Belated HI351 Lego Stuff

As requested:

Lego 2001: A Space Odyssey


Lego Steam Punk


Lego Futurama


Hope you all did well on your exams!

Dwelling in Possibilities

I'm not sure how many people are in Professor Schulmann's HI365, but if you are you'll recognize this. Mark Edmundson's article "Dwelling in Possibilities" I think does a good job of highlighting some of the themes from this course in the context of how students of our generation (this article was posted on this site 14 March, 2008) interact with the changing technology. He talks about the computer sublime, consumerism, and the incessant need for information in the age of the Internet. Regardless, its a really interesting read from the point of view of a professor facing a college full of Crackberry-addicted internet jockeys.

Dwelling in Possibilities: Our students' spectacular hunger for life makes them radically vulnerable

Soyuz Superteam

So, I'm a dork who just became ridiculously excited. I was wikipediaing ( if people can say googling) around and I found something pretty cool. "Soyuz" as in the Apollo-Soyuz project and as in the first C in CCCP (Soyuz means union in Russian) is actually the name of a group of Russian superheroes. Each character is based off of a figure from Russian mythology. These characters were first created by John Ostrander and, interestingly, were first introduced in the pages of the Firestorm comic, who was the creation of a nuclear accident and who had the ability to rearrange the atomic structure of matter.

Here's a link to the Soyuz wikipedia entry.

Geek Flowchart

So as I was procrastinating in studying for my exams, I was surfing the 'internets and came across a link to a flowchart that describes the evolution of a geek. Basically it made me happy and I felt like some other people might enjoy similarly procrastinating. Good luck to everyone, by the way. Especially to those of us who excel in the art of not studying until the last minute.

[click to view full image in new window]

Cape Wind

This is the website for the Cape Wind project going on. It's been coming for a long time, with a fight. Residents of the Cape don't want a wind farm off in their view. They even have bumper stickers protesting it...usually found on their enormous SUV's. They are definitely an example of technological sublime. There is a part of NY where wind turbines border a few miles of road and its hard not to be in awe of them.

Here's some video footage of a wind turbine. One of people's problems with them is that they believe the turbines will create a lot of noise. But as you can see....we make more noise than the turbines.

brain scans reveal our cognitive response to androids

Culture of Comic Books

I'm doing some research for another class on Popular Culture during the Great Depression by focusing on comic books, movies, and radio. It seemed like a lot of people were interested in the book Men of Tomorrow that was posted earlier in the semester. I found another book that deals with comic books and the rise of youth culture in America. It's called Comic Book Nation and if anyone is interested, you can find it here.