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Cory Doctorow:

This “computer bed” starts out as a hinged desk with room for a PC, printer, and so forth. When you’re ready to sleep, the whole desktop swings to the floor and a bed with matress swings down from the wall in its place, converting it to a bed. It’s clever as hell.

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Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on May 6, 2006, 5:58pm

I attended a panel discussion in New York City last night, sponsored by David Haskell’s Forum for Urban Design. The attendees, as you’ll see on the invitation, below, represented a number of hefty publications – meaning the combined critical and journalistic weight of the writers in the room was almost enough to redesign Manhattan…

Ultimately, the conversation was both stimulating and worth the trip – but I came away thinking two or three points still needed to be made. Although some of this did come up afterward, without controversy, whilst talking to David Haskell and the panelists, I do want to expand on and clarify some things.
First, early on, one of the panelists stated: “It’s not our job to say: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks…”
But of course it is!
That’s exactly your role; that’s exactly the built environment as it’s now experienced by the majority of the American public. “Architecture,” for most Americans, means Home Depot – not Mies Van Der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you’d have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan – or San Francisco, or Boston’s Back Bay.
You’d also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique – or celebrate – these buildings now popping up on every corner. If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey – citing Le Corbusier – then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night’s panelists.
Put simply, if everyday users of everyday architecture don’t realize that Home Depot, Best Buy, WalMart, even Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, can be criticized – if people don’t realize that even suburbs and shopping malls and parking garages can be criticized – then you end up with the architectural situation we have today: low-quality, badly situated housing stock, illogically designed and full of uncomfortable amounts of excess closet space.
And no one says a thing.

To use a musical analogy: you can have a thousand and one interesting, inspired, intelligent, widely referring, enthusiastic, even opinion-changing conversations about music with almost anyone – including what that person listens to, why, what soundtracks they own, what “bip-hop” really means, whether or not “post-techno” exists, what they actually want to hear on the radio, should file-sharing be legalized, is Chris Cornell this generation’s Sammy Hagar (answer: yes), etc.
But to infer from that conversation – because nobody mentioned Stravinsky or Bach – that those people are philistines who don’t care about music is absurd. In other words, maybe my cousin can’t cite Deleuze and maybe he has no idea who Fumihiko Maki is, or even Frank Lloyd Wright, but does that mean he doesn’t care about architecture?
As it is, one critic writes for approval by another critic, who writes for another critic, who writes for some editor somewhere, or for the head of a department, and no one wants to step out of line. You want to talk about a videogame, or a Tim Burton film, or castles as described in the books of J.K. Rowling – but nope: it’s all Zaha, all the time.
Meanwhile, subscription rates are plummeting.

[Image: A single issue of The Architectural Review now costs US$22.99].

