nathan.chantrell.net

Photo credit: Vermin Inc

Remember all the exciting things we were promised? Back when the year 2000 seemed unfathomably distant the future looked rosy, by now we would be living in a Star Trek like world where robots would do all the work and we would be able to spend all our time on leisure pursuits. A world where diseases and even the common cold would be a thing of the past.

Now here we are, nearly ten years into the 21st century, where is it all? Where is my jetpack, my electric flying car, the underwater cities and the day trips to the moon? What happened to being able to control the weather?

Instead, we have a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots and the technological wonders that would bring our new peaceful, prosperous society have not appeared.

Our cars are still grounded and powered by fuel extracted from the earth at great cost (both monetary and politically) not electricity. The electricity which by now was supposed to be “too cheap to meter” instead of increasingly expensive and still generated by pollution spewing power stations burning a dwindling supply of fossil fuels.

Even some of the things that have materialised are disappointing, the household robot is here after a fashion, but it’s really just a vacuum cleaner. The jetpack is here too but you won’t be going to work on one anytime soon.

Photo credit: SamJUK

Recreational space travel might be on the cards but it’s not going to be the ubiquitous, even routine image portrayed in the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey for a long time, if ever.

So what went wrong? Well I think a lot of the time, investment and talent that should have gone towards bringing us these things has been squandered on military development, procurement and war. The oil companies and others tried to strangle the electric car at birth for their own financial gain (at least this seems, finally, to be making progress again) and fear of nuclear power killed our cheap electricity. Maybe those were just more optimistic times too.

Sure, it’s not all doom and gloom; Computers, the internet and gadgets such as smartphones are bringing a different, perhaps unpredicted, slice of “the future of the past” into our present but it’s not for all, there is still war, famine, sickness and a huge percentage of the worlds population still don’t even have basics such as clean drinking water.  Maybe William Gibson was right when he said “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

At the very least, we’re more than a bit behind schedule and frankly, it’s all a bit disappointing really.

I’ve been raving about streaming music service Spotify to anyone who will listen for a while now…

Financed through very infrequent and unintrusive ads or a rather expensive £10/month subscription, Spotify is the latest attempt to save the music industry from piracy, and it’s making a big impact.

The application is available for Windows or Max OS X and also runs flawlessly under Wine on Linux (which seems to have resulted in no ads at the moment) and mobile versions are in the works.

As well as browsing for artists, albums and tracks Spotify also has a radio feature where you can select music by genre and time and it also allows you to share songs and playlists with friends easily.

It’s a brilliant way to explore new music and the range available is staggering with a few notable exceptions being The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin (get with it guys!).

If you love music you’ve got to try Spotify.

Just some links:

How Aphex Twin hid pictures in his music

Crazy building

Bloody BIG hole
the surrounding “air zone… is closed for helicopters” after “a few accidents when they were ’sucked in’ by downward air flow..

Would make a good location for a sci-fi film that!

Postman Pat (NOT kid/work safe!)

This was one serious pot growing operation.

Bet they didn’t think that one would get found!

Edit: Couple more links on that: one, two

Edit: and another.

The Beeb have a great site with loads of info, pics and a video tour of the “Burlington Bunker”. You might remember this as the place Mark Thomas went and made a nuisance of himself… “there are no underground tunnels” was what they told him! It’s HUGE!  Some of the time warp stuff in there is mad!

This is a good one

Don’t move your eyes or blink once you see the colour and it stays like that for ages!

Here’s how it works. In the first image the colors (more precisely the hues) are opposite to the full colour image, but the brightness is constant over the entire image.

When you stare at the bright screen with this image for so long, your eyes literally get tired, and so all the colour receptors that pick up the blues and oranges get tired, and just don’t see anymore for a little while. When you go over it and it goes black and white, well, white light is really just the entire spectrum, it’s every single colour coming at you all at once. But your eyes are tired of the blues and oranges, so it doesn’t see them! You’re now left with the colours in white light that your eyes “want” to pick up – the real colors of the picture that weren’t desensitized.

I’ve posted some of these optical illusions on here in the past but I’ve never seen the third one before… it’s mad!

This is really rather good.

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD — part of a test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950’s. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils.

“Upon completing the drawing the patient starts laughing, then becomes startled by something on the floor.”