Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 801

Dead Media Beat: 1960s NASA Lunar Orbiter Images

*They're in the garage with the dead hardware.

*via Tim O'Reilly, who presumably owns no giant extinct NASA tape drives,
but is a marvel at tweeting endangered newspapers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwor...

(...)

When the clerk came in to ask about the Lunar Orbiter tapes, she didn't hesitate.

"Do not destroy those tapes," Evans commanded.

She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. "I could not

This Glorious Easter Season Abounds With Glimmers of Hope for All Mankind

*In glamorous modern Detroit:

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*Intrepid British photojournalist discovers friendly grocery store for Somali pirates. Note
Internet and cellphone services.

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*Futurity.

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*And the heritage of the past. Trample Old Europe under the heel of oppression
as long as you please -- but you better watch those Brazilian girls.

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Clumsy British Centipede Stings Itself To Death In Public

*Wow, it's amazingly rare to see these centipede sex-smear schemes blow up
in public *before* they manage to become full-scale tongue-hanging-out
get-the-pitchforks political sex smears.

*So who is dogging the doggers here I wonder? Who ratted the rats?
Happy Easter!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/12/damien-mc-bride-labour-smear

Gordon Brown was engulfed in crisis last night after a key aide resigned and the Tories threatened legal action over explosive leaked emails di

Spring Break at Beyond the Beyond

It's Easter. It's spring outside. Also, my laptop is broken.

To heck with this blogging nonsense; I'm gonna read some work on paper.

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Flarf Versus Conceptual Writing

http://virginformica.blogspot.com/2009/03/at-whitney-flarf-versus-conceptual.html

*Conceptualist though I am by nature, I am still rooting for Flarf.

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"Surely, one of the signs of the Apocalypse . . .

"On Friday, April 17 the Whitney Museum of American Art presents eight poets associated with two cutting-edge movements in contemporary poetry: the Flarf Collective and Conceptual Writing. The followers of both movements employ technology to create their works, often using strategies

Small meteorites pop holes in Martian surface, reveal lakes of pure ice

*One wonders why we weren't looking for these earlier. Because nobody
thought about it, that's why.

*Makes one wonder what else is happening on Mars that nobody
thinks to look for.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/2009/03/lpsc_2009_little_asteroids_on.html

"But the gist of the work is worth repeating: members of the MRO HiRise team are using fresh impact craters as probes of the subsurface, and are finding ice farther south than anyone has thought possible. Pictured here are th

A-Pod hexapod robot

*She's a beauty. Really gives you a good mandibular grip
on the mechanical utility of our planetary rivals, the ants.

Nice artsy choice of soundtrack, too -- for robotics geeks, anyhow.

*Thanks for the link, Allen Varney!

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Urban Detroit Raccoon Hunter Predicts Imminent Cannibalism

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090402/METRO08/904020395

(((It's both fantastic and hilarious. The allure of Detroit grows stronger by the month.
Man, if I've got a hundred dollars left over after tax time, I'm gonna buy an
apartment there.)))

(...)

Where one man sees a vacant lot, Beasley sees a buffet.

"Starvation is cheap," he says as he prepares an afternoon lunch of barbecue coon and red pop at his west side home.

His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon

'Being a Throbbing Gristle fan was like enrolling in a university course of cultural extremism'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/apr/07/sonic-youth-underground-influences

*Wow, I never knew that Uschi Obermaier was a groupie for Amon Duul.

*The bohemia of the 1970s now looks almost as distant and intriguing as
the bohemia of the 1870s. You know what's missing here? A searchable
database of counterculture social-media. You can't follow their money (because
they never had any, and if they got it, they never kept it), but if you could
just track the intercontinental social

Printing Clay

*Via Fabbaloo. Okay, it's not *exactly* fabricated clay, but its close enough
to printed ceramics that the implications are pretty strange.

*Basically it's powered clay, alcohol and sugar. Then you stick it in the kiln
and... well, let them tell it.

http://www.ceramicartsdaily.org/magazines/Ceramics%20Monthly/2009febprintedpotfeature.aspx

"Encouraged by successfully printing with Xtra-White, we moved on to a higher firing slip, Redart TerraCotta. With the same powder additives and o