Hello Humans, welcome to a new weekend reading! My name’s Julian and I work here at this school, mostly found somewhere between coding, our beautiful workshop (which I want to introduce in a further weekend reading) and somewhere in the sun. Dreaming about the latter: it got quite cold and grey in Berlin this week. So let’s get into the right mood (← music to listen to in background) while I’m still thinking of this article in le monde diplomatique, Why Trump wants to buy Greenland. Main reason, easy to guess, the natural resources hidden under the ice. Nobody had real interest in this before, because there was no chance to access them. Spot on climate change, which Trump’s government denies to exist. With the melting of the ice the chances are really good that the production of natural ressources can soon start in the Arctic:
To solve this kind of political challenges in the arctic region in a diplomatic and peaceful way, the Arctic Council was founded in 1996. Nice idea, but it doesn’t seem to be the way Trump’s foreign minister Mike Pompeos liked to handle it during their last meeting in Rovaniemi, Finnland:
The great and depressing article goes on a bit and if you want to read (in german) just text me. In the end you get a clear idea that Trump’s government not only denies climate change but more is looking forward to it.
Ok, enough of that now, it’s weekend and weekend should also mean happy feelings (← again, listen in background)! So I was quite happy that Friedrich mentioned Douglas Engelbart last week, who I always connect with Steward Brand. Those guys were real hippies back in the 1960s/70s, folks! They totally saw the power and social benefits of technology and wanted to share this knowledge and wisdom with everybody! So Steward Brand became the author of the Whole Earth Catalog, a book that describes the functionality of all important technology (and more) in this time and, as Steve Jobs mentioned, was “the bible of his generation”.
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Another great thing Brand made is the WELL, Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, the world’s first online forum or, to add one last thing: the Long Now Foundation, where they’re building for example a clock that will last for 10.000 years. I can’t even imagine what our world will look like in 200 years and they’re thinking of the year 12019! Whatever those hippies took, I never know if it was too much or exactly the right amount of it. However, just always keep in mind how this counterculture is deeply connected with cyberculture! And today? Hm, Brand is also an advocate of nuclear energy.
To recap last week at MA Spiel&&Objekt: Arturo Castro, one of the core developers of openFrameworks, is currently teaching this great open source toolkit to our students. Programming gets even more serious now and words like “compiling” and “machine code” were mentioned more than once in the last couple of days. So in addition to last week’s Assembler-Video I want to show you the lovely book Machine Code For Beginners by Lisa Watts and Mike Whartion.
That’s it for now. Christian and I have this video installation running in Berlin since Friday till Nov 10th (come and see, of course!) and I’m at Science Hack Day.