Sunday 14 September 2014

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY


Photo via Gizmodo.


Andrew Liszewski writes in Gizmodo: The first videos we saw of DARPA's advanced ATLAS robot it was just an infant, learning to walk and balance on its own. During the DARPA Robotics Challenge the humanoid robot handled itself like a capable child. And now almost a year later the folks at MIT are happy to announce that ATLAS has finally reached the level of a lazy, shiftless teenager. Read full article in Gizmodo. E.T.P. 3' And learn about DARPA's plans and future challenges in this article of Humanoïdes (in French). E.T.P 8'

GIF by Zoe Burnett via Rhizome.

Not precisely a very recent article, but these past days I came across the review that Megan Heuer wrote of Jonathan Crary's book: 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep. Megan analyzes the book really well highlighting Crary's most interesting arguments (as some other of his claims sound like something a crazy man with a megaphone would shout in a public square, and I personally think that is not necessary "capitalism" but "industrialism", but well, that's the subject of a different book, ain't it?). Anyway, here's an extract of Megan's article: "Offering a genealogical account of the reformatting of time from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present, 24/7 is relentlessly negative: sleep is the last unleveraged form of human activity and it is violently threatened by a world in which the divisions between night and day, between rest and work, are disappearing due to mutations in the experience of time produced by unceasing digital networks, new metrics for productivity, and ever-expanding forms of control and surveillance . . . As he elaborates the specific textures (or lack thereof) of this new temporality, signaled with the shorthand 24/7, Crary ties the disruption of sleep to an emerging and intensifying set of demands around our productivity as workers." Read full article in Rhizome, and please (I've been reading a lot about this: sleep at least 7 hours every night). E.T.P. 7'

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