A cadre of adventuring entrepreneurs are making incremental moves, in earnest, to go prospecting in the asteroid belt (DE/EN). Although I am not sure of the details, whether the project will live up to romanticized notions from science-fiction and space opera with heroes and villains and high risk—or if the risks of this melodrama only pertains to business and investor losses and there’s only the tremolo-bravery of disposable robots and swarms of tug boats and pick-axes.
Either way, such a vision and ambition is something exciting and sure to have broader repercussions, like the cadre promises, of not only material wealth and resources and also tutoring (remediating) mankind in space exploration, and I cannot fully understand some of the jadedness and cynicism that’s being cast towards this enterprise—well, I understand some of the suspicion given the rank privilege that corporations enjoy and pulling down shooting-stars should not give us license to be more wasteful and less environmentally-conscience, especially considering how dirty, invasive and creeping terrestrial mining operations are. Efficiency won’t be necessarily discredited either, just because rare-earth and trace metals and alloys are increasingly precious components of current electronics and material manufacturing might become common-place; technology will still advance and probably in surprising ways. This research and exploration may not only succeed in overcoming the pettier expense barriers and lead to bolder experimentation and engineering developments, mining asteroids, while possibly not unearthing some alien mutagenic virus or uncovering the artifacts of an ancient civilization (perhaps we are the claim-jumpers) or finding unexpected residents, it will at least force us to think about the possibility of such wondrous and exotic things and give us a bit of a foothold beyond this poor abused and hollowed-out world.
Thursday 26 April 2012
mission midas or bergwerk im all
catagories: ๐ก, ๐ญ, environment, transportation
Tuesday 24 April 2012
presto-chango or mission abolished
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , foreign policy, revolution
Monday 23 April 2012
synaxarion or by george!
Though Germany is one of the few places not wholly under the patronage of Saint George and Germany has another event to mark on this day—the anniversary of the enactment of the Reinheitsgebot, the Saint Day has universal recognition and usually falls (the feast can be preempted by Easter) on a strange amalgam of celebrations that are as varied and involved as his cult and veneration. Aside from beer, literature is also synthetically celebrated on this day, due to it being the anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’ death and the anniversary of both William Shakespeare’s birth and death (though this coincidence is a bit contrived because of subsequent calendar reforms)—books are a traditional St. George’s Day gift.
Sunday 22 April 2012
visa visum
The careless rhetoric of political campaigns can certainly re-phrase backwards proposals as something benign. The European Union is a striving towards perfection through integration and cooperation, and while though it may still have hard battles ahead of it (exacerbated by the economic climate and political scapegoating), one should approach the subject of closing boarders with extra caution. To have reinvented an entire continent of some four-hundred million people as an entity with no internal border control is a hallmark of the EU, extended even to more people than use the euro. Citizens of Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein also enjoy this privilege, though the Irish and the Anglo-Saxons did not fully agree to the terms of the treaty and still exercise elements of border controls with the rest of the EU.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฑ๐ฎ, foreign policy, labour, transportation
triangle man
In a follow-up interview, after adding his voice to the chorus of educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, futurists, writers and artists expressing grave concern over the openness and continued utility of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee (DE/EN), who made the internet accessible though his perseverance and invention of hypertext mark-up language, made a very eloquent remark that should be all rights be the coup de grรขce and last word to the bullies of the world.
Berners-Lee simply said that the internet is bigger than the entertainment industry, bigger than record labels and movie studios. The potential for fostering creativity and discovery and the threat to this freedom of congress is much more significant than the grossly magnified grievances of a few thuggish companies, who have the backing of politicians and inflated claims of damages. In fact, although apparently we’d be better off believing the charm-offensive that equates copyright integrity to the last bastions against all the nightmarish ills of the world, the scale of economy of the entertainment industry is relatively tiny and could be handily absorbed (though I doubt the situation would be improved) by anyone of the technological giants that has built empires of connectivity. We have been put at the mercy of bullies in a lot of other ways as—and though it’s an obvious statement, we’d do better not to forget again: freedom, honesty, integrity are bigger than any illusory security; peace and unity are bigger than any one nation’s peccadilloes or aspirations; not demonizing others is bigger than spreading one’s personal gospel; conserving nature is bigger than profits (though for the last two, forces are ardently at work with discrediting keeping matters in perspective). Understanding scale and priority is something that we are all capable of at first glance, and despite efforts to skew and burden our feelings, I think, with a gentle reminder, we’re able to see through that deception as well.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก, environment, networking and blogging, philosophy, Wikipedia