Entries Tagged 'technology' ↓

I think about technology all the time. I think about how much it has taken over every facet of my life in a short period of time and I now try to spend weekends offline away from screens. I think about how I am part of the first digital test generation who grew up with computers in their home.

When I was about twelve I convinced my Mother to get the first Atari 400. My Father thought it was a fad. Perhaps he was right after thirty years, as technology has finally become a fashion accessory.

My friends all got them too and before long we were obsessed with gaming and programming. We would spend hours, even days locked away in suburban basements and rec-rooms staring at screens. We would trade the latest software. Some kids became experts at piracy in their curtain closed bedrooms. All piracy was offline. This was at the advent of 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers that you attached to your phone. This got you to an online bulletin board that was only text. The computers had no drives built into them. There were clunky tape drives or disc drives for storage.

I look back at this time and think about how seduced we all were. I also realize how patient we were. I’ve gone back to these computers and games and discovered how incredibly tedious they were; so brutally un-adaptive compared to now.

I wonder if there is now a certain saturation point or a distinctive timeframe where you eventually become exhausted of a screen. Is this point part of your advancing age or is it finite. Perhaps after 10,0000 hours of staring at a screen in your life, it becomes confining. If you conservatively looked a screen for an average of 4 hours a day over thirty years, it would be something approaching 5 years of your life.

When you are twelve you do not think about the future. You do not think about results and implications. You don’t think about reality all that much. Recently I cannot get my head around the idea of how commonplace digital technology has become over security. How kids have no sense of their own privacy and enjoy putting their lives online for the sake of marketers and corporations. They don’t see the corporations because they are so influenced by their peers. Their comfort zone is the screen.

The dark side of pervasive computing is that you don’t see where your data is going. You don’t think about it like when you were twelve. It’s perfect collectivism. Facebook is an awesome conformist tool. Any Fascist regime or Dictatorship from history would have loved Facebook as long as they had the keys to the backdoor.

Cracks in the walls of cyber-security mostly stem from social engineering or humans who give out information recklessly. If you are twenty-five and working for a major corporation or a bank is your default to share everything or do you have to be reminded to not give out secret knowledge? A curious problem is coming to a head. We have lost all respect for information. It’s our downfall. We are all eternally twelve.

- X.F. Pine

With all recent oil panic and near nuclear meltdowns I decided to venture out to the mythical site of Wardenclyffe in Shoreham, NY (Long Island). This was the site of Nikola Tesla’s controversial “Magnifying” tower which was first designed to send radio information across the Atlantic in 1901.

In Tesla’s mind it was also capable of transmitting energy without wires. If you are unfamiliar with Tesla you must read this as a premier to get the whole picture. He conceived AC current, radio controlled robotics, cell phones, and a plethora of influential inventions (+700 patents) which set the foundations of the 20th century mad sciences.

Construction on the extensive laboratory and tower began in 1901 to become a part of Tesla’s Global System with J.P. Morgan as a primary backer. Also in 1901 Marconi successfully transmitted a radio signal across the Atlantic by using patents Tesla had invented although Tesla received no credit until after his death.

According to this In 1904 NY Times article, Tesla received the land for free to help develop a wireless radio resort community and had plans of putting similar towers in population areas. He claimed that the magnifying transmitter would be able to emit a wave complex of 10 million horsepower.

By 1903 the tower stood 187 feet high and was visible from New Haven, Connecticut across the sound. There were accounts that year of the tower briefly being turned on and bolts lighting up the night sky from the top of the tower. People noticed electrical sparks from their feet to the ground when they walked nearby. There are tanks in the main building which were reportedly used as massive batteries.

As the ambitious prototype neared completion Morgan backed out of the funding. Historians speculate that this was due to Tesla’s philosophy of giving electricity away for free and there was no way to “put a meter” on what Tesla had planned.

“Homes, farms, offices, factories, villages, libraries, museums, street lights, etc., could all be powered wireless and produce brilliant white light 24 hours a day. Motor energy for any industrial applications, transportation, tractors, trucks, trains, boats, automobiles, air ships or planes could be powered freely-anywhere on the planet from a single Magnifying Transmitter.”

Without Morgan the entire laboratory was in jeopardy. Tesla secretly mortgaged off the property to the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria to cover debts of $20,000 dollars. By 1917 they had the tower blown up for scrap. The site changed hands a few times over the years.

What remains is very perplexing and mysterious. The site was taken over by AGFA in the 1960s and they proceeded to poison the site with photo chemical toxins. It is now posted as restricted Superfund site although it was supposedly cleaned up by 1993. I also discovered it is currently for sale for $1.65 million dollars “as is”. The complex has 14 buildings on 15 acres. The original low brick building with the ornate smokestack which was designed by Stanford White is partially still there. The site of the huge tower is a strange octagon shape which is fabled to have honeycombs of tunnels and dormant spiral staircases beneath. Depressing rusted barbed wire surrounds everything.

