/*Random*\____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
For your information, this is where I drop off anything I might find
remotely interesting, BLOG-stylish, therefore the name RANDOM:
/10.12.2005\________
With all respect due, I haven't been so emotionally .. grasped by a painting
in a few months:
http://www.halhigdon.com/art/terror.htm
I applaud the artist for portraying this dramatic event in such a ..uhm,
appropriate style. I particularly like the "KRYK!"
/20.08.2005\________
Heey! Looking for the service manual for a Casio AZ-1? If you want one,
email me! I finally managed to dig it up from under a rock and thought I'd
share it with other unlucky owners of the AZ-1....
/13.07.2004\________
Watch this animation, one of the funniest (and sadly also most truthful)
jokes on the U.S. election [here]
Favorite quote of the day:
Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred
years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.
(J.W. Goethe, 1817, Principles of Natural Science)
/04.07.2004\________
Wicked!
Images from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft as it stops by Saturn and it's
moons is free on NASA's site. These images are crazy: [1,
2, 3,
4, 5,
6, 7]
The planet's just fucking hanging there.. wow. And dude, what's with the
rings!? Why can't earth have something that cool!
/27.06.2004\________
Blog-stylish! Yeah right, I hear you say. Well, although the word
blog, or "weblog" does insinuate something in the vincinity of
regular updates, I did call it random didn't I, random updates that is.
Anyway, here's something. Do not expect regular updates, you'll probably
be disappointed. (I'll try my best though)
I have seen the future of cars, and it looks like this:
It's called "Aura", of course it's a conceptcar (all good cars
are), and it's created by designer Ayline Koning, who won the prestigious
(?) "Pilkington Automotive Best Overall Design Award". Hoorah!
Although you can't see it very well on these images, it's very asymmetrical.
Image of creator and model here:
Slightly bladerunner yes? Now let's hope it turns out to be an electric
car, as i hate those fossil-fuel guzzlers... [LINK]
Reasons to be very worried about global warming are building up as even
the head of Shell, one of the world's leading oil companies, admits in an
interview that the threat of climate change makes him "really very
worried for the planet". On the subject of "sequestration",
which is a technique for capturing carbon dioxide and pumping it underground,
thus keeping it out of the atmosphere (which has been tried out by Norwegian
company Statoil for some years now) he even said: "Sequestration is
difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope
for the world", a very harsh statement indeed, coming from people who
usually deny the existence of man-caused global warming. The full interview
with Ron Oxburgh, head of Shell, can be found [here].
Prospects for the world in 2050, if we continue accelerating oil, coal and
gas-use as we do, can be found [here].
My option would be to spend the entire oil-fund in Norway, which presently
amounts to a whopping 845,3 billion NKR, on research into renewable energy
and stopping CO2-emissions. If global warming is anywhere as near as bad
as it sounds, we are sitting on stiiinking blood-money for future generations...
A top-ten list is to come soon...
All right: UPDATE: 19.10.2003
--//Top Eight (In no specific order)\\--
-* Philosophy
-* French
-* Heiner Goebbels: "Eislermaterial" [CD, 2001?] (Actually a CD
with interpretations of the all-th-way-through-commie Hanns Eisler, who
wrote music for Bertolt Brecht also.
Alas, or, perhaps, not so
strange, not as famous as Kurt Weill.)
-* Joakim: "Fantomes" [CD, 2003]
-* MU: "Afro Finger & Gel" [CD, 2003]
-* Arne Næss: "Økologi, samfunn & livsstil" [Book,
1974]
-* FRIEZE [Magazine] (Philosophy + Art + Ramblings Rules. Yeah!)
-* Manuel DeLanda: "A Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History" [Book,
1997]
---
--//Top Ten (In no specific order)\\--
-* Stephen Wolfram's illustrations in "A New Kind of Science"
[Book, 2003]
.* Metallica: "Master Of Puppets" [LP, 1986]
-* Øyvind Ådland: "Konfliktritt" [Book,
2001]
-* Mathematiques Modernes: "Les Visiteurs Du Soir" [LP,
1981]
-* "Irréversible", directed by Gaspar Noé.
[Movie, 2002]
-* Thomas Bangalter: "Irréversible O.S.T." [CD, 2003]
-* Sebastiaan Bremer's Photos/Paintings [Art, 2002]
-* Roy Andersson: Vår tids redsel for alvor [Book, 1995]
-* "The Word", directed by Carl Th. Dreyer [Movie, 1955]
-* Scritti Politti: "Cupid & Psyche" [CD, 1985]
---------------
Vannevar Bush was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.
In the July 1945 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, he published a popular
science article entitled "As We May Think." Bush discusses a device
called a "memex", a sort of workstation with vast optical storage
and mechanical information retrieval using associative indexing and "trails".
The article is of interest today not only because he happened to get pretty
close to how the future finally turned out, but also for the fresh perspective
from a time before interactivity itself had been invented. Most interesting
is perhaps the fact that the utopian "memex" never really has
been fullfilled by the internet either, even though what he's describing
bears a very close resemblance to the WWW as we know it. The article can
be found HERE.
"Good pop is heard obliquely; it offers unexpected versions of feelings
we never knew we had. What's good' here usually is described by its straight
musical elements (a haunting tune, etc.), but what matters is a tone of
voice: suddenly there's this stranger, involved in a different conversation
altogether, talking about you. "
-Simon Frith, Music For Pleasure
"Slik går livet tapt og blir til intet. Automatiseringen fortærer
tingene, klær, møbler, kvinnen og angsten for krigen (...)
Men nettopp for å kunne gi oss livsfølelsen tilbake, for at
vi igjen skal kunne føle tingene, for igjen å gjøre
stenen til sten, eksisterer det som kalles kunst. Kunstens mål er
å gi oss følelse for tingen, en følelse som er et syn
og ikke bare en gjenkjennelse. Kunstnens virkemiddel er 'underliggjørelsens'
virkemiddel og den vanskeliggjorte forms virkemiddel, som øker vanskeligheten
og varigheten av persepsjonsprosessen..."
-Victor Sjklovskij, om Leo Tolstoj
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending
beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons."
- Michael Shermer, Sept. 2002 Scientific American
