Human
zooillogix | March 30, 2007To baaa or not to baaa?
Professor Esmail Zanjani from the University of Nevada unveiled a genetically engineered sheep- well, technically a sheep, we think -that has 15 percent human cells and 85 percent sheep cells this past week. Zanjani injects adult human cells into sheep fetuses to create these chimeras with the eventual goal of "growing" human organs inside the sheep for transplant into humans.
In an example given by Zanjani, he hopes one day to take bone marrow cells from a sick patient, implant the cells into a sheep fetus and literally grow bone marrow for the patient inside the…
cevans | March 27, 2007
Welcome to the second in an ongoing series of Interviews with authors of Science Fiction. I'm lucky to have had a chance, recently, to review Portland local Thomas A. Day's A Grey Moon Over China, a totally postapocalyptic epic that takes the ongoing cultural fear of an energy crisis to a particularly dark and alienating place in the cosmos. He's an interesting writer for his sense of grand scope -- in the complexity of the narrative and the breadth of time it represents -- but also because of his background: he's worked in the aerospace industry, flown night-cargo planes, and developed…
cevans | March 7, 2007
Followers of this web-rag know well that Universe was once a bi-weekly print column in the now-defunct LA Alternative. The intertextuality of it all -- blog, paper, and the interactions between the both -- was a lot of fun, brought readers in from all over, and smeared Web 2.0 all over the place. Sadly, the LAA went kaput ("Print is dead," they crooned forlornly from their last cover) and print-Universe was homeless.
Thankfully, the wonderful people over at Portland's Willamette Week -- an alternative newsweekly with a whopping 100,000 circulation -- have taken me under their wing, and I'm…
cevans | March 6, 2007Did you know that the geodesic dome is the only man-made structure (apart from, maybe, a "spirit vibe") that gets proportionally stronger as it increases in size? Truth: of all known structures made out of linear elements, a geodesic dome has the highest enclosed volume to weight ratio. It is no secret to my intimates that if I ever earn enough money to own anything, I will have a home with a room-sized dome inside of it, and inside of this dome I will hang a globe of Earth, and there will be a crystal bowl of fruits in the center.
Buckminster Fuller, incidentally, didn't invent the geodesic…
cevans | March 4, 2007The French have a Internet neologism that I particularly like, "Internautes," which of course is a sort of digital traveler, an Astronaut of the web. If any word is more fitting for this blog's readership, I don't what it is.
Welcome, Internauts, to this new version of Universe. We were long overdue for a design overhaul -- cutesy deep-sea creatures are a thing of the past, as is darkness -- and this one, appropriately, is a wonderful collaboration between myself and the Team Yacht one-man band. Influences: Charles and Ray Eames, 60's IBM advertisements (often one and the same), the wormhole…
cevans | February 19, 2007Following the runaway success of the first Universe podcast, I have decided to make this -- so to speak -- a running thing. This one is less "vibes" and more "ambiance," and includes some human voices reading texts, so if that kind of thing upsets you, steer clear.
Some highlights, which might elucidate the relevance of any of this, are the Brian Eno recording of algorithmic bell tones inspired by the Long Now clock's now-prototyped chime mechanism, Cacao's wonderful Bucky Fuller-inspired dome music, Mort Garson's Moog version of "Let The Sunshine In," and a couple glimpses into yours truly'…
cevans | February 13, 2007
The most recent issue of Cabinet Magazine has a really good article by artist and CIA expert Trevor Paglen about the iconography of military insignia, particularly of those branches of the military that "don't exist." How do you celebrate your work with traditional military regalia, Paglen asks, while retaining the secrecy which defines it? It's an interesting question.
