Welcome to

Monkey’s butt is red.:

monkey’s butt is red. An odd but lovely little work by the video artist min oh. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin).

(Via Boing Boing.)

…or Federal troops to police the Homeland. Anyway you phrase it… this stuff gives me the creeps.
-Monkey

A Permanent Security Force For NorthCom: “The Army Times reports that the US army has commenced security operations in Northcom - an unstable country teetering on the edge of financial collapse - Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1. Luckily the local intelligence services have gathered a huge list - well over 1 million names now - of potential troublemakers for them to keep an eye on. Whatever happened to that ‘Posse Comitatus’ thing anyway ?

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.

‘Right now, the response force requirement will be an enduring mission. How the [Defense Department] chooses to source that and whether or not they continue to assign them to NorthCom, that could change in the future,’ said Army Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom future operations. ‘Now, the plan is to assign a force every year.’

“

(Via Peak Energy.)

Top 10 Worst Types of Blog Post (and how to fix them):

Anyone who writes will eventually be guilty of writing something bad. Most do so only incidentally, as a result of error or ignorance. It’s a sin of professional writers, however, to be systematically bad.

Following are some of the worst things that I’ve ever done … and worse!

10: The blockquote sandwich

Lede, blockquote, analysis, quip.

The form is simple, and done well, it makes for a perfect post. As a formula, however, it’s poison.

First, introduce what you’re going to quote. Then quote it. Then say what you think of it. Got nothing to add? Drop the analysis altogether, or replace the quip with a question for your readers.

It’s a vital part of the cross-referenced idea feast that blogging kindles. With insight and wit, it’s a powerful and laconic form of filtering others’ work. But it’s all too easy to do nothing but this as an alternative to research, reportage and in-depth review. It generates superficially meaty content quickly and with little effort–no wonder it typifies the output of those markets that still pay by the post and throw demanding daily quotas at writers.

Improve such posts by making every part count. If you’re ‘just linking,’ let the original speak for itself without adding half-hearted commentary. Try reducing it to a single sentence and hyperlink an active verb to the source: this echoes how people blogged before blogging was a business.

Related offense: Posts that try an humanize dry subjects by prefacing the real lede with a short anecdote. Blog posts—at least mine—are best when they’re about one thing.

9: The Reblog

This is rewriting something that someone else wrote, in your own words. This is the blockquote sandwich’s insecure sibling, who feels it has to work even harder to prove itself — but not so much that the author must engage in original reporting or insightful analysis.

There is an extended form of this, wherein a writer glowingly approves of another’s more substantive opinion piece by quoting all the best parts, interspersing them with an occasional interjection that amounts to ‘me too!’

Fix these by reducing it to the concise form, that lesser evil, number 10.

8: The Image Macro

Unless it’s your specialist subject or you’re a razor-sharp practitioner of visual catachresis, forget about lolcats and all the other cut-’n'-pastage. You’ll just make yours seem a commonplace mind.

When the urge rises to post such a thing, ask yourself these questions: why is this funny, here and now? What am I saying by posting it? What am I feeding?

Then do something entirely original that does all of the above, but which others will remember you for.

7: The Fisk

Fisking is when you disagree with someone by reprinting their piece one sentence at a time, adding your response to each as if you were a computer processing it one syntax error at a time.

Just cut it out. This is the disease of the internet sub-autist who cannot let even a single error go unpunished, because they’re mentally incapable of engaging the totality of their adversary’s argument or the abstractions that embody it. It’s one thing to treat written English like a compiler, but taking that attitude to your own response just makes you look too scatterbrained to compose a reasoned and self-contained critique.

Yes, yes, I’ve done this about eighty times.

6: The Snark

Snark is blogging’s rottenest bough. Few are gifted enough to pull it off as a general mode of creativity. Most can’t even crank out a single example without losing it to non sequiturs and awful similes.

The solution is not to try and build jokes when you’re in a sneering mood. Don’t set out to be a funny man. If humor doesn’t arise effortlessly from the subject as you write about it, you’ll gain nothing from forcing it.

Mean-spiritedness, contempt and ridicule make it seem easier to get a laugh, but it’s just not true. Instead, look for the unexpected to converge amid the mundane, then report it with a light heart in as few words as possible.

Pro-tip: when ranting on the internet, guard against letting it dissolve into snarking. This kills credibility if you’re sincere, and betrays your artifice if you aren’t. If you read masters of the form, you’ll note that what looks like simple sarcasm is often irony that hooks deep into assumptions that the author knew you would bring to the reading.

5. Look at Me!

Keep the trolling to forum threads. If you need attention, there are countless ways to do it without being a dick. At the very least, think carefully before publishing something deliberately contrary, unpopular or offensive. What exactly is your plan should it work? Are you ready to be identified, perhaps forever, with the response it garners?