Further – though this may contradict what I say above – strong and interesting architectural criticism is defined by the way you talk about architecture, not the buildings you choose to talk about.
In other words, fine: you can talk about Fumihiko Maki instead of, say, Half-Life, or Doom, or super-garages, but if you start citing Le Corbusier, or arguing about whether something is truly “parametric,” then you shouldn’t be surprised if anyone who’s not a grad student, studying with one of your friends at Columbia, puts the article down, gets in a car – and drives to the mall, riding that knotwork of self-intersecting crosstown flyovers and neo-Roman car parks that most architecture critics are too busy to consider analyzing.
All along, your non-Adorno-reading former subscriber will be interacting with, experiencing, and probably complaining about architecture – but you’ve missed a perfect chance to join in.
Which brings me to two final points, and I’ll try to be quick:
1) Architectural criticism means writing about architecture, not writing about buildings.
Incredibly, in the midst of the talk last night, one of the panelists mentioned Archigram – almost wistfully – commenting that, despite a lack of built projects, Archigram still managed to dynamize and re-inspire the architectural scene of its era. This was done through ridiculous ideas, cheap graphics, a sense of humor, and enthusiasm. But, wait, what was –? Oh, that panelist must have forgotten, because he immediatetly went back to discussing buildings: not ideas, not enthusiasm, not architecture.
Architecture is not limited to buildings!
Temporary Air Force bases, oil derricks, secret prisons, multi-story car parks, J.G. Ballard novels, Robocop, installation art, China Miéville, Department of Energy waste entombment sites in the mountains of southwest Nevada, Roden Crater, abandoned subway stations, Manhattan valve chambers, helicopter refueling platforms on artificial islands in the South China Sea, emergency space shuttle landing strips, particle accelerators, lunar bases, Antarctic research stations, Cape Canaveral, day-care centers on the fringes of Poughkeepsie, King of Prussia shopping malls, chippies, Fat Burger stands, Ghostbusters, mega-slums, Taco Bell, Salt Lake City multiplexes, Osakan monorail hubs, weather-research masts on the banks of the Yukon, Hadrian’s Wall, Die Hard, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Akira, Franz Kafka, Gormenghast, San Diego’s exurban archipelago of bad rancho housing, Denver sprawl, James Bond films, even, yes, Home Depot – not every one of those is a building, but they are all related to architecture.
Every item in that list should be considered fair game for truly exciting, dynamic, and intellectually adventurous forms of architectural criticism. (And, obviously, many people already are writing about these things – including some of the panelists from last night. I’m just making a point).
2) Finally: The Archigram of today is not studying with Bernard Tschumi and openly imitating The Manhattan Transcripts. The Archigram of today works for Electronic Arts, has no idea who Walter Gropius is, and offers more insights about the future of urban design, space, and the built environment to more people, in more age groups, in more countries, than any practicing architectural critic will ever do, writing about Toyo Ito.
Videogames are the new architectural broadsides.

Being an architectural critic means writing about architecture – even writing about Le Corbusier and Toyo Ito, sure – but that means writing about architecture in its every manifestation: whether it’s built or not, designed by an architect or not, featured in a videogame or not, found anywhere other than inside a novel or not, whether it’s still intact or not – even whether it’s on planet Earth.
If a critic can get people to realize that the everyday architectural world of garages and malls and bad haunted house novels is worthy of architectural analysis – and that architecture is even exciting to discuss – then maybe the trade journals can get some of their subscribers back. At the very least, it’s worth a try.
Even if that means saying: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks.

Originally from BLDGBLOG on May 5, 2006, 9:43am

Cory Doctorow:
Annalee Newitz has a great feature on RFID hackers in this month’s Wired — she tells the story of various RFID hackers who exploit vulnerabilities in RFID tags to hotwire cars, steal gas, break into your office, and get up to other naughtiness:

James Van Bokkelen is about to be robbed. A wealthy software entrepreneur, Van Bokkelen will be the latest victim of some punk with a laptop. But this won’t be an email scam or bank account hack. A skinny 23-year-old named Jonathan Westhues plans to use a cheap, homemade USB device to swipe the office key out of Van Bokkelen’s back pocket.

“I just need to bump into James and get my hand within a few inches of him,” Westhues says. We’re shivering in the early spring air outside the offices of Sandstorm, the Internet security company Van Bokkelen runs north of Boston. As Van Bokkelen approaches from the parking lot, Westhues brushes past him. A coil of copper wire flashes briefly in Westhues’ palm, then disappears.

Van Bokkelen enters the building, and Westhues returns to me. “Let’s see if I’ve got his keys,” he says, meaning the signal from Van Bokkelen’s smartcard badge. The card contains an RFID sensor chip, which emits a short burst of radio waves when activated by the reader next to Sandstorm’s door. If the signal translates into an authorized ID number, the door unlocks.

The coil in Westhues’ hand is the antenna for the wallet-sized device he calls a cloner, which is currently shoved up his sleeve. The cloner can elicit, record, and mimic signals from smartcard RFID chips. Westhues takes out the device and, using a USB cable, connects it to his laptop and downloads the data from Van Bokkelen’s card for processing. Then, satisfied that he has retrieved the code, Westhues switches the cloner from Record mode to Emit. We head to the locked door.

://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=X7kpXF”>

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on May 5, 2006, 4:51pm

What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it’s good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York’s East River and boarded the British ship L’Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.”

Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” a cousin of Washington’s wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.”

w of two new books on the history of slavery at The New Yorker.

