links for 2009-04-27

  • "h+ covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing — and will change — human beings in fundamental ways. We will be following developments in areas like NBIC (nano-bio-info-cog), longevity, performance enhancement and self-modification, Virtual Reality, "The Singularity," and other areas that both promise and threaten to radically alter our lives and our view of the world and ourselves.

    More than that, h+ aims to reflect this newest edge culture by featuring creative expressions of humanity on a razor's edge where daily life and science fiction seem to be merging."

  • "Last year, Columbia University added 90,000 new books to its collection. Those were books in the way most people think of them — ink on paper bound between two covers, read at one's own pace, a comforting weight of pages accumulating in the left palm as the reader progresses.

    But during the same interval, Columbia added 380,000 new electronic books, acquiring them at a rate four times that of traditional books."

  • "The domain of architecture has been transformed by developments in interaction research, wearable computing, mobile connectivity, people-centered design, contextual awareness, RFID systems and ubiquitous computing. These technologies alter our understanding of space and change the way we relate to each other. We no longer think of architecture as static and immutable; instead we see it as dynamic, responsive and conversant. Our projects explore some of this territory. "
  • "Planet Venus is an awesome ‘river of news’ feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first."
  • "This is a blog with an agenda–to bring the colorful, playful, twisted, and glamorous world of burlesque to as many people as possible. I'm fortunate enough to have access to a great deal of the world of neo-burlesque and I love it and I want you to love it too, so I'm sharing that access with you."
    (tags: blogs theatre)
  • "Remain by me; I feel I must con-
    fess the trouble of my soul to thy
    soul serene. Thou knowest, oh Pale-
    mon, I regained the soul of her that
    was the impure Thaïs. A proud joy
    had followed this triumph and I came
    back to this desert of peace… Well
    then, peace is dead in me… In vain I
    flagellated my flesh, in vain I bruised
    it; a demon possesses me. The beauty
    of the woman haunts my visions, I
    only see Thaïs, or rather it is not she,
    'Tis Helen and Phryne, 'tis Venus
    Astarte, all the splendors and the en-
    joyments in one single creature!"
    (tags: opera)
  • "Thaïs occurs in Egypt under Greek occupation, where a Cenobite monk, Athanaël, attempts to convert Thaïs, an Alexandrian courtesan, and devotée of Venus, to Christianity, but discovers, too late, that his obsession with her is rooted in lust; ironically, while the courtesan's true purity of heart is revealed, so is the religious man's baser nature. The work is about religious eroticism, and has had many controversial productions."
    (tags: opera music)