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This Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, which was launched into space by the Soviet Union on October 4th, 1957.

Sputnik kicked off the space race between the United States and Soviet Union, beginning the age of space exploration. Here’s more from NASA on the history of Sputnik and the 50th Anniversary of the Space Age.

On November 3rd 1957, Sputnik 2 was launched, carrying the famous space dog Laika, the first living creature to go into space. This was also the first space casualty, since the Soviet Union did not plan for the safe return of Laika.

The San Francisco Chronicle is has been running a great series on the history of Silicon Valley, which has its roots in radio engineers who formed hobby clubs not long after the big ‘06 earthquake.

“High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio”

“Tracing Silicon Valley’s roots”

“Silicon Valley CEOs offer their predictions”

“The History of Silicon Valley”

Along with the birth of Hewlett-Packard in their famous Palo Alto garage, another key point on the “Silicon Valley timeline” was in 1957 when 8 engineers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of these engineers were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (author of “Moore’s Law”), who would later go on to start Intel.

The term “Silicon Valley” was created by entrepreneur Ralph Vaerst and used by his friend Don Hoefler in a series of “Silicon Valley USA” articles for Electronic News, starting with the January 11, 1971 issue. In 1975 the Homebrew Computer Club formed, where Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple I in 1976, and the rest is history.

Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has discovered the wonderful Bad Signage Flickr Pool, including the brutally honest sign for Laundry Depot in Morrisville, PA.

Our Austrian friends from monochrom in Vienna are starting to arrive in town and are preparing for next week’s Arse Elektronika 2007 conference on pornography and technical innovation, which takes place October 5th-7th at Kink.com’s Porn Palace in San Francisco. This morning I met up with Johannes Grenzfurthner, Stefan Lutschinger and David for a Arse Elektronika press meeting at the Ritual Coffee Roasters in Flora Grubb Gardens.

The organizers of Arse Elektronika are still looking for help in the following areas:

- setting up a live stream via Ustream.tv, including setting up mixing for two cameras

- stage lighting for the event

- chairs for the event (approximately 200, red chairs would be great)

If you can help out, contact Johannes at jg AT monochrom.at.

Also, there are a limited number of press passes available, if you are interested in covering the event, please fill out their Journalist Accreditation Application.

Oh hey and Johannes of monochrom has a Twitter account, so follow him to get updates on Arse Elektronika, Roboexotica and all things monochrom.

Per Marshall Kirkpatrick’s suggestion, I’ve started using Feed Digest to republish squid.us and Squid List feeds on the left-hand sidebar of this blog, as well as adding the Laughing Squid feed to the Squid List sidebar. It’s really easy to setup and highly customizable. You can even combine multiple individual feeds into one digest.

Feed Digest is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds. It lets you do things like:

put the content of RSS or Atom feeds on your own site(s), e.g.:
- get your del.icio.us / digg links on your site automatically
- get your Flickr links on your site automatically
- have automatically updating links to other blogs
- create news alerts and news digests

syndicate your blog’s content and/or links to other sites

mix multiple feeds together into a single feed (Atom and RSS)

convert RSS to Atom, and vice versa

filter RSS and Atom feeds

turn RSS and Atom feeds into a JavaScript include to use anywhere (even free Web space)

turn feed(s) into WAP pages for cellphone use

merge all blog mentions of your company onto a single page

have your local weather update on your page(s) automatically

merge RSS services with your Web site

Tonight’s Critical Mass ride in San Francisco marks the 15th anniversary of the bicycle convergence that takes place on the last Friday of the month in cities all over the world. The very first Critical Mass (originally called “Commute Clot”) took place on Sept. 25, 1992 in San Francisco. Wikipedia has more on the history of Critical Mass.

“Critical Mass celebrating 15 years of free-form bicycle advocacy”
Rachel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle

The monthly Critical Mass rides are part political statement and part roving street festival and now are firmly part of San Francisco’s cultural fabric.

Critical Mass has no organized leadership. The rides are promoted by word of mouth and over the Internet. The only constant is that they are held the last Friday of the month and start around 6 p.m. at Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market Street. The routes are fluid, often determined on the spot.

Italian artist Blu has created two videos of his amazing wall animations, “Walking (2 times)” and “Fantoche (2 times)”.

via M2

In order to organize his huge collection of Star Wars toys, Josh Budich created tiny pixelated illustrations of each toy, that can then be sorted by film, series, year, etc.

