Sunday, January 4, 2009

Do you want to live forever?

Moving into the 21st century, the rise of hybrid brain-machine interfaces and other biotechnological breakthroughs are beginning to challenge our notions of personhood. Philosophical arguments often appeal with brain in a vat arguments, but Aubry de Gray wants to actualize some of these ideas. He works on what he calls "strategies for engineered negligible senescence." He thinks a fundamental human right is to live indefinitely insofar as we have the technology to do so. Thus, de Gray is challenging the scientific community to achieve this end. Here is a documentary chronicling the emerging figure and some controversey surrounding him. (Props to whomever decided to use Mahler's "Resurrection" in the film).

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Waste = food

If you have not read Cradle to Cradle, this is a 50 minute documentary on Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart, a duo who is essentially the foremost impetus in actualizing the green movement for industrial design, production, architecture, and city planning.