Anamorphic Illusions
Swiss artist Felice Varini has a fantastic series of anamorphic illusions. It took him 30 years to complete the body of work.
Tumblr Is Hiring Journalists
Not sure how I missed this, but Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover itself:
“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”
Journalists covering online communities – a novel idea.
2100°/451°
A short film by Alistair Banks featuring the art of Etsuko Ichikawa.
I can’t remember if I’ve already shared this particular project, but it never hurts to revisit good art.
The Amish Project
A 24-year-old student went 90 days without using a cell phone, email or social media. Yahoo News interviewed him about the experience:
I definitely just lost complete contact with people that normally would have been part of my life. I mean it’s also an interesting metric for your life to see who some of your closest friends are, you know, and who’s willing to take the time.
I find it an interesting thought experiment to contrast this idea with Clusterflock, which is the clearest example in my life of the relationship-building power of the internet and social technology. The internet made it possible to seek out an entirely new tribe of people – people with which I have so much in common and so much to talk about, but that I hadn’t realized existed.
But then there are social networks like Facebook, which at their worst takes all of the people who are already part of your life – your co-workers, your school chums, your family – and hands them a level of intimacy about our lives that they haven’t really earned and don’t particularly deserve. I think that’s why it’s so interesting when these online relationships predicated on intimate knowledge but passive communication go bust when one party pulls out of Facebook – we’re just learning a hard lesson about the differences between that kind of intimate knowledge and true friendship, which for the longest time I thought were one and the same.
A couple relatives recently found me on Google Plus (I use it primarily for the sad remnants of what was once Google Reader). I hadn’t even acknowledged their existence before they were already commenting on every single piece of information attached to my name. This, I’m told, is keeping in touch.
Will Israel Attack Iran?
As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”
The Six Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In
Look, we’re idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it’s probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC’ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be.
(via @tylercowen)
Mapping Twitter Traffic
Eric Fischer has been mapping Twitter traffic in major cities, resulting in beautiful cartographic representations of our information flow. It’s all faintly reminiscent of blood vessels or a network of neurons. I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
(via Animal New York)
A Five Minute Interview with Maurice Sendak
As part of their TateShots series of artist interviews, the Tate Galleries spoke with Maurice Sendak about his books and career. I love this bit about his subject matter:
I do not believe I have ever written a children’s book. I don’t know how to write a children’s book. How do you write about it? How do you set out to write a children’s book? It’s a lie.
Also, he’s obsessed with William Blake and comic books.
Via: Papertastebuds
Whalers, Activists & Drones
Anti-whaling activists intercepted Japan’s harpoon fleet far north of Antarctic waters on Sunday, they said, with the help of a military-style drone.
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society spokesman Paul Watson said the unmanned long-range drone, launched from the anti-whaling ship the Steve Irwin, had located the Japanese fleet and relayed the coordinates back to the activists.
I know I should be shocked at what appears to be the ease of obtaining a long-range drone for non-military use, but really I’m just fascinated that the activists named their boat the Steve Irwin.
Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
I’ve become slightly obsessed with Frank Chimero’s talk on the purpose and philosophy of design:
To really think about design, you need to learn and think about everything other than it. Design is a vessel: the most important part is what it holds.
The first comment on the Vimeo landing is a single word: Nourishing. Such a perfect way to sum it all up.
Via: Swiss-Miss
The Lake, The Hood & The Golf Course
After we’d talked for a while, we got in my rental car and went for a drive around his ward. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not for us,” Knowles said, as we rode through Harbor Shores. “It’s not for poor people.” I had asked Knowles if he slept at City Hall, and he took me by his house, which he said he rents for about $250 a month. “I don’t sell dope,” he volunteered, explaining how he pays his rent. “I come out and hustle — electrical jobs, cutting grass, whatever.” […]
When I dropped him back at City Hall, Knowles got out of the car and said goodbye, then poked his head back in the passenger window. “Hey,” he said, “can you spare a couple of bucks so I can get myself a bag of chips and a pop?”
