Archive for June, 2008
Short doc about Karen Palmer, a dedicated female parkour
links for 2008-06-18
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and some recommendations about what to do about it
6 Questions for Boris Groys
Today’s cities are mostly accessible. One can even say that there is only one global city, with some parts of this city (for example, Berlin or Paris) only reachable from other parts (New York, São Paulo or Deli) by plane. Thus, the global city structure remains u-topian because communication between its individual parts takes place in air. That affects the cities immensely. Airports begin to be the new city centers—places where you can buy whatever you want, watch movies, etc. Churches are already there. The next steps are adding museums and universities.[...]
Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go though all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.
(via Tomorrow Museum)
links for 2008-06-17
Who owns the west? The federal government
The United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) - nearly 30% of its total territory. These federal lands, which are mainly used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and indian reservations, are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority.
links for 2008-06-16
OLPC XO 2.0 may be a glimpse of the future
Noted here earlier, the OLPC 2.0 indeed feels like the future. Really, anything else (short of the Nokia Morph concept) seems stale in comparison.
Here are some speculations at ComputerWorld about what the future may hold.
My del.icio.us tags, wordlized
links for 2008-06-15
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Scalia’s words sure sound like an implied threat. You liberals think Guantanamo is bad? Next time you won’t even know where the prisoners are held.
links for 2008-06-14
Russian elephant art
Graffiti in Shanghai
(via Wooster Collective)
Lawrence Lessig on the Kozinski scandal
Here are the facts as I’ve been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski’s son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.Cyberspace is weird and obscure to many people. So let’s translate all this a bit: Imagine the Kozinski’s have a den in their house. In the den is a bunch of stuff deposited by anyone in the family — pictures, books, videos, whatever. And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family’s stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won’t like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: “Hey look,” he says, “look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house.”
I take it anyone would agree that it would outrageous for someone to publish the stuff this disgruntled sort produced. Obviously, within limits: if there were illegal material (child porn, for example), we’d likely ignore the trespass and focus on the crime. But if it is not illegal material, we’d all, I take it, say that the outrage is the trespass, and the idea that anyone would be burdened to defend whatever someone found in one’s house.
I agree. Although I do think public figures, like judges, should be subject to more public scrutiny, waving some privacy as part of public life, this is absurd. Kozinski has done nothing illegal, nothing hypocritical, and there is no conflict of interest. Should obscenity trials only be tried by prudes who have never looked at porn before?
Also: 10 Zen Monkeys takes a look at the pictures in question
Short documentary about “reverse graffiti” artist Moose
(via Wooster Collective)
links for 2008-06-13
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This whole episode has been a hammer blow to the idea of “citizen journalism,” as bloggers with agendas and no idea of how to do reporting or corroboration spread a rumor using the tropes of reporting.
Excellent William Gibson interview
I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother’s family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I’m happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I’m into hybrid vigor.Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it’s not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.
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None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.
links for 2008-06-12
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The Spanish lorry drivers’ strike has started to cause shortages of food, fuel and car parts and the mood has turned ugly with one death and 15 arrests.
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Mobile for Good (M4G) is a social franchise project designed to use mobile phone technology to help alleviate poverty and improve the lives of people in the developing world
“Green Blade” Slices LA Skyline
Life goes on in Tehran
A former LA resident photo documents his new life in Iran.
When I was leaving Los Angeles, many of my friends were worried for me. They thought I was jumping into a war zone. Soon after moving to Iran I shared a few photos with them and assured them that all is safe and normal. But I soon realized how little they knew about Iran. Their fears and lack of knowledge about Iran is justified and a result of negative portrayal of this country in the Western media — as well as sound bites from a certain controversial President. So I decided to start a site to remind them (and the rest of the world) that life goes on in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran.
(via Dark Roasted Blend)
