Exactly a month after the humongous 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, Japan has finally raised the severity level of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant from level 5 to level 7. That’s the highest there is. I guess they could no longer deny reality. Maybe we can’t either. The decision came after another [...]
Filed under: ecology, technology | Tagged: aftershock, Christchurch, earthquake, Fukushima, Japan, level 7, nuclear power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tsunami | 3 Comments »
Replying to an email from a friend just now, I quoted a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s “Ozymandias,’ written in response to a giant sculpture of a pharoah’s head lying on its side at Luxor, Egypt. Then as I thought of the whole poem, I began to get chills up and down my spine. So [...]
Filed under: ecology, existence, technology | Tagged: Egypt, Japan, Luxor, nuclear disaster, Ozymandias, Shelley | 3 Comments »
I always swore I would never let any surgeon near my face with a scalpel or a laser – thus my age-appropriate weathered look. But I’d known for months that I needed cataract surgery. My right eye had more or less stopped working, so reason finally prevailed: since I was losing vision in that eye [...]
Filed under: existence, technology | Tagged: cataracts, courage, eye surgery, terror | 4 Comments »
My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is as tattered as a book can be and still hold together enough to be called a book. It is the record of a kind of Zen pilgrimage into one of the most remote parts of the Himalayas, undertaken for many reasons, but among them, the hope [...]
Filed under: Buddhism, ecology, existence, technology | Tagged: 'Nature', 'Silent Roar, Himalayas, Mac OS X, Peter Matthiessen, snow leopards, Zen | 5 Comments »
Sometimes there’s no mistaking what’s fake — or the effect it has on our sense of what it is to be human. Here’s a still from Terry Gilliam’s brilliant movie ‘Brazil’ (left) remarkably similar to decidedly unbrilliant Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (right, of course), as she explains how to preserve the plastic way of life, [...]
Filed under: existence, technology | Tagged: Arizona, Brazil, facelifts, immigration, Jan Brewer, Terry Gilliam | Leave a Comment »
Major ooh and coo time on the front page of the NYT this morning: a baby seal robot used as therapy for patients with dementia. It trills and paddles when petted, blinks when the lights go up, opens its eyes at loud noises and yelps when handled roughly or held upside down. Two microprocessors under [...]
Filed under: existence, technology | Tagged: baby seal robot, dementia, therapy | 1 Comment »
The short film screening on the studio wall had me transfixed. It was Claude Lelouch’s ‘C’Etait un Rendezvous,’ shot from the windshield of a Ferrari being driven at absurd speed through a Paris dawn, straight through red lights, shuddering around tight turns, on the constant edge of disaster. It had me terrified and exhilarated at [...]
Filed under: existence, technology | Tagged: Chase Jarvis, Claude Lelouch, death, grappa, Greg Lundgren, immortality, Jeff Rosenthal, Michael Hebb, Ray Kurzweil | 3 Comments »
Why the strange assumption that a brilliant man in one field is brilliant in all fields? Nobody doubts Ray Kurzweil’s technological innovations, like speech recognition technology. But isn’t saving the world on, let’s say, a slightly different level of complexity? Yet on Sunday the NYT devoted most of its Business section to Ray Kurzweil the [...]
Filed under: existence, messianism, technology | Tagged: biotech, genome project, New York Times, Nietzsche, Ray Kurzweil, Singularity University | 5 Comments »