Originally by Morgan Meis from 3quarksdaily on May 7, 2006, 9:27am

Sam Anderson in Slate:

The range of material on the Web site YouTube is almost literally incredible—it’s like the largest talent show in the history of the world crossed with your boring uncle’s home video collection. You can see virtuoso guitarists playing TV theme songs, college guys pretending to be repulsed by ice cream, a robot dancer who might actually be a robot, and (for some reason) a girl eating an apple. There are kids’ bands covering inappropriate songs, James Lipton reciting bad rap lyrics like they were Keats poems, and endless footage of George Bush’s awkwardness at press conferences. If you like home video of iguanas, you have about 70 choices. The site has no organizing aesthetic or agenda. It’s a kind of anti-TV-network: an incoherent, totally chaotic accretion of amateurism—pure webcam footage of the collective unconscious. It can be a little overwhelming. And its users add 35,000 videos every day…

critic, however, YouTube is an invaluable resource. It allows us to study phenomena that have flown for centuries under the analytical radar. Take, for instance, the formerly mysterious art of lip-syncing. Once merely a private folk art, syncing has risen over the last 20 years to displace jazz, baseball, and rock ‘n’ roll as the great American pastime. It’s become the sole prerequisite of post-MTV fame and one of our most lucrative global exports. (We ridiculed Ashlee Simpson not because we suddenly discovered she was syncing—everyone knew that—but because she bungled it so publicly: It was a national embarrassment, like an Austrian ski-jumper crashing in the Olympics.) In bedrooms from Maine to Oregon, lip-syncing is the last real connection between a celebrity overclass and its fan base. It has become such a powerful symbol of Western culture that it was outlawed last year in Turkmenistan. And yet we know very little about it. What, for instance, makes a good lip-sync so funny that you want to forward it to your entire address book, and a bad one so painful that you want to hurt the syncer?

Originally by Robin Varghese from 3quarksdaily on May 7, 2006, 11:34am

From Science:

You hate needles, but you ought to get a flu shot. So what do you choose–one injection or the possibility, months later, of 2 weeks in bed feeling terrible? These so-called intertemporal choices present a trade-off between two outcomes that might occur at different times. Now researchers have added a new insight into how people make decisions like this one: The dread that lingers before something bad–a nasty flu, say–can sway the choice. Economists study intertemporal choice to predict behavior in various scenarios, but they only recently have begun to consider whether anticipation or dread might affect decision making. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his team, for example, have turned to brain scanning.

First, they put volunteers into a brain scanner and gave them something to dread: an electric shock to their feet. In the first part of the experiment, the 32 subjects were informed when the shock was coming and how big it would be. In the second part, they could choose between a big shock with a short time delay, or a smaller shock that they had to wait longer to experience.

Nine subjects went for more pain right away to avoid the agony of waiting.

More here.

Originally by Azra Raza from 3quarksdaily on May 5, 2006, 4:51am

From BBC News:

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science. They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish. The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world. Plankton form the base of many marine food chains, and some populations are being disrupted by climatic change. Zooplankton are tiny marine animals. Many live on floating plants (phytoplankton), and many are in turn eaten by fish, mammals and crustaceans.

More here.

Originally by Azra Raza from 3quarksdaily on May 5, 2006, 5:00am

"In which one ecstatic, idol-shattering poem heralded the ’60s counterculture–and spawned the myth of its own radical break with the past."

David Barber in The Boston Globe:

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden duly informs us, but when mythology takes over, anything goes. Or so it would seem, to judge by a new collection of essays, ”The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later" (FSG), commissioned by Beat hagiographer Jason Shinder to mark the golden anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s epochal barbaric yawp.

Ever since ”Howl" first appeared in its instantly talismanic City Lights pocket edition in the fall of 1956, it’s been hard to reckon where the poetry ends and the mythology begins. The Poem That Changed America? Never mind that there’s no parsing such a blunderbuss hypothesis-the startling thing is that any poem at this late date can still have the kind of potent half-life in the collective imagination usually reserved for platinum pop hits.

When the legend becomes fact, runs the imperishable line in John Ford’s ”The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," print the legend. In the case of ”Howl," it was a seamless transition: The poem was already legendary before it saw the light of print.

