It’s interesting to consider the collective, aggregated mass-density of all of our associated technological paraphernalia, our Technosphere. The aggregated totality of all our buildings, vehicles, dwellings, cities, the flotsam and jetsam of commerce and industry, our possessions and everything we throw away: it all has an estimated mass of 30 trillion tons. More information after […]
Category: culture
Miami Beach: Lost Souls and Sandy Shoals
A very Cuban or otherwise South-American domain. It was summertime in the long stretch of Art Deco and sand-covered concrete, between the secure private condominiums and the cheap or garishly upmarket neon-lit beachside hotels and restaurants which gradually fade in a Westerly direction to apartments and strange villas housing mysterious perversions, under the sluggish feet […]
This film confirms a long-standing suspicion of mine that a “Cormac” is in fact the metric by which bleakness and the narrative representation of evil is measured. Cormac McCarthy’s script sparkles with philosophical rumination and psychological observation while weaving a tragic path through the world of drug-smuggling and its associated terrors. The film is finely […]
I wonder sometimes if all this digital media and virtual space we share is really something other than what it seems. We perceive a rich tapestry of choice and self-expression, a veritable cornucopia of tittilation, education and ideological assertion. It may actually be much simpler at base, that we are all following simple rules in […]
The Perils of Paywalls
One of the most annoying things I have come across online is the tendency for some scientific and academic journals to percolate their content through paywalls. When this is done with journalistic news content, it is usually not difficult to find equivalent content freely available elsewhere. When this is done with academic reference or technical […]
Digital television was progressively rolled out over a period of several years. I find it ironic that although I now have several dozen channels to choose from I still remain fairly exclusively interested in the content of about four or five non-commercial channels. I find myself for the most part irritated, distracted and annoyed […]
I recently saw the biopic “Notorious” which portrays the life of rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. “The Notorious B.I.G.“). I have always been a little indifferent to rap and rap-culture but it was interesting to discover one interpretation of what happened in a famous conflict between rapper Tupac Shakur and “Biggie” the final result of which […]