This is an excerpt from Jonathan Mahler’s Simon-esque piece on Benton Harbor, Michigan, for the NYT Magazine a few weeks back. The bit above is from a conversation Mahler has with an unemployed Benton Harbor resident who is also a city commissioner for one of the city’s poorest wards.
For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in the area and my family has lived there for a few generations. The article is a longer piece focusing on the city’s socio-economic problems and new divisions over a golf course and property development on Lake Michigan called Harbor Shores, which is hoped to improve the impoverished city’s attractiveness for future investment. The only problem is that most of the developers and proponents for Harbor Shores are affluent and white, while most of Benton Harbor is impoverished and black – oh, and the golf course was built on a chunk of the city’s one nice park at the lakefront.
It’s a feature worth reading and not just because it’s about the clashes between a city’s residents and a group of well-intentioned (if not woefully ignorant) outsiders that believe they can solve deeply-rooted problems of poverty and crime by introducing the game of golf. I like to think it’s also because Mahler turned my old stomping grounds into a moral fable for today’s social, cultural and economic divisions.
Tim Tebow & Why Faith Makes Us Nervous
If you all haven’t already happened upon it, Chuck Klosterman wrote an absolutely fascinating essay for Grantland describing the significance of Tim Tebow and why he seems to be so polarizing as a professional football player. It’s mostly about Tebow and football, except that it’s not – it’s about so much more than that:
I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West. I’m sure a few hardcores might, but not many. However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume this assumption infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he’s so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to. Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere. It seems like the thinking that ran this country into the ground.
I don’t think I’ve read such a straight-forward and correct explanation for why I get so nervous in a culture preoccupied more with feeling something than knowing anything. Also, I’m fairly convinced that some of the best writing happening today is on Grantland, the little sports website that could.
Cain Suspends Campaign
It’s official, Herman Cain has suspended his campaign. And he certainly picked an interesting opportunity to make the announcement:
The announcement, originally slated as the opening of his campaign’s Georgia office, featured barbecue, a blues band, and Tea Party movement supporters in colonial costumes, The Times reported.
Too bad. I suspect he would have truly shown brightly in the upcoming Trump-moderated Republican debate.
tweet of the day
In case you need more context.
Hudson – Against The Grain
I’m not sure if stop-motion is quite yet overdone, but I know for a fact that pencils haven’t had their fair shake in the limelight:
The new music video for ‘Against The Grain’ from emerging Melbourne indie-folk artist Hudson sees him collaborate with film maker/animator/VJ Dropbear (aka Jonathan Chong), producing a vibrant and colourful clip based around a mainstay from our humble artistic efforts throughout childhood – coloured pencils.
Predicting The Future
If Steve Jobs predicted the future, it should also be pointed out that Bill Watterson had the same prescience, just with less optimism.
Image with a Little Bit of Context
I stumbled across this picture a few days ago and meant to post it sooner. The headline? ‘Cain’s Bodyguards Get Physical with Reporters‘.
Is that not the most comically over-intimidating presidential bodyguard you’ve ever seen?
Dead Pheasants
Creative-type Julian Harriman-Dickenson has been creating a body of work by scanning the bodies of dead birds and manipulating the resulting images:
Butcher’s counters aren’t renowned for their aesthetic allure and even the best taxidermy is frequently unnerving (something about those cold dead eyes). But Julian Harriman-Dickinson of Harriman Steel has created a body of work that defies this contention, taking a brace of dead pheasants and creating some truly striking visual imagery.
The feathery mix of colors and patterns are undeniably beautiful and the subject matter has me pondering exactly where I find beauty and why I find particular subjects moving. It’s a strange feeling — I’m told this is called art.
An Easier-To-Use Music Player
Now, why music? Well, we love music and it’s always good to do something you love.
Ten years ago today, Apple introduced a music player that would let you take your entire music library with you wherever you go. Since then, well, you know.
