Innovation

I can’t sleep. So this post will probably just make you crinkle your nose, particularly if you’re sober. No worries.

This is a chapter of a book, Sound Unbound, edited by DJ Spooky (who besides being a most interesting musician working with the broadest imaginable range of artists, majored in French lit and philo and is a long-time friend of Shepard Fairey). I recommend that you read the chapter; don’t be a-skeerd of it even though it looks dense. That just means you’ll get through more coolness in less time.

The essay’s like a series of TED talks on speed for people who are in to technology and art and architecture and geography and music and film and the all-consuming fastness of the speed of life in which all of these things articulate … it pulls together a plethora of things, people, and ideas I’m interested in at absolute warp speed.

But that’s the point. He’s sampling history and books and philosophers and programmer-speak and art exhibits. He’s filtering them, finding the patterns, trying to decipher a system that makes sense in his (and, since I know who’s reading this, it’s safe to say our) world. And the common denominator for him is the archive as the dominant form. The web as an archive, his music collection as archive, ftp having the potential to be the ultimate communication tool so far.

He tells a story of how a clock maker invented the modern system of latitute (as in longitude and latitude), and the moral of the story is that time is the archival system for the measurement (and thus understanding) of space, and that time is also the archival system for the measurement (and thus the understanding) of music (rhythm). Presence and absence of material. Well … I take it back. It may not have a moral. That’s okay, though. It gets me worked up, and that’s about all anyone can ask for from ideas.

Or how i stopped worrying and learned to love greenhouse gas…

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/02/klimatic-base-1-airwater-machine-pulls-drinking-water-from-the-a/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/dean-kamen-aims-to-clean-water-generate-electricity-with-slings/

It constantly amazes me how many problems we could solve if we threw some bucks to underfunded technologies instead of bridges to nowhere.

This is so cool. The Eye-Fi photo card looks like an ordinary memory card for your digi camera, but it stamps your pictures when you take them and wirelessly uploads the time stamp, geotag, and picture to your computer when you get home via wi-fi.

The first is about a car that is able to drive itself. Pretty amazing, although it requires a big ass car to cart all of the shit around…

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1374481183/bctid1377895007
The second is very important information for all of you future farmers out there…

http://www.cdc.gov/nasd/docs/d001601-d001700/d001695/d001695.pdf