decoarchitecture:

Interior, AWA Building and Tower (Wireless House), Sydney, Australia
by Chris&Steve 

Wonderful mosaic floor featuring the AWA logo, complete with radio signals: Beep-beep be-beep-beep!

(Source: davelinks)

madmendaily:

throwherinthewater:

Top: screencap from Mad Men season 2, episode 13, “Meditations in an Emergency”

Bottom: detail from promotional poster for Mad Men season 5

there are no coincidences under Matthew Weiner’s watch. can’t wait.

THIS ^

staff:

Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls to U.S. Representatives in a concerted effort to protect the Internet. Extraordinary. There’s no doubt that we’ve been heard.

So just to keep you updated: The well-intentioned, but immensely flawed “Stop Online Piracy Act” is still in the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was yesterday and now members will debate and bring amendments to the bill. The Committee will reconvene in a few weeks — the date has yet to be scheduled. Nothing has been brought to a final vote. Everything is still very much in play. We’ll keep you posted on what’s going on and what you can do to help. But for now, we want to thank you.

One encouraging thing we heard yesterday:

I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.

— Representative Darrell Issa

We also want to express our tremendous gratitude to our friends at Mobile Commons who, on 30 minutes notice, hooked us up with their amazing platform (and provided their expertise) to automatically connect callers with their Representatives.

futuramb:

In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has “turned the corner” and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.

Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”

OK, now magazines like The Economist are stating this fact that we futurists have been talking about for many years, well maybe most early by Alvin Toffler… Is it time to leave these issues to the politicians and change our focus to things more far ahead into the future…?

(via npr)

robertreich:

Every other Wednesday evening for the past few years I’ve been offering commentary on a spritely show on public radio called “Marketplace.” On alternative Wednesdays David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has been airing his views.

This past Wednesday, Frum called it quits. He…

jayrosen:

Ron Suskind in the New York Times, October 17, 2004

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s…

crookedindifference:

Sunrise To Sunset Aboard The International Space Station

Roughly half an orbit of the ISS, from sunrise over Northern Europe to sunset south-east of Australia. The view is to the north of the station’s ground track. In the upper-left, is the tail of the Space Shuttle Discovery, which docked with the Space Station during the STS-131 mission. The animation begins with a view of snow-covered Norway and the Jutland Peninsula. Low clouds cover Central Europe.

The animation continues as the Station flies by Ukraine, eastern Russia, the Volga River, and then the Russian Steppes. South and east of the steppes, a dust storm comes into view over the Taklimakan Desert, followed shortly by the lake-studded Tibetan Plateau and the glaciers of the Himalayan Mountains. Smoke-shrouded lowlands hug the southern margin of the Himalaya. Smoke also covers much of South-east Asia, including the Irrawaddy Delta.

After the Space Station passes over the sapphire-blue South China Sea, the island of Borneo appears, followed by the open expanse of the Indian Ocean. A trio of coral reefs lies off the coast of Western Australia, which is studded with clouds. Australia’s arid interior is coloured myriad shades of red. As sunset nears, cloud shadows lengthen, highlighting their structure. Night falls as the Space Station crosses the terminator above the South Pacific.

(via fuckyeahtheuniverse)

(Source: davelinks)