“This is the kind of surveillance that people can actually like. There’s satellites up there not only to spy on us, but to help us lead better lives.” — Marcel Salathé, head of the Digital Epidemiology Lab at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on using satellite photographs to correlate obesity and environment. Oh, fuck […]
Continuity & Persistence
“Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff tent; and Brunaburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fight — all of this came closer to most of us than the drawing room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century.” — Robert Graves, Goodbye To […]
Technical Difficulties
***UPDATE**** Looks like the problem is solved and we’re back in action. Thanks for your patience and for all of the comments. ***** The Running Iron Report site is experiencing technical difficulties. We’re taking a good hard look at the Russians. We’ll post all comments and report back to you as soon as we get the […]
Going Deep And Weird In The Post-Industrial Forest
The following is a guest post by Rob L. Thornton North Idaho is a weird place, and the deeper you go the weirder it gets. I spent a week this past June going deep and weird, the end result of about six months of research into the history of our logging industry back in the early 1900s. I’ve […]
Skynet Is Listening
DON’T LET THIS TECHNOLOGY INTO YOUR HOME! From The Daily Beast: Amazon Alexa allegedly recorded a Portland family’s private conversation and sent the audio to a person in their contact list, KIRO 7 reported. Danielle, who declined to use her last name, said she recently received a call from her husband’s employee, who told her: “Unplug your Alexa devices […]
Repair As Rebellion
“…When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, repair becomes a political act.” — Stuart Ward, repair café volunteer My grandfather made his own electric lawn mower out of a pair of scrap metal blades and a washing machine motor that he pulled out of one of the machines at an apartment complex he owned, and repaired. […]
First Person Shooter, Act Two
For long-term thinkers, the most alarming part of our failure to have the right conversation about the causes of predatory mass killings is that our civil liberties are put at risk. The seductive anodynes put forth by short-term thinkers require that law-abiding citizens sacrifice their own freedoms in a well-meaning but clearly improbable effort to stuff the predator genie back into the bottle.
First Person Shooter, Act One
There can be little doubt that Homo Sapiens is the most dangerous predator the world has ever produced. We have enormous brains capable of building systems to overcome friction, the ability to accomplish complex planning within those systems, and opposable thumbs to assist in the execution of the plan. We have canine teeth and forward-looking eyes. We are the most accomplished killers in the animal kingdom, exceptional when hunting alone, but capable of cooperating in large groups to make a kill.
The Gorgon’s Stare
At the current pace of development and disenfranchisement of the human mind, one might be forgiven for wondering at what point a modern version of the Luddites packs a van full of explosives and attempts to drive it through the gates of Google, or Apple, or Intel.