Well, sometimes you don't. Take for example this embroidered patch, distributed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the US "black" space agency primarily responsible for the operation of military reconnaissance…
cevans | January 28, 2007
Psychic Phenomena on Vimeo
I've been spending a lot of time lately with a late-70's interview with Buckminster Fuller, conducted at the end-range of his life and career by a really inspiring Los Angeles public-access television figure called Damien Simpson, who apparently died shortly after the airing of this segment. This interview, it seems, is only available on a DVD called "Buckminster Fuller: The Lost Interviews," along with a handful of other late-era New Age television segments. Bucky loses his marbles progressively throughout the interviews, but manages to say some pretty…
cevans | January 20, 2007The final day of the TOMS contest is upon us, and what a time it's been. I've had highlights (when Josh guessed "baleen"), low-lights; we've gotten a little press. There have been moments of great tension, too, as I wondered when and where the correct guess would appear. Although I can't reveal if the objects have yet been identified, I can say this: keep guessing.
cevans | January 19, 2007Day two of the TOMS contest. Many good -- nay, great -- guesses have been made. According to the rules, I can't tell you if anyone has guessed correctly yet, but this will all be revealed in due time. Maybe these pictures, at a reduced magnification of 10x, might help.
Best of luck!
cevans | January 18, 2007Urban Honking community, 2007 is the year of the co-brand, the year of the collaborative promotional effort. This is why Universe, the Urban Honking overlords, and (unwittingly) TOMS shoes are pooling together to present to you this shoe-giveaway contest! Why? Because we respect the mission of this company, which, for every shoe purchased, gives a free pair of shoes to an underprivileged critter.
The rules are simple. To win a pair of TOMS shoes -- the color and size are your prerogative -- all you have to do is correctly identify the two objects below. Now, the catch is that the Universe…
cevans | January 15, 2007
Sometimes fractured energies in our planet's noosphere can throw people together who, logically, should never meet. There's no rational reason I should count among my friends the particularly reclusive, Cologne-based science fiction writer and critic Mark von Schlegell; but, lo, kismet, I do. Schlegell's work is dogged and incredibly esoteric, a wry mix of stupid fantasy and devastating insight, and although they're clearly influenced by the awe and slime of pulp paperback sci-fi novels, his are the kind of books that get published by MIT and Semiotext(e). His first and only novel, Venusia,…
cevans | November 16, 2006
I've been thinking a lot about Explorers since my last post. Certainly exploration is intimate with extremism: extreme temperature, extreme height, extreme speed, extreme isolation. It is also a practice of firsts. After all, it matters little who the second man to climb Everest was or who made it most of the way to the North Pole. In that capacity, it represents our perhaps natural tendency to think in terms of binaries -- there is, to us, the one man who first sailed 'round Cape Horn, and then there is everyone else who didn't. Most people know little about the men who went to the moon…
cevans | August 19, 2006
For effect, I'm just going to say something here, something that your outer skeptic -- nay, even your inner skeptic -- might immediately buck against. Don't worry; I'm not going to start talking about the healing power of Lemurian Seed Crystals. I will only present you with this deceptively simple idea:
"The world is a better place than it was before."
Or, alternately: "The world, on the whole, is improving."
You may, very rightly, protest: they did kill the electric car, after all. Global warming is probably going to melt the Internet, and we are in a state of constant and meaningless war…
cevans | May 15, 2006
Growing up, I watched a lot of television. Not the good stuff, mind you: rather, I would gambol home from elementary school to watch hours of Designing Women re-runs and then laugh uproariously at Step By Step while enacting my early OCD tendencies in elaborate Lucky Charms marshmellow seperation projects. In retrospect, I realize that I could have been playing soccer or going to sleep-away camp. My bearing witness to the worst television programming of early 1990s, however, has probably shaped me in ways I am yet to fully understand.
For example, I am haunted to this day by a "Cablevision…
cevans | January 18, 2006In a classic temporal reversal, this advanced self-publishing machine (ie, the "web-log") has been converted into a bi-monthly print column in the LA Alternative, a Los Angeles-area lifestyle newspaper, now the only alternative weekly in the city since the LA Weekly's deep sell out. Logistically, the switchover means this: I will be writing a new "Universe" every other week which will appear first in the LA Alternative, then, a few days later, on this blog. This blog itself will remain an exclusive source of "Recent Mountain" links, web-only entries, and discussion. I will also get paid.…