Archive for the 'futurism' Category

"The specific title of the class is "COM 230: History of Print Media." I'm calling the class "a history of print culture." The primary goal of this class is to teach students about the culture of "print media" in an era when that culture is being joined (and in some cases, overtaken) by a culture that we might variously call digital culture, online culture, or the culture of the web."

The Helicopters are Coming.

“The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas?”

Population information for industrial robots.

This would be a good substitute for flying cars, Science.

"It's been a long, long time coming"

Brief discussion of the purpose behind and the technique needed to create "10,000" year photographs. This is particularly interesting in light of current preservation efforts towards art that wasn't meant to last at all. Is permanence our only goal?

Segment from 60 Minutes showing a tour of the Doomsday seed vault in Svalbard.

Wired's collection of planned and imagined architecture.

Vannevar Bush's landmark article in the Atlantic theorizing a machine which partially (wholly?) inspired the functional base of the world wide web.

ROBOTS / FUTURE CITIES / STAR TRAVEL (star travel?).

Audit of 1989's (consumer) vision of 2007. Actually sort of a lot of this stuff has hit the market.

A not particularly carefully OCR'd pdf of Clynes' and Kline's groundbreaking article on the plausibility of modifying the human body to adapt to extended periods of spaceflight. Might be worth considering in the face of the doping scandal, might not.

The master of speculative, atmospheric, unrealized architecture.

"What can the mechanical man do? Plenty! He can walk, and he can talk. He can stand, sit, bow, and otherwise comport himself after the fashion of a human being. But he can do more than that. He...can perform any number of duties advantageous to mankind."