“The Radiated Library”

My friend Jake from Insider Agitation posted this on my Myspace page and I’m really interested by it. The early-twentieth-century Belgian information scientist Paul Otlet predicted the basic infrastructure of the Internet in a vision so uncannily exact it’s almost eery considering he wrote the essay in 1934. He called it “The Radiated Library” or, [...]

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Time-Lapse Video of Hanoi Traffic

I found this over on Laughing Squid and thought it a great example of an organically-functioning co-operative system. Note the complete absence of traffic signals yet everything is flowing smoothly, no accidents, no road rage. Bicycles, buses, cars, scooters, pedestrians all safely traveling through the intersection. If only we had this in San Francisco, people [...]

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Times Article on CIA Interrogations

Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation

By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew [...]

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Fix-Pushers!

This is pretty good. “I’m a fix-push messenger downtown, its pretty rad.”

From Mission Mission

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The pebble perpetuates nothing

.Poor pebble
Ignored by sculpture, architecture, mosaic and jewellery
It dates from the beginning of the planet, perhaps even from another star
Warped by space, like the stigmata of its terrible fall
It per-dates man, and man has not embodies it in his art or history
He did not manufacture it and thus decide its place
The pebble perpetuates nothing more [...]

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Biofuels threaten Tribal Peoples

 
Demand for biofuels is destroying tribal peoples’ land and lives, according to indigenous representatives at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), meeting currently in New York. 
A report presented to the UNPFII refers to ‘increasing human rights violations, displacements and conflicts due to expropriation of ancestral lands and forests for biofuel plantations.’ One of the report’s authors, UNPFII chairperson [...]

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Albert Hofman, inventor of LSD, dead at 102

The famed bicycle rider and father of certainly the 20th century’s most problematic “problem child” died of heart failure on April 29th in Basel, Switzerland. According to the NY Times “he took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the [...]

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Los Detectives Salvajes

I’m waist-deep in Bolano’s “The Savage Detectives” at the moment. It’s an immensely readable novel mostly because of the propulsive quality of the writing, what Paul Berman called a “forward-hurtling momentum that comes rushing out of the very first words”. Has anyone read this in it’s original spanish? I’m eager to know what I’m losing, [...]

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94 year-old Man kills Landlord

A 94-year-old man was taken into custody after he allegedly shot and killed his landlord Thursday night and holed up in his East Oakland home for several hours, police said.
Police said he was upset that his landlord, 64-year-old Kulbushan Gupta, planned to evict him, so he fired several shots at Gupta about 7:30 p.m. at [...]

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Dam Project Could Wipe Out Indigenous Russian Tribe

 

MOSCOW — The Evenks, an indigenous tribe that leads a nomadic life herding reindeer in northern Siberia, fears its way of life will be lost forever if plans go ahead to build one of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams.

Tribesmen say their already-depleted numbers will be forced to leave their homeland and abandon their centuries-old way [...]

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