hi
My new book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 is finally available today. Co-written with Tom Engelhardt, it also launches a new publishing venture of mine — Dispatch Books. For years, Tom (who brought the world Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, Eduardo Galeano’s beautiful Memory of Fire trilogy and about 1000 other books by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Rebecca Solnit) and I have talked about starting up a small press. Now we’ve finally done it.
With Terminator Planet, we’ve carefully put together the best of our joint work on the subject of American robotic warfare, shaped and edited, and added a powerful new conclusion. The result is the first comprehensive history of drone warfare (with a preview of the drone’s possible future as well).
From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond. Drawing on several years of research — including official documents, open-source intelligence, and interviews with military officers and Pentagon officials, we offer up a sobering, factual account of robot warfare combined with critical analyses you’re likely to find nowhere else.
Packed with rarely seen Pentagon photos, Terminator Planet provides a rich history of the last decade of drone warfare, a clear-eyed look at its present, and a far-reaching guide to its future. You used to have to watch science fiction movies to imagine where that future was headed, now you can read Terminator Planet — and know.I hope you’ll take a look and perhaps download it as an ebook or purchase an old-fashioned hard copy.
(via jmek)
Apparently a flock of sheep have taken over the hobbit holes that were built on a New Zealand farm during the filming of the Lord of the Rings movies.
Fuck I love New Zealand.
(via fuckyeahcompassion)
1925 (08-21) Columbia University, visiting college student as Iron worker (by straatis)
(via nuaira)
Birds Have Juvenile Dinosaur Skulls
Below content via smithsonianmag.com“Birds are dinosaurs. That much is certain. That deep connection, bolstered by fossil finds and theoretical frameworks, has made dinosaurs seem more bird-like than ever expected. From feathers to nesting behavior, many aspects of avian natural history are now known to have originated among non-avian dinosaurs.”
“Despite the fact that birds represent the only surviving dinosaurian lineage, though, their growth pattern is different. Instead of going through a period of protracted change, as with non-avian dinosaurs, the skulls of young birds are anatomically almost identical to those of adults. And birds take a much faster, more direct route to maturation—many bird species grow to adult size in a year or less. As a new Nature study by Bhart-Anjan Bhullar and collaborators suggests, this feature of bird life can be traced back to ancient transformations that effectively locked bird skulls into a permanent juvenile anatomy.”
“Bhullar and co-authors used a technique called geometric morphometrics to survey the degree of skull change among birds, various non-avian theropods, the archaic archosaur Euparkeria and the modern American alligator. By tracking landmarks on the skulls in virtual models, the researchers were able to quantify how much the skulls of particular creatures changed. As expected, most non-avian dinosaurs retained the ancestral growth pattern—juvenile skulls were significantly different from adult skulls, regardless of how big those dinosaurs were.”
Read the full article on smithsonianmag.com
(via scinerds)
Miami police are still tight-lipped about the man they shot and killed on the MacArthur Causeway Saturday afternoon, but new details back claims they had no choice: the naked man they shot was trying to chew the face off another naked man, and refused to obey police orders to stop his…
