Futurism in Rear View

Spacesuit Still Alive, Giving Weak Signal
The cats in the Space Station are not dulled floating in orbit. It occurred to them to stuff clothes into an old space suit, attach a ham radio, set the mess off into space. Strangely it evokes a 2001 [1969] moment. Dave, I am concerned about the mission. ABC News. Anyway. It has turned now into a great event for the real true futurists: Hammers. Follow it. Use links below
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/articles/BauerSuitsat/index.php
http://www.suitsat.org/
http://www.suitsat.org/index.html

Biomass: Hope and Hype - Technology Review
National Resources Defense Council and researchers at Dartmouth and Princeton project that by 2050, in part through harvesting both protein and cellulose from corn and switchgrass, existing agricultural land could both supply our food needs and replace. But, the supermarket systems and the farming infrastructure are not prepared. Or primed to prepare. From Technology Review.

Biotech's Sparse Harvest - New York Times
Frankenfood is a damn strange story. With little public scrutiny, but with plenty of backdoor political chicanery, the doctored tomatos and corns got out of the lab and onto the farm. But nothing went right. Most especially, the Monsanto coffers did not fill. Euro folks with a variation on the American political system waved the reddish flag. From New York Times.

Reviewed: 'World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men'
It’s beyond pretty spooky what scientists under the influence of delusions of insight are capable of. Insight and omnipotence seem to be the worst combo. The psychological scientists at work in North Korea about the time that I was born were working under suc a cloud of omnipotence. They tortured captured Americans with a vengeance. No pictures I have seen coming out of Abu Grave lead me to think the US social scientist if in the thrall of omnipotence is capable of any much different. After Korea the CIA got into LSD as a means to make the world a lab. New York Times Book Review.



Restoring an Icon of Optimism - New York Times
Over the years various new roles were suggested for the Atomium that was built for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, including a casino and a museum dedicated to the Belgian cartoon character Tintin. Before the restoration, the feeling say some who crawled the Atomium was of living in a Russian submarine. You who have purchased Russian Army Navy Ware know what I am talking about.


WWTPS?
Found Shroud in Thomas Pynchon's V. Well, will helmsman on!

SHOCK was a marvelous manikin. It had the same build as SHROUD but its flesh was molded of foam vinyl, its skin vinyl plastisol, its hair a wig, its eyes cosmetic-plastisol, its teeth (for which, in fact, Eigenvalue had acted as subcontractor) the same kind of dentures worn today by 10 per cent of the American population, most of them respectable.

Meanwhile found discussions on web of "Pynchon’s neo-luddite dislike of machines and his symbolic realizations of men becoming machines.

http://inside.fdu.edu/fdupress/05112101review.html

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/v/anthresearch.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_lineland.html

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cjas/sontag.html