Thursday, January 31, 2013

A visual history of Corvette logos [part1] [part2]
(Via Core77)
Mars colony program lands first investors
Managing the selection process could prove challenging, as Mars One anticipates receiving hundreds of thousands of applications from people interested in becoming Mars colonists.

Mars One plans to launch a series of robotic missions between 2016 and 2020 that will build an outpost on the Red Planet. The first four astronauts will arrive in 2023, and more will touch down every two years after that. There are no plans to return these interplanetary pioneers to Earth.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Message in a binary bottle
Notes from game developers hidden in ROM, found later (sometimes much later) by curious fans armed with diasassemblers.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering (believermag)
Representations of value, or the unexpected double history of banking and the art world.

Sunday, January 06, 2013


If Mars had oceans it would look like this (theatlantic)
Metal Robots - Compressorhead: Ace of Spades (youtube)

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

The full workout of all that may be some years further out, but the blowout will commence in 2013. The glue that held these markets together was faith that they meant something -- and that faith has been pissed away by fools in high places who drained all the honesty out of them. It was a classic case out of the Joseph Tainter playbook: diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants. In other words, borrowing a term from Taleb, they are hopelessly fragile. Any little vibration could reduce the whole creaking arrangement into a heap of rubble and ashes. There's plenty of vibration available out there. Events are humming.

The New York Knicks logo that should have been