Perhaps conspicuously absent from my post on the need for a bit of magic in technology was Arthur C. Clarke’s famous edict, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think it kinda supports my point, adding the one that technology and magic aren’t so dissimilar as technology’s relationship with science and magic’s relationship with mysticism might suggest.

Anyway, it also reminds me that I recently listened to an incredible group discussion that was held in May 1970 between Clarke, sociologist Alvin Toffler, who was about to publish Future Shock, and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. It’s called 2001: Science Fiction Or Man’s Future?

› read more

Sorry for this screed, but it appears I haven’t had my Delicious links properly linked up lately. It’s worth it, I swear, if only for the casu marzu.

• The Suits of James Bond - Well, just that, really. Good fetishism.
• Clive Thompson: Will the word processor destroy our ability to think? - Looking at the impact of cut and paste on writing, and asking the question: has it changed the way we think? I can't really imagine writing anything fully structured in one pass, but I must have done so when I was at school and early university. It's strange to realise how alien the concept is now.
• Designing Media: Interviews - Hyper interesting - a series of fantastic four-minute interviews with leading editors, designers and writers about the changing form of media, all to publicise Bill Moggridge's new Designing Media book. Includes Neil Stevenson on making PopBitch, Chris Anderson on Wired's relationship with its website, Ira Glass on telling narratives and Mark Zuckerberg on sharing and social connections.
• The Twitter Hulks - From Feminist Hulk to Cross-dressing Hulk, Lit-crit Hulk to Film-crit Hulk.
• Paleo-Future Blog: Dawn of the Wireless Phone - Professor William Edward Ayrton wondered in 1901 what it would mean to have portable, wireless telephones: "Think of what this would mean, of the calling which goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole, not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others. It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws."
• Chris Burden's Metropolis II - "It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation. In "Metropolis II," by his calculation, "every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city," Mr. Burden said. "It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It's quite intense.""
• Batman symbols - Must be most, if not all of the Batman symbols. A remarkable range of shapes, but all maintain its distinctive identity.
• NYT: The Attention-Span Myth - "At some point, we stopped calling Tom Sawyer-style distractibility either animal spirits or a discipline problem. We started to call it sick..." What exactly is an attention span? And is it really good to have one? Great piece of assumption busting.
• Nine Eyes of Google Street View - Jon Rafman's cuts of Street View, showing beauty and ugliness, humour and horror in momentary, sliced, sections of the world. Makes you realise that, though public, streets tend to go often unobserved. And it's a project that seems rooted in a kind of compulsive madness of panning and zooming. Deckard surely has nothing on Rafman.
• The Atlantic: The 12 Timeless Rules for Making a Good Publication - The Atlantic's mid-20th century exceedingly elegant and thoughtful editorial guidelines. My favourite: "Always remember that the fastidious element in the Atlantic audience is its permanent and valuable core."
• Clay Shirky: The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics - Guess what! Shirky doesn't think it's been an enormous success. Expanding on that, the venture "suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms".
• On Set: Empire Strikes Back - Vanity Fair - Pictures from the set of Empire Strikes Back show the wonderful mundanity of making fantasy. Mattresses scattered beneath the platform during the climatic scene between Vader and Skywalker, model makers towering above AT-ATs. Also, check the way they created the yellow scrolling text at the start - they actually filmed it.
• Human landscapes in SW Florida - Patterns amid natural forms in new housing estates in Florida.
• Cheese I'm afraid of #43: casu marzu - Maggot-riddled casu marzu from Sardinia doesn't sound like my thing. It's eaten with thousands of maggots still in it, maggots which are not only able to jump six inches but also have mouthhooks which they can use to tear up your insides.

› read more

Look at the journey of a new idea, from its origin in greasy workshops and grinding machinery to showroom floors, or from the inscrutable mind of a genius to a gleaming plaything in your hand. It seems to me that the biggest sign that a technology is ready to take over the world is when it starts to think about the people who will use it.

› read more

A nice piece on The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine, particularly for the quote about his feelings, pre-Corrections, about the orthodox idea of the American novel, born by the likes of John Updike and Saul Bellow.

“Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society,” he wrote, “seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.”

I think the idea that a single book can stand for swathes of its society is why I’ve been drawn to American writing. But I think Franzen was right. America is much too fractured for these examinations of its tortured middle classes to represent anything wider than just that.

› read more

• Thirty Five Images of Space Helmet Reflections - A compendium of faces peering from within bulbous glass at the great beyond (via Berg).
• The New Science of Morality - “Nearly all of us doing this work are secular Liberals. And that means that we're at very high risk of misunderstanding those moralities that are not our own.” Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s talk on how western liberal culture, the one that has essentially built the foundations for the study of human psychology, has a restricted moral spectrum compared to other cultures around the world, and why confirmation bias means it’s much to easy for these psychologists to profoundly misunderstand other cultures.
• Granta: Cinema's Invisible Art - An essay on the scriptwriter's talent of spare but vivid description, from the Coen brothers to Shane Black's awesome script for Lethal Weapon. No, really.

› read more

• Charles Holland on Inception - A sober but enthusiastic view of Inception, noting its ludicrousness while loving its film-within-a-film complexities. Like a very, very good episode of Doctor Who on an unlimited budget, he says, rather explaining my misgivings: I don't much like Doctor Who's delight in story mechanics over, well, just telling a good story, which is why Inception didn't quite enthral me.
• Wired: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown - Nice piece on the commercial realities of AT&T's experiences with its exclusive iPhone deal. Turns out that scaling up its data network to meet iPhone's (plus Blackberry and other smart phones', surely) demands has already cost the company $37 billion, with another $14 billion this year.
• FT's CEO on why paywalls are commercially and morally necessary - "The paper's digital subscribers reached 149,047 at the end of June, up 27% year on year and 17,000 up from January." Kinda think you need the specialisation, market type and scale of the FT to have this sort of success.

› read more

Multi-storey car parks aren’t commonly beautiful places. They usually sit as ostracised blocks in the city, rough and slitted concrete walls facing the outside like the those of a gaol; an ugly and barely tolerated necessity of urban life.

How to redefine the multi-storey car park? If you’re stern Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron, you try to invite the city into its structure, rather than close it off. 1111 Lincoln Road is a newly opened car park in Miami, situated on the border of its social downtown heart and its suburban sprawl.

› read more

• An affectionate octopus - This sight will warm the cockles of any heart - even the three hearts of a cephalopod - though the huge welts from its gentle octopus sucker-love look a bit of a mood-dampener on the part of the human.
• Squid at play - So squid indulge in mating dances which appear to be similar to lekking, a behaviour some birds employ in which males gather together and display in order for females to pick out the best. The term 'lek' comes from the Swedish terms for rule-less play ('att leka' means 'to play'). This can only mean that squid either have a sense of style or fun. Biologist PZ Myers says that males gather to swim in large circles above the mating ground at dawn. The females arrive and they all dance together before pairing off and mating over and over again until after sunset.
• Squidblog - Profoundly sadly, this blog has been mothballed since 2006, but it's a delightful repository of old cephalopod news, including a 15-17m bull sperm whale with scars indicating tussles with 200-300kg squid all over its snout, research that squid inherit personalities from their parents, documentation of squid orgies and a cat wearing a squid hat.
• Humboldt squid: Soft, gentle kittens of the briny deep? - Clive Thompson on how a biologist is refuting general horror at the six-foot Diablo Rojo, with its 'fleshreaping beak', saying that they kinda like attacking his equipment, but they're frightened by his light.

› read more

Oh my, do I want this. Spotted: the Warthog, the spherical robot from The Incredibles, that bounty hunter out of Star Wars, and isn’t that a grunt out of Robotron?

149 Sci-Fi Icons on One Poster | Design You Trust (via n0wak)

› read more

Beautiful in their organic, subjective and muddled attempts to represent the world and his own life with objective information, Simon Evans’ works explore, as Frieze excellently puts it, “that wonderful gap between the words and life itself”.

› read more