As I walked around the lonely perimeter I was struck by the concept that this is where the 20th century branched off in the wrong direction. We’ve built a superstructure on dwindling commodities that we are fatally dependent upon from food distribution to heating our homes. Telsa’s execution may have been premature, but the concept of free energy transmission is profound given our current global circumstances. To think that this lost dream collapsed over a century ago is disturbing. The deeper you look into it the more you realize that Tesla knew things we still cannot comprehend. To go forward you must look back. The greatest scientific achievements are giant leaps of faith.

-XFP

Within the freight elevator, the old Mr. Pointe spends a day’s eternity. Through the wire mesh at the bottom of the shaft a maintenance man hovers over a dark wheel. Spinning ratchets and dull greased pulleys. In Mr. Pointe’s cab are the necessary items of faith. There are old Christmas lights tangled and burned beyond repair. A toy mouse with a rusty grin is affixed to a switchbox. The cab’s color is sky blue, lit by a single raw bulb. Outside the cage the subsequent dark shafts appear endless. Mt. Pointe has no teeth. His neck seems to have been broken once. There is a religious calendar with a painting of wise men in a desert. There are certain exact dates circled in red meticulously. A plastic rose is woven through the links of the mesh. A ripped picture of a beautiful young woman by the sea is taped to a small panel. The girl is photogenic but very shy. Long dark hair covers her eyes. A brown newspaper clipping without a headline flips down only secured by a piece of tape at the bottom now. The words are faded and gone. The story was about Mr. Pointe’s friends from long ago who won all that money. Mr. Pointe believes in luck. A buzzer blares from the top of the shaft and Mr. Pointe secures the stretching cab gate and bolts it down. As the ascent begins, Mr. Pointe yells to the floors above. He complains about their lateness. A camera blinks a blue eye from the far corner of the cab. It’s cool lens is docile and thoughtless, as the cab ascends up through the abysmal space.

X. F. Pine

Just dug this up. I started getting the sircam virus in my email way back in 2001. For people who do not know the mechanisms of the virus look here. It would copy information from the “my documents” folder on any Windows 98 os machine, and send it randomly to people within that person’s outlook address book. It would mask the file, with a corrupted name, and include this message. (Hi! How are you? This is the file with the information that you ask for See you later. Thanks).

When I pulled the corrupt document down on a mac to examine it, (Never try and do this on a PC running Windows) changed the extension to a .doc, and opened in MS Word as a unformatted text file I got the following messages within hundreds of pages of noise.

There is absolutely no pattern as these messages were sent without the owner’s knowledge and were organized and distributed by a unthinking virus. I started enjoying the complete randomness of the messages after a while. I have excerpted them, and do not know any of the owners.

1. This fragment appeared to be some kind of document about dentistry in Spanish. It was translated (loosely) by babelfish from Spanish.

ERUPTION. – It is the movement from the weaves that surround it until the buccal cavity, is vertical, begins within the bone to maxilar. It initiates – when already the crown of the tooth has formed, when it has matured the enamel and when formaciÛn of raÌz begins. It is classified: – preclÌnica ErupciÛn: it is the heave of the tooth within the bone to maxilar. – clÌnica ErupciÛn: it is the heave of the tooth in the buccal cavity. The speed of the heave depends on the resistance of the weaves that surround to the tooth, when clÌnica phase arrives at wing, no longer is it and its movement is but r·pido and returns to be slow when there is contact with the antagonist. Active ErupciÛn: heave in the clÌnica phase and does not finish when it finds the antagonist. Within the preclÌnica phase there is a heave within the bone to maxilar towards the buccal cavity, this movement finds resistance in the weaves that surround the tooth. In the clÌnica phase there is another heave that receives the name of erupciÛn activates Èste movement initiates since part of the tooth in the buccal cavity is seen until it finds his antagonistic

2. Cannot figure out what language this is. Turkish perhaps. It appears to be about photography.

B a g i a n F o t o – F o t o i l u s t r a s i y a n g t u r u n k e B a g . D e s a i n d i h a r a p k a n f o t o f i n a l y a n g s u d a h d i s e p a k a t i d e n g a n R e d p e l s e t i a p r u b r i k . S e h i n g g a t i d a k a d a p e r u b a h a n – p e r u b a h a n d i t e n g a h j a l a n . – F o t o s u a s a n a u n t u k i s i r u b r i k h e n d a k n y a b e r i m a g e s i z e m i n i m a l b e r u k u r a n 1 4 X 1 0 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i m i n i m a l 1 5 0 . U n t u k f o t o l e a d F O R U T , W a w a n c a r a , F O K U S , P r o f i l , h e n d a k n y a l e b i h b e s a r d a r i u k u r a n t e r s e b u t ( k i r a – k i r a m i n i m a l s e l e b a r 2 2 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i 2 0 0 ) . U n t u k k o l o m a t a u l o g o d a p a t m e n y e s u a i k a n ( b i s a b e r d i s k u s i t e r l e b i h d a h u l u a t a u k i r a – k i r a m i n i m a l l e b a r 5 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i m i n i m a l 1 5 0 ) . – F o t o u n t u k C o v e r b e r i m a g e s i z e m i n i m a l l e b a r 2 2 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i s e k i t a r 3 0 0 .

3. Construction Materials airlifted via helicopter?
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