MonthFebruary 2009

The Continuous Enclave: Strategies in Bypass Urbanism

Viktor Ramos The Continuous Enclave: Strategies in Bypass Urbanism

Strategies in Bypass Urbanism

This project explores the idea of using creative infrastructure projects to “route around” geopolitical agreements in Israel/Palestine.

More Images: BLDBLG

Appropedia: Lazy gardening & Easy to grow plans

I’ve been having trouble getting started growing my own food. Maybe these pages will help me get moving again:

Lazy gardening

Easy to grow plants

Goodbye

As Technoccult will be no more, I just wanted to thank Klint and our readers for this great experience. I’ll still be posting my links, articles, and interviews on my LJ for those who’d like to read them. Again, many thanks to Klint and to our regular readers, and I wish everyone the best of luck in their future endeavors.

TiamatsVision

Mutation in Process

Technoccult is in the process of mutating into Renegade Futurist.

More info soon, but be aware that things are probably going to be actively breaking over the next few hours as I deal with server migration issues, WordPress upgrades, design changes, new plugins, domain issues, etc.

Moving to renegadefuturist.com

I’m consolidating my efforts here and at Technoccult by merging the two sites. There will be no further updates here – watch Renegade Futurist for updates.

This site will remain as is for about a month and then will be archived at renegadefuturist.com. All links should still work after the archiving, though.

Study debunks ‘global cooling’ concern of ’70s

The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.

The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”

Full Story: USA Today

New Issue of H+ Magazine: Has the Future Been Canceled?

h plus magazine

Read it at H+

One gripe: why is a publication so obsessed with the future stuck replicated the decidedly past format of print magazine? The do better than anyone I’ve seen at making this quasi-print webzine into a true hypermedia object with permalinks to specific articles and a search functionality. But they are still stuck replicating the past.

That aside, I’m looking forward to reading this.

Last minute LOST theory round-up

  • ‘Lost’ is the opposite of ‘won’ Wadester23 suggests that the title LOST doesn’t mean the opposite of found, but the opposite of ‘won’ – as in the game Ben, Widmore, and possibly others are playing. Desmond might know about it via Penny now (“These people–they’re just usin’ us. They’re playing some kind of game, and we are just the pieces.” – Desmond in 316).
  • Ben tried to kill Penny, got beat up by Desmond (Lostpedia)
  • Charlie convinced Hurley to take flight 316. That’s why he has a guitar case. (Lostpedia)
  • Claire died in the explosion, it’s her ‘Island ghost’ self that people have been seeing since. (Lostpedia)What are your theories? Any ideas about what happened to Aaron, why Sayid was in custody, or how Lupitus has been able to fly commercial jets without being abducted and questioned by Widmore?
  • Americans Would Be Lucky to Mimic 1990s Japan

    It’s time to stop debating whether the U.S. is becoming Japan.

    The U.S. already is Japan with near-zero interest rates, a broken financial system and politicians who don’t seem to realize the severity of the economy’s plight. The only question is whether the U.S. will be so lucky.

    Lucky? Japan? Well, yes. For all its rigidities and idiosyncrasies, Asia’s biggest economy never fully collapsed. It never got near a depression, nor did deflation get out of control the way many analysts predicted following the implosion of the 1980s bubble economy. […]

    Even so, the U.S. can only wish that its own “lost decade” would go as smoothly as Japan’s. It’s highly doubtful that the U.S.’s experience would be as stable as Japan’s.

    Households in Japan were sitting on trillions of dollars of savings; Americans aren’t. Japan began its crisis as a creditor nation; the U.S. is a decidedly debtor nation. Japan doesn’t rely heavily on foreign capital to finance imbalances; the U.S., with its gaping current-account deficit, does.

    Global growth also softened Japan’s slide. In the late 1990s, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was referring to the U.S. as an “oasis of prosperity” during Asia’s crisis. Today, there’s no such source of growth as the biggest economies fall. Exports won’t bail the U.S. out the way they did Japan.

    Full Story: Bloomberg

    (via Twitter, I think – can’t remember who)

    LOST and linearity

    It wasn’t until last week’s episode that I figured out what’s been bugging me about this season thus far: it’s too linear.

    Sure, there’s the time flashes that have helped us explore the island a little bit. But for the most part, the plot has been moving in a single forward motion. Contrast this with last season: we knew the “Oceanic 6” got off the island – but we didn’t know at first who the Oceanic 6 were. And until the very last episode, we didn’t know how they got off. We also didn’t know what happened to everyone else on the island. There created two narratives: the events on the Island, and the non-linear “flash forwards” about the Oceanic 6.

    Having part of the story already laid out and filling in the puzzle pieces non-linearly is one of LOST’s most compelling storytelling devices. We wanted to know what Kate did. How Locke ended up in a wheelchair. Why each character was in Sydney. (I still want to know if there’s more to Sawyer’s background than we know about.)

    Weirdly enough, this season we were for the first time being given more answers than questions. And it wasn’t nearly as exciting. Now we have some more puzzle pieces to fill in: How did Ben get beat up? Is Penny ok? Why was Sayid in custody? Why did Hurley decide to come along? Hopefully we’ll also start to see some of Daniel, Ben, Widmore, Richard, and Miles’s stories explored to create more tension.

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