A Sexy Little Halloween
Grace and I have been discussing tentative Halloween plans the last few days and the concept of “sexy” Halloween costumes inevitably came up – not the plan to wear them per se, but their origins. Has this always been a thing?
That illustration is by Jillian Tamaki.
Book Cover Out of Context
Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book, but I have been on a bit of a bear kick lately.
(via)
Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?
Slate Magazine is discussing the question, citing several experiments during the 50′s and 60′s that seem to point to LSD as a catalyst for innovation and creative thinking:
Taken as a whole, the studies suggested that people who are creative to begin with may experience a slight increase in inspiration or insight during and after an acid trip. That’s not true for non-artistic types, although psychologists did find that most participants thought they got more creative on LSD, regardless of what the tests actually showed…
Despite the relative paucity of rigorous scientific data, Steve Jobs—who once suggested that Microsoft products would be better if Bill Gates “had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger“—is far from alone in his belief. Francis Crick reportedly claimed to have envisioned the structure of DNA during an acid trip. John Lennon attributed the Beatles’ album Revolver to the group’s acid use.
Connecting the dots, the author doesn’t seem convinced by the studies, but it’s still a fascinating idea. Jobs was obviously a visionary, predicting technologies years or sometimes decades before they would be fully realized by Apple (this 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air seems to include prediction for both the iPad and Apple TV). That’s either serendipitous prescience or the product of some very constructive acid trips (or more probably, a combination of both). Either way, it reminded me of something Deron once shared (or maybe a book he was reading) that discussed the proposition that human culture evolved through the use of hallucinogens. Humans have had the same DNA for something like 250,000 years, yet only developed complex societies and culture in the last 15,000 or so – Steve Jobs just took it all a massive step further.
The Decade Since
I realize now that those in history whose lives were short and mean and threatened by sword and disease gathered and told stories not as leisure, but as desperately needed distraction, and reassurance that they were not alone.
So if art cannot contain or describe this event, and if for now the suffering is too keen to be alleviated by parable… if stories are for the moment not as critically needed, as courage, as medicine, as blood, as bacon, they can at least revert to this social function. As time goes on, this will all pass away into memory, into a story with a beginning and a middle and finally an end.
The above quote is from John Hodgman’s McSweeney’s column on September 25, 2001, where he discusses narrative in the context of the attacks. This morning, for probably the first time since maybe 2002, I sat down and actually pondered the events of 9/11. I sat and looked through the many photos provided by The Atlantic and read columns from that strange time, reflecting on what this would all mean. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it a decade later, but I think most striking is the sheer sadness and emotion captured through the lens and in the words that were written.
I jokingly told a friend last night that I remember where I was the last time someone asked me if I remembered where I was on 9/11. Nowadays, I tend to think in broader terms about September 11th – namely how we’ve responded with irrational fear to the slightest threat of terrorism in our post-9/11 reality. But I had a moment this morning where I felt almost shameful at how much I had allowed things to gloss over in the years since. Not in a hollow sort of “remembering 9/11 as a form of dime store patriotism” way, but more in how much we’ve let the genuine feelings of unity and pride we felt for our neighbors slip, thrown away as talking points in elections or manipulated as tools of demagogues.
If September 11th was ever meant to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, I sometimes wonder whether we’ll ever get the closure of a happy ending.
As the Spirit Moveth
A pentecostal minister has provoked the ire of her fellow believers after praying in tongues via her Facebook wall.
(The Dish)
That Inspired Extra Seventh
Scholars at the Hebrew University have spent the last 53 years studying variations on the ancient text in order to publish an authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. Along the way, they made some interesting discoveries about the evolution of the holy book:
The Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some verses, including ones containing a prophecy about the seizure and return of Temple implements by Babylonian soldiers, appear to have been added after the events happened.
Interesting to see that the predictions of biblical scholars are now being verified – though, I imagine for many, these sorts of things won’t matter. Fun fact: the last member of the original team of scholars, who started with the project in 1958, died last year at age 90.
