16th Apr 2013✧22:5411 notes

"

When Samuel Morse established the first commercial telegraph, in 1844, he dramatically changed our expectations about the pace of life. One of the first telegraph messages came from that year’s Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, where the delegates had picked Senator Silas Wright as their vice presidential nominee. The president of the convention telegraphed Wright in Washington, D.C., to see if he would accept. Wright immediately wired back: No. Incredulous that a message could fly almost instantly down a wire, the delegates adjourned and sent a flesh-and-blood committee by train to confirm Wright’s response—which was, of course, the same. From such beginnings came today’s high-speed, networked society.

Less famously but no less significantly, the telegraph also transformed the way we think about the pace of our inner life. Morse’s invention debuted just as researchers were starting to make sense of the nervous system, and telegraph wires were an inspiring model of how nerves might work. After all, nerves and telegraph wires were both long strands, and they both used electricity to transmit signals.

"

~   

Carl Zimmer on measuring the speed of thought.

Technology has long shaped our metaphors for the mind.

(via explore-blog)

(via explore-blog)

8th Feb 2013✧09:16103 notes
explore-blog: The 2013 submarine cable map of the world, reminding us of the striking physicality of the internet. 
5th Feb 2013✧10:00164 notes
explore-blog: The 2013 submarine cable map of the world, reminding us of the striking physicality of the internet. 
4th Feb 2013✧23:48164 notes

"I think human and computer intelligence will be mixed together just as it is now. A war between a group that used the latest technology and a group of humans who eschewed modern technology would be a very short war."

~   Ray Kurzweil (via Las Vegas Sun News)

(via twicr)

30th Jan 2013✧16:5217 notes
Je viens de là
4th Aug 2010✧01:522 notes

"Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

~   The Nine Billion Names of God
4th Aug 2010✧01:32

smell of napalm

by  Apocalypse Now

1 plays
4th Aug 2010✧00:38

Slow down

…represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fast-speed information cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload.

28th Jul 2010✧21:58
le jardin
28th Jul 2010✧21:51
Opaque  by  andbamnan