tower of tapping machines (by Jen Southern)
“Rafi Haladjian, the designer of Nabaztag the connected rabbit discovered is that even though it was undoubtably loved some of the behaviour that didn’t fit its rabbitiness were considered a bit unneccesary. For example when it read out RSS news feeds people found it hard to believe what it was saying - which is an issue because reading or playing feeds and podcasts was one of the major features of Nabaztag so maybe making it shaped like a rabbit wasn’t sugh a good idea. I reckon that if the design of an object suggests a set of behaviours the way it behaves should map to the way it looks - and vice versa. Unfortunately rabbits don’t do much”
“As one example, drones carry inherent political costs to the regime that allows them. Among domestic populations, drones are almost always unpopular, as they represent a distant and unaccountable foreign power exercising the right to kill them at will”
— The Political Consequences of a Drones-First Policy - Joshua Foust - International - The Atlantic
“Building owners can charge higher rents for skyway-connected properties. The city also has skyway incentives in its zoning code. The city tries to keep standard hours for skyways, but it’s hard to enforce and some buildings shut off their skyways unexpectedly.”
— Maze of Minneapolis skyways: A dead end? | StarTribune.com
“They may also find people like Gene and Patricia Poppler, who left their 4-acre plot in Hastings for the year-round comfort of a skyway-connected apartment. They take the skyways to their favorite restaurants, the downtown YMCA and the theaters on Hennepin Avenue. If a spot isn’t connected to the skyway, they probably aren’t going there.”
— Maze of Minneapolis skyways: A dead end? | StarTribune.com
“Skyways have recast the Minneapolis cityscape in ways that were likely unimaginable when the first one opened in 1962. The imposing metal structures now loom around nearly every corner of the downtown, forming an elevated maze that snakes through hotels, corporate offices, department stores, even the county jail. The beehive comes alive in the early morning hours as downtown offices start the day. There are sometimes peculiar scenes, like workers walking through the men’s section of Macy’s to get to their offices, passing rows of slacks and sweaters roped off until the store opens.”
— Maze of Minneapolis skyways: A dead end? | StarTribune.com
“The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.”
“Now, a rocket that can reach Mars, or the Moon, with a crew-rated module. NASA used to have those. They were called Saturn V launchers. They stopped making them. And, right now, I don’t believe anyone is building a launcher with comparable juice. Space-X are making noises about one, but getting a stack crew-rated is a long haul. The Chinese, who seem to be basically cloning Apollo technology, aren’t there yet, but could be inside ten years. Everyone’s aware of this. The sort of lifting power we had with Apollo is gone. And Apollo would have been a crappy way of going to Mars anyway, because it’s still too slow, everyone would get cancer and it’d make being cooped up in the ISS for a year feel like living on Richard Branson’s private island.
Basically, because NASA stopped being able to try and solve all the problems, and because no-one else was all that interested, the science of crewed spaceflight really hasn’t advanced all that much since the 70s. So he can be as “grandiose” as he likes, but the term for what he’s actually doing is “bullshitting,” because neither NASA nor the private sector are in a condition to make his fantasies happen within the timeframe. There’s bugger all worth mining on the moon. The idea of extracting helium-3 from the lunar regolith to drive nuclear-fusion power stations that don’t exist yet… it’s all dream stuff.
”
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS (by Michael König)
“We should learn a few things from the problems we’ve had with gameification and establish early on that not everything should pretend to be happy to see you and sad to see you go or demand that you treat it as another person.”
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