I’m a voracious collector, mostly of toys, and namely Star Wars action-figures. To commemorate the recent completion of my collection, I undertook this huge illustration project, not only to take stock in what I had, but also to share some of my joy of collecting with others.

via LCSV4

The fourth annual Sumptown Comics Fest 2007 takes place September 29th & 30th at Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel in Portland, Oregon.

The Stumptown Comics Fest was started almost on a whim when a small group of Portland-area cartoonists lamented the lack of local convention-style outlets. While there were certainly other comic book shows in town, there weren’t any that gave much attention to the artists themselves. The dream was to design a festival with the creators as its focus, rather than dealers and work-for-hire publishers.

via Drawn!

The Bohemian Carnival One Year Anniversary Party takes place this Saturday, September 29th at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, featuring The Mutaytor, Vau de Vire Society, Gooferman, Motion Potion and An-Ten-Nae.

In anticipation of this week’s ArtCar Fest, which starts tomorrow (see my previous post), here is Weird America’s wonderful 4 part video series on the World of Art Cars:

World of Art Cars 1

World of Art Cars 2

World of Art Cars 3

World of Art Cars 4

Our friend Jack Davis passed away this weekend due to a heart attack. Jack, a major force in the San Francisco arts community, was the director of SomArts Cultural Center and did stage production for The San Francisco Blues Festival. Our deepest condolences go out to Jack’s family and friends. A memorial service is being planned for Sunday, November 18th at Somarts, from 2pm to sundown.

Lil Mike has a great write-up about Jack over over on Metroblogging San Francisco.

John Law wrote the following about Jack last year when he suffered a heart attack:

In any town, any scene, any time, you can count on the fingers of one hand the largely unheralded folks that facilitate almost everything thing of note that happens. They are there early on, giving quiet, confident encouragement – and, as importantly for starving artists, the occasional big break in event cost or maybe various services provided but somehow unbilled. These two or three princes never expect anything in return other than to watch the blossoming and growth of what they consider to be (and usually are) the most worthy enterprises. Other’s who “make things happen” the individuals, deserving or not who do get the lion’s share of the credit – you know who they are – they’re in the papers, on the radio, these folks know who those two or three are and always owe them a debt.

Jack Davis is one of those princes. At crucial points in the life of almost any significant Frisco art endeavor/scene/ organization (underground or established,) Jack has, in some capacity, small or gigantic, been pivotal in its life and growth. As Director of SomArts Gallery in SOMA for the last twenty years, one of the largest, best and most easily accessible art/event/party places in the City, Jack and his wonderful staff have given untold thousands of nascent artists, community groups and provocateurs their first big or pivotal show and a grand forum for promulgating their ideas and spirit in the local scene. Many of these individuals and organizations have moved on to national prominence. Following is a very small sampling of groups that benefited from Jacks involvement and/or support: The Neighborhood Arts Program (one of the founders) this group kicked off most of local Cultural Centers, Intersection for the Arts (past Director,) S.F. Mime Troupe (Board Member,) Burning Man (first big in-town events in the early 90’s were at SOMARTs for extremely low cost,) Day of the Dead, The Farm, Pickle Family Circus, Make a Circus, Dance Mission, Cellspace, S.F. Pride, Survival Research Labs (Jack held the cops off while Mark and crew got away!) The list goes on & on.

We are looking for more photos of Jack, if you have any please let us know in the comments.

UPDATE: A blog has been setup to chronicle memories of Jack Davis.

Epic Arts presents the 12th Annual How Berkeley Can You Be!? Celebration this Sunday, October 1st, beginning with a bizarre parade (including art cars from ArtCar Fest 2007) through the streets of Berkeley and ending up at a festival in Civic Center Park. This year the event has set a goal to be a Zero Waste Zone.

Here’s video by Stacy Alexander of the art cars in the parade in 2004.

Of course there are a bunch of great photos of How Berkeley Can You Be on Flickr.

They are looking for volunteers for the event if you are interested in helping out.

Today Amazon launched the public beta of Amazon MP3, their new DRM-Free MP3 music store, featuring “over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels”. Songs range from $0.89-$0.99 each and are recorded at high bitrate of 256 Kbs.