Susan Treister’s insanely detailed art piece A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security catalogues 150 science fiction killing devices spanning almost 300 years. Her timeline covers crysknives, lightsabers, proton packs, and everything in between.
From Richard Grayson’s catalogue essay published by Annely Juda Fine Art:
In A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. These include the ‘Raytron Apparatus’, a form of aerial surveillance, which was described in ‘Beyond the Stars’ by Ray Cummings in 1928, or the ‘Control Helmet’, from ‘Easy Money’ by Edward Hamilton in 1934. The timeline starts in 1726 with the ‘Knowledge Engine’ in Gulliver’s travels and carries on up to the present day. It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic to manifest themselves into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack of Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.
Along with your average scifi armaments, Treister also includes such security and defense innovations as the Invisible Man’s invisibility and Orwellian Doublethink. A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security can be seen at the Documentalist exhibit at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery until March 28.
[via Ensemble and The Journal]
<img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/io9/2010/03/s13" width="397" height="709" /
During the last two days we have had something we haven’t seen in a while. No, I am not talking about highs near 60F…although that is true. What we have had is a very large diurnal (daily) range of temperature. Look at the plot above at Sea Tac, today the high was 59 with a low of 39F, a 20F temperature range….far greater than we have had since December. Many locations got colder than that and frost graced many a car this am.
Why so large a range? Most important have been clear skies and our strengthening sun. You feel the warmth? Remember the sun right now is as strong as in mid October, with much longer days than two months ago. And the clear skies associated with high pressure aloft allow maximum heating during the day and maximum cooling at night as the earth radiates infrared energy to space.
But why no clouds and fog…which often occur in midwinter? The secret is that we have a modest east-west pressure difference (higher pressure to the east), which is producing easterly flow across and down the western Cascade slopes. Such downslope air produces drying and warming. Check out the latest profiler data from north Seattle…you can see the easterly flow.
But too much easterly flow would cause warming due to compression and keep our temperatures up at night. But fortunately for diurnal temperature range lovers the easterly flow is strong enough to keep us clear, but not strong enough to cause too much warming.
These conditions will continue through the weekend…warm enough for tee shirts during the day, but cold enough for frost in the morning at many locations.
Today’s Contest: WHO HAS THE LARGEST DIURNAL RANGE?
PSS: There is an article in the Seattle Times today (Saturday) on the early spring.
iPhone developer Jonathan “Schwa” Wight offers a great little trick for creating pixel perfect glassy buttons: using the unofficial UIGlassButton class in the simulator to build your art. In his code paste, he shows how to build a button and render it to a PNG, which you can then save to your desktop.
It’s a great little trick, and one worth adding to your development arsenal. Be aware that UIGlassButton is a private class, and one that has long since been relegated away from the official SDK development path. Although it continues to work on the Simulator, it’s not for use on the iPhone itself or in App Store projects.
Continue reading on to find the code. Don’t forget to substitute your own user folder into the code (in my case, “ericasadun”) for Jonathan’s (“schwa”).
// Code to create a "Glass" button and render it to a png on your desktop.
// Run this from the SIMULATOR and change my username to yours.
// Update: This uses a private iPhone SDK. Do not use this code in your shipping app.
// Use it merely to generate the PNG file for you to use in a fake button.
Class theClass = NSClassFromString(@"UIGlassButton");
UIButton *theButton = [[[theClass alloc] initWithFrame:
CGRectMake(10, 10, 120, 44)] autorelease];
[theButton setValue:[UIColor colorWithHue:0.267
saturation:1.000 brightness:0.667 alpha:1.000]
forKey:@"tintColor"];
[self.view addSubview:theButton];
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(theButton.frame.size);
CGContextRef theContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
[theButton.layer renderInContext:theContext];
UIImage *theImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
NSData *theData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(theImage);
[theData writeToFile:@"/Users/schwa/Desktop/test.png" atomically:NO];
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND–According to a study released Monday by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, 4.2 billion people–a full 70 percent of the planet’s inhabitants–could use an all-star benefit concert.
Nice, NPR’s Radiolab did a piece featuring an excerpt from the famous Voyager Golden Record that was placed aboard 1977’s twin Voyager Space Probes. Alongside some simple instructions showing how to construct a device to play it, the record contained recordings of greetings in 50 languages, music, human heartbeats, and a lot more. The link is to an extremely sweet feature on Morning Edition about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan falling in love during the process of creating the record for NASA. There’s video and an excerpt there too.
I was very moved by the story of how Carl and Ann fell in love, especially at the end where you find her brain waves were recorded while she meditated on being in love, and sent along on the Golden Record. I’ve always been totally in awe of Carl Sagan, since I was a small child in Dallas watching COSMOS as a kid on our local PBS station. He was my first exposure to any kind of popularizing of science and he became the very symbol of that curiosity and wonder and awe that only science can bring to you. He and maybe Stephen Jay Gould, with Neil deGrasse Tyson a good recent example, set the standard for bringing science to the layman. And of course then there are the rest of his many achievements, including a killer movie.
So I will always hold memories of him dearly, what an awesome guy.
Click here to read the story.
Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc.
If you’re in the San Antonio, Texas area, you’ve got a chance to catch some lectures from a gang of futurists, critics, and science fiction writers during this spring’s Reality Hackers series at Trinity University.
Students created this awesome lecture series trailer. I’m not sure how I got lucky enough to be included alongside R.U. Sirius and Ekaterina Sedia, but I’m not complaining! There’s a complete schedule of the lectures here, and all lectures are free and open to the public. The first lecture is this Thursday night, from awesome cultural critic Steven Shaviro. He’ll be talking about recent movie Gamer and “the control society.”
Susan Treister’s insanely detailed art piece A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security catalogues 150 science fiction killing devices spanning almost 300 years. Her timeline covers crysknives, lightsabers, proton packs, and everything in between.
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