
As Justin notes, Kindles are back in stock at Amazon.
If you need proof that Cooks.com lets anyone submit recipes:
Wiener water soup
1 pkg. wieners
3 c. water
Combine wieners and water in a two quart saucepan. Bring to a boil until wieners are cooked. Throw the wieners in the garbage. Serve soup. Serves 3.
The NYC hot dog vendors should think about branching out into soup. (via serious eats)
In commercials for Domino’s Pizza, the chain’s employees wage a never ending battle against the Noid, a gremlin who delays deliveries and carries a gun that can turn a pizza ice cold. Many viewers are amused by the Noid, Domino’s says, but one of them took the advertising campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino’s Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow’s Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.
All Noid got was the pizza he ordered. After a five-hour siege, the two employees slipped away and Noid gave himself up. According to police, Noid has “psychological problems” and believes that he has an “ongoing dispute with Tom Monaghan,” the head of the Detroit-based Domino’s chain.
Time Magazine, you’re making that shit up. (via lonelysandwich)
From an article on jet lag, the story of Sarah Krasnoff’s fatal jet setting:
One day in 1971, a woman called Sarah Krasnoff made off with her 14-year-old grandson, who was caught up in an unseemly custody dispute, and took him into the sky. In a plane, she knew, they were subject to no laws, and if they never stopped moving, the law could never catch up with them. They flew from New York to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they turned around and flew from Amsterdam to New York. Then they flew from New York to Amsterdam again, and from Amsterdam to New York, again and again and again, month after month.
They took about 160 flights in all, one after the other, according to the stage piece “Jet Lag.” They saw 22 movies an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again and turned their watches six hours forward, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Krasnoff, 74, finally collapsed and died, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.
(via things magazine)
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that only ended with the dawn of space exploration.
That’s Carl Sagan in Contact from 1985. The effects of light pollution were documented in the New Yorker last August.
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