In the standard telling, it all began with a thunderclap on what Jack Kerouac later called that ”mad night" of Oct. 7, 1955, in an erstwhile San Francisco auto-body shop converted to a Boho art gallery.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on May 5, 2006, 7:07pm

From The New York Times:

Like most of his colleagues on the religious right, Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series, insists that "those who founded this nation" were "citizens who had a personal and abiding faith in the God of the Bible." If LaHaye means only to say that religion has played an important role in American history, he is surely correct. But if he is taken literally (as a believer in the inerrancy of the Bible should be), he is decidedly wrong. It is one of the oddities of our history that this very religious country was created by men who, for one brief but significant moment, had serious reservations about religion in general and Christianity in particular.

According to David L. Holmes’s "Faiths of the Founding Fathers," none of the first five presidents were conventional Christians. All were influenced to one degree or another by Deism, the once-popular view that God set the world in motion and then abstained from human affairs.

More here.

Originally by Azra Raza from 3quarksdaily on May 6, 2006, 6:31am

BLVR: You mentioned earlier that your stigmata studies were a counterpoint to studies of monsters—the former on wonder, the latter on horror. It seems now that this is related to what we’ve just been talking about, especially as an example of conflicting ways to explain phenomena.

AD: Right. I’m interested in the changing classifications of monstrosities. In the Renaissance, for example, there was a whole genre of quasi-medical discussions of monsters. I wanted to figure out how people differentiated monsters from one another. Unlike psychiatric disorders, monsters or monstrosities are anatomically inscribed on the body, so we have detailed descriptions of the monster’s structure, whether it was hermaphroditism or half animal, half human—thought to be produced by bestiality—or other things we recognize as genuine medical examples, like conjoined twins or people with greater or fewer appendages than normal. All of those conditions were classified as “monsters,” and I wanted to look at the ones which provoked moral reactions. Then you can see how those moral reactions became a “natural” reaction to a monster. And eventually, scientific explanations pushed the moral condemnation of monsters away, so that a causal scientific explanation was the only way to describe a monster. That is, after that point, a moral reaction was considered inappropriate, merely superstitious, something expressed by someone who didn’t know the true explanation.

interview with Arnold Davidson in The Believer here.

Originally by Morgan Meis from 3quarksdaily on May 6, 2006, 4:34pm

From BBC News:

The artificial sweetener aspartame is not linked to cancer, according to a report just released by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The European food watchdog undertook an urgent review of the additive following a study, published in 2005, which suggested aspartame was carcinogenic. But a working party said the incidence of tumours could not be linked to the artificial sweetener.

Dr Iona Pratt, chair of AFC’s working group, said: "The Ramazinni Foundation’s study showed an increase of cancers of the blood - lymphoma and leukaemia - in the rats." But, she said, the working group concluded that these tumours were not related to aspartame. AFC said the rate of the tumours was not related to the dose of aspartame, which would have been expected if there was a link. The working group believes that a respiratory disease, found in many of the rats that took part in the study, was the likely cause of the tumours.

More here.

Originally by Azra Raza from 3quarksdaily on May 6, 2006, 6:54am

Heading through a phalanx of paparazzi into a screening of the movie, I feared that I too–a big, some would say addled, Barney fan–would be swept up by the bad buzz. Settling into my seat, anticipating the sight of an artist running on fumes, I prepared for my own private Barney hate-fest.

It never arrived. Which means I now have to try to explain not only why Drawing Restraint 9 is better than many in the art world think, but why it’s probably the best thing Barney has ever done. First, what had been an art of exquisite parts with moments of solidity has in Drawing Restraint 9 morphed into a ravishing, wide-ranging, symphonic vision. This is Barney’s Moby Dick by way of Beckett: a story that takes place nowhere but that touches on everything. Barney is still clinical, hermetic, grandiose, controlling, melo-dramatic, and aberrant; his work can be claustrophobic, drugged, operatic, and tyrannical. But now he’s taking these qualities to new levels: This is the clinical-sublime, the hermetic-sublime, the grandiose-sublime.

rry Salz at The Village Voice here.

Originally by Morgan Meis from 3quarksdaily on May 7, 2006, 9:10am