The sun is danger and invective. The moon is hope and narcissism. We turn our eyes to the moon, and we see a man staring back; we turn our heads to the sun and are blinded by the daring. The moon soothes. The sun punishes. The moon beams and becomes us. The sun burns and loathes us. We have dipped a human toe in moon dust. We have now, finally, eyed the fiery sun, up close, but through a glass darkly.
If you had access to a 3D printer and could create only one thing out of plastic, from scratch, what would you make? An implantable human ear replacement? A filter for pumping clean water in thirsty third-world nations? What about forming something fun and whimsical like, say, an acoustic guitar? Or, would you take the tunnel of least resistance, and the road of the lowest common human morality, and choose to print a plastic gun for killing people?
Forty-four years ago, a man named Charles Whitman terrorized the University of Texas campus when he climbed up into the school bell tower and went on a sniping rampage, leaving 16 people dead and 31 more people wounded.
Continue reading → Another Shooter, Another Death, at the University of Texas
The midlands are all a twitter over the impending news that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is leaving the Big 12 athletic conference today to join the Big Ten. Now, the clever thing about that move is that the Big Ten currently has eleven member schools in the conference — can you see the “11” hidden in the Big Ten logo below? — and by adding Nebraska, the Big Ten suddenly becomes the new Big 12!
When ZZ Top became a band way back in 1969 — yes, it’s sort of hard to believe ZZ Top have been together for over 40 years! — they were a Texas Blues band. Here is the album cover for one of their first efforts — “One Foot in the Blues” — a funky and cool Blues creation of grinding harmonics and driving rhythms.
Here are the boys as they were:
When you think of the mainstream Blues revival in the 1980’s, that charge was led by the manic Texas Blues guitar of Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Total Information Awareness is now possible thanks to Microsoft and the NSA’s new Texas Cryptology Center in San Antonio, Texas:
“No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San Antonio, Texas,” writes author James Bamford in the Shadow Factory, his third book about the NSA. “Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the 470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome. Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive, the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the world.” …
Continue reading → Microsoft and the NSA and the Texas Cryptology Center
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