• Via Bruce Sterling, a great series of summer reading lists.Lots of interesting books – two that I’m going to put in my queue: The Resurrectionist and Dark Mission. Feral House, publishers of Dark Mission, print some wild stuff – this looks to be no exception.

This weird yet well-researched book by a former science advisor to Walter Cronkite argues that NASA is an occult control system, created by Nazi SS officers and high-ranking U.S. Free Masons, that discovered alien technological artifacts on the moon. Hoagland believes the “secret government” has been reverse-engineering alien technology for decades.

• One of the folks tapped for summer reading materials in the link above is Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky :: That Subliminal Kid. I heard an interview with him a few days ago – I especially like his notion of “artist as search engine”. I think there’s a sense where this has always been true – part of the artist’s job is pattern recognition – pulling something (at best, something unexpected) out of the ground. An MP3 of the interview is here and you can click here to get to Miller’s Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus mix (Buddhist  hip hop).
• Another dispatch from the digital edge – The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Not sure how I feel about tossing theory over the side…  Update – an example of scientific petabyte computing – the Large Hadron Collider – 2Gb of data every 10 seconds.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a picture of Barbie finials on a miniature trebuchet.