I read this review of Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture (Verso - fantastic publisher, 2016), by Douglas Murphy in the LA Review of Books. It asks why ambitious 'megastructural' architecture (think: Archigram, Metabolism and Habitat '67) declined in popularity after 1960s. It touches on changes in aesthetics (modernism -> postmodernism), the perceived 'social responsibility' of the architect and prevailing political ideology.
It raises a really interesting point in the final paragraph: what if megastructuralism actually succeeded? One big part of megastructural architecture is that this massive structure is designed that provide a 'frame' in which social activity takes part. We can see this now in "the big-box store, the hub airport, the mega-mall", which re-purpose this idea, but replaces an often progressive ideology with pure capitalism. I think the writer of this review missed an even better example of contemporary megastructural architecture, however: shipping container buildings. Apartment blocks and shopping malls made out of shipping containers are made up of discrete parts that simply require a crane and some mechanics to reconfigure them.
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The Apollo 11 source code is great reading, although it doesn't make much sense to me (I don't know this variety of Assembly language). The in-jokes left in the comments are fun to look for. The really striking thing about all this of course is that they had to write code to land an incredibly expensive and politically important piece of machinery on the Moon and they never got to do any unit testing. They had to be totally confident that it would work, with no simulation to test it against. The amount of domain knowledge (physics, engineering, maths) needed to do this is seriously impressive.
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I read this article on 'Male feminists'. All I can say is: the best conversations I've ever had about feminism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, have been the ones where I have shut up and listened, occasionally offering words of support. Me having read some articles about something or other doesn't mean I suddenly get free licence to jump out with my own opinions on it. It's too damn easy for someone to ask me about some social topic or other and I find myself suddenly saying every thing that on my damn mind without passing the mic to anyone else. Constant vigilance is necessary.
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I read Poets for Corbyn, an anthology released last year of poems inspired by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, who I've probably mentioned on here before. Some favourites: J.C. by Nicholas Murray, The Seven Ages of a Labour MP by Ian Birchall, Wongawongaland by Tom Pickard, Austerity by Becky Cherriman, 8th May Song by Natalie Chin. Honestly I'm still not totally sure what this all signifies - is this some kind of glorious rebirth of British socialism? What's a Britain anyway? Aren't his policies really a not-particularly-radical form of social democracy? How do we know Corbyn won't just get assassinated? God knows it's been tried before - Britain's helped depose socialist and social-democratic politicians in other countries. God knows the establishment have a lot to lose. I could talk for days about this, I've probably already talked for weeks this past year alone. Other people have said it better.
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A comment on a recent map of ISIS/Daesh oil trade trades - which illustrates something important about political control. When people shade in the area of Syria/Iraq that Daesh currently control, it's this massive massive swathe of land - but most of it is desolate. It's a mistake to think of it in these terms because in reality to 'control' an area is to control its "logistical spaces, transport routes, and routes of war and trade" - which "correspond fairly closely with its transport maps". It would be interesting to see this view applied to other political scenarios.