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“If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
This video has been making it’s rounds on the interwebs this week and I just thought it would be appropriate to remind everyone what a thoughtful, passionate and remarkable human being Carl Sagan was. I mean if autotune can get the kids to listen to anything these days it’s better this than Kanye. If you’re not familiar with his Cosmos series or his numerous books, let me share one of my favorite anecdotes about Dr. Sagan.
He chaired the NASA committee responsible for the content of the solid gold record (not sales, we’re talking Au) that accompanied the Voyager I & II probes into the depths of space containing a message from Earth. This record included greeting in 55 languages and music from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson among other representatives from non-western and indigenous cultures. Sagan wanted “Here Comes the Sun” from Abbey Road, but EMI said no. Also on this record is a brain scan of someone in love. For more on this, check out this episode of WNYC’s Radiolab. The probe is now well over 14 billion kilometers from the Sun. In 40,000 years it will be within 2 light years of a star in the next galaxy to us, Andromeda.
Sagan was also a great popularizer of the search for extraterrestrial life and of science in general. Sadly, he passed in 1996 and no one since has quite managed to replace his enthusiasm, love and selfless promotion of a higher understanding of life and its relationship with the universe.
In 1971, amidst the raging political insecurity surrounding the Vietnam War, activist and linguist Noam Chomsky was invited to partake in a debate with French philosopher Michel Foucault on the topic of Human Nature.
The discussion, primarily focused on the concept of whether there is an intrinsic quality to human nature, or if it’s completely conditioned from external influences, was aired on Dutch television, and later transcribed and published as the Chomsky – Foucault debate.
This excerpt, dissects the notion of justice versus power. Each of the intellectual heavyweights stay true to their respective dogmas; Chomsky’s long standing position that absolute power corrupts, and Foucault’s disdain and criticism of psychiatry, but the results are terrifically interesting.
The book not only has a transcription of this debate, but additional original text from Chomsky, and a new introduction by Foucault scholar John Rajchman.
I was visiting a friend on Lake Winnipesaukee last Saturday when he started playing a guitar riff that sounded very familiar. I asked him the name of the song, and he said it was the theme from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece, L’avventura (seen & heard in video above). I suggested that it sounded very similar to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’Egyptian Reggae. He agreed. Now, composer Giovanni Fusco died in 1968 and The Modern Lovers formed in 1970, so they weren’t broing down in Boston, or even Italy for that matter. It is quite possible however, that a young Jonathan did see the film and fell victim to one of our implicit and ubiquitous human faults, cryptomnesia, or unintended plagiarism.
I got excited last night talking to Victor about tightening up our CB slang game for texting and live conversations. Little did I know that the citizen’s band is no longer the exclusive domain of truckers and teenage hobbyists. In Sydney, Australia, the citizen’s band has been taken over by thugs!
If that’s too much for you, enjoy the grave nostalgia of Dick Curless below. If you like that one, then listen to his 1970 track “Truck Stop” about the gentrification of the greasy spoon by a “swell cafe…a brand new coffee shop.”
Wait. I thought I was done here but check out Sir Mix-a-Lot’s alter ego, Prime Minister. He broadcasts and converses regulary on Channel 6.
was digging through some old VHS tapes the other day, and found this really weird interview with french filmmaker Verene Sandrine from The Valentine Sainsbury Show and just had to share it.
Lazy? Certainly. I’m pulling “not saying shit” on these clips for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this film is absolutely impossible to find. Between this and the Fleetwood Mac Tusk doc., I’m signed on with every dangerous/crawling-with-hackers-stealing-your-worthless-identity auction network throughout Eastern Europe, Korea, China, and all nations currently comprising South and Southeast Asia. A Swedish Love Story is a brilliant piece of work.
The painfully short, incomplete, clips on YouTube have, whether they intended to or not, created a community of people who care deeply about this film they’ve never seen. I haven’t seen all of it. If anyone reading this can remedy that, let’s talk.
A Swedish Love Story (Swedish: En kärlekshistoria) is a 1970 Swedish romantic drama directed by Roy Andersson, starring Ann-Sofie Kylin and Rolf Sohlman as two teenagers falling in love. Inspired by the Czechoslovak New Wave, the film was Andersson’s feature film debut and became a big success in Sweden and abroad. It is today considered a classic about teenage love.
Have you ever solved one of these? Well that’s called CAPTCHA and this is the dude who made it up. It basically started as a test to determine legitimate users vs. spamming software and it worked very well. But Luis thought he was wasting too much of Humanity’s time (±1.666 Million hours in 2007). So what did he do? With the advent of reCAPTCHA, every time you solve one of those annoying verification puzzles you are helping to decipher and digitize some of the 150+ years of non-digital, non-computer recognizable NY Times archives that exist as scans or microfilm. Keep in mind, this started last year and Ahn expects to be done by the end of 2009.
Some other interesting notes:
The Empire State Building took 7 million human-hours to build.
The Panama Canal took 20 million human-hours to build.
9 Billion Human-Hours of solitaire were played in 2003.
Granted, the energy output of a game of solitaire is not equal to one of manual labor, but think about the scale of this. Thanks to Nova Science Now for bringing this up.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. -MM
James Howard Kunstler is undoubtedly brilliant: A social poet with the sharpest of sharp wits, a truly visionary and pragmatic thinker. In the TED talk below, he’s funny and occasionally charming (Pol Pot got big laughs). But Mr. Kunstler is fighting hard, (and weekly), to change the way that we think about, engage, and use the spaces we all share. And while some might hail him as a god-sent prophet, I think everyone, on both sides of WalMart’s fence, can agree that he’s a really special kind of dick. Just saying.
Read: The Dystopians (The New Yorker, 1/26/09)
Related: a few lines from Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives:
Where there is wealth and poverty, there is awkwardness in any one of these four situations:
A rich man speaking in praise of wealth
A rich man speaking in praise of poverty
A poor man speaking in praise of wealth
A poor man speaking in praise of poverty
Comic primness, or “prim irony,” is an an attitude characterizing a member of a privileged class who somewhat questions the state of affairs whereby he enjoys his privileges; but after all, he does not enjoy them, and so in the last analysis he resigns himself to the dubious conditions, in a state of ironic complexity that is apologetic, but not abnegatory.
