Linear A.
Ancient language, lost to the modern day. Largely undecipherable.
So this got me to thinking . . . what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine's subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?
- Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
this is what buckminster fuller had in mind when he championed the geodesic dome, i am sure of it.
I always knew there were more galaxies and planets out there, but I never quite thought about it long enough for it to have really blown my mind. But today, it happened.
I can’t stop wondering what it’s like on those other planets in a totally different galaxy.
Another galaxy.
Let’s go watch Barbarella.
The joy of being on YouTube is you get strange comments like this:
Who let you out? of your mom’s basement? Go back to building lego trainsets to transport your cocoa from the kitchen to your computer desk.
Hey – that’s a great idea, come to think of it.
- CDM
vintage geekeryI feel as though all t-shirts in the eighties looked like that
I believe heartsick computer geeks might have called for Linda, hoping to make a user-compatible connection
jstn:
NASA has released some video from the infamous lost “slow-scan” tapes of the first Apollo landing (40 years ago Monday!) Even better, it’s in a variety of excellent formats, including ridiculously huge Quicktime ProRes. I wish a certain Japanese space agency would follow suit with a certain lunar orbiter.
Unfortunately, the NASA press release today admits the search for the missing tapes was a failure. The video being released is best of the already scan-converted material.
The archivist in me weeps deeply for the reels of data lost.
Life: Michael Collins, March 01, 1969.“Michael Collins with his wife Pat at a beach in Texas, March, 1969. “The shot of Mike lying on the beach reading, with a stack of paperbacks under his head, like a pillow, really sort of captures him. It made sense that he’d be the Command Module pilot, orbiting alone above the moon while Neil and Buzz were on the surface. Mike was a very capable guy, obviously, and comfortable when he was by himself.”
Photo and comments by Ralph Morse.
9 0 0 0: echo
“you don’t code php. you merely edit it until it works.” - pedro figueiredo
DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL.
I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”
A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”
Modern Mechanix - THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (1959)
((and the lonely people are getting lonelier.))
THE FIRST INSTANCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION-INDUCED LOLS??
In an early experiment, the computer was asked to translate the English saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” into Russian. The result was startling: “Invisible and insane.”
PLUS BONUS “oh brave new world!” FACTS:
Most commercial and scientific computer systems are huge affairs that fill a good-sized room which must be air-conditioned and dust-free. The largest digital computers cost from $500,000 to $4,000,000 each and yet they are being produced on an assembly-line basis by several companies.
jinxthebit:spaceships:iamallface:
James Whistler – Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.
my neighbors were already setting off bottle rockets last night. then i heard more at 8am this morning.
how much you wanna bet the kids got into them?
Charles Bukowski
with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
(Previously.)