Fixing this by being both respectful and ruthless. Respectful, by challenging your opinions with research and by not treating your own readership as a target for venom. And ruthless, by learning to distance yourself gracefully from your own handiwork should all hell break loose.

4. The Third-Party PR Shot

This isn’t the evil stuff, like astroturf or paid viral marketing. It’s the mundane burden of every enthusiast market, be it gadgets, games or obituaries.

In its benign form, such blogging amounts to a condensed press release, given proper context with some fresh analysis. But like blockquote sandwiches, one should either keep it short and sharp, or as a lead-in for something more involved. Something that maybe involves making a phone call.

How to fix: if you have nothing to add after condensing the specs to a graf or two, you had nothing to say about it to begin with and should not bother at all. Don’t write stuff you don’t care about.

The ‘colossal blockquote,’ bracketed with some perfunctory comment like ‘if they pull this off, they might…,’ is a particularly numbing form.

Sometimes avoidable compromises arise from ignorance of journalistic standards, or, in their most malign form, by those who consciously reject them on misguided principle.

A common example is when someone recomposes a press release as news so as to put someone else’s marketing under an editorial byline. This is bullshit and should not be done at all.

A relatively minor but related wrong is using marketing buzzwords, especially in headlines. This is hard to avoid, as it’s natural to want to mix up language: it’s the blogging equivalent of closing dialog with terms like ‘he muttered’ or ’she prognosticated’ instead of simply ‘he said.’

As as result, we often echo phrases like ‘unveils’, ‘unleashes,’ ‘declares war on’, ‘officially announces,’ and so on. Ciphers that add geek chic (’decloaks’) tire fast: use them only when context makes them apt. Exactly how often do you cover the latest Klingon battleship?

3: Fake News

Too many people think that fake news is easy to toss off. Most of it is dreadful. There are three necessary skills for writing in the style of The Onion. The first two can be explained, but the last is, in truth, innate. You either have it or you don’t. I don’t!

First, gain an intimate familiarity with AP style (or a similarly universal analog, such as BBC English or the libel-skirting lexicon of Florida tabloids).

Second, understand the inverted pyramid structure used by reporters. Even if you get the tone and language right, it won’t work if it’s applied to a formless journey around the subject. Start with the most important thing in the story, then proceed to detail and exposition. Absorbing this approach will improve your normal blogging, too!

Thirdly, you have to be a seriously funny motherfucker. The strict format makes it harder, not easier, to maintain the laughs. This is because the inherent humor of fake news wears off after the headline and lede, so the rest has to be particularly imaginative and cutting, as it must all lie within the self-imposed limitations of the newswriting format.

2. The Spec Bump

Sure, it’s covered in passing by at least two of the other entries here, but it’s so common and so foul that it deserves its own place in the shade. Almost all of us in this game do it every day, but it’s bad, folks. It’s really bad.

Technology is a product of mankind’s ingenuity. It raises bridges and flattens cities. It mows the lawn and collides hadrons. It’s fed, clothed and sheltered us for thousands of years, and now it will have to stop climate change and generate new energy sources, or we’re screwed.

So don’t waste energy writing about anything so boring that nothing beyond a few numbers are worthy of inclusion. What does it do?

1: The Top List

Yes, even this one!

The purpose is to aim a harpoon at our psychological inclination toward the ordered and curated, at our favor for quality rendered as quantity. Lucky 7, perfect 10, top 100; it’s a world-simplifying numerology to which we are addicted. It adds a hook to any old rope.

These aren’t going to go away: They’re just too much fun to write, and when they’re good, too much fun to read.

Pure, unadulterated evil, however, is found the meta list. Lists of lists. Websites facing one another like mirrors, a cloned tulip in every graf. Such things speak for oversaturation, for spent fuel endlessly reprocessed.

That said, would someone please do a top 10 list of top ‘10 iPhone flaws’ lists? It is time.

”

(Via Boing Boing Gadgets.)

Thoughtful Acts:

Above & below: ‘Push’ Table by Jennifer Hing.

Jane Fulton Suri’s wonderful Thoughtless Acts? chronicles, visually, ‘those intuitive ways we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking’ - effectively, examples of valid affordances perceived by users, which were not designed intentionally.

Observing how people actually ‘make use’ of/hack the products, systems and environments around them - emergent user behaviour - and extracting lessons and ideas which can then be applied developing new and improved products, is a cornerstone of IDEO’s human factors strategy, and it seems to have been very successful. It’s an intelligent way of designing.

So I was excited to see, at New Designers last week, some inspired projects based around exactly this kind of thinking.

Jennifer Hing (Manchester Metropolitan, Three Dimensional Design) has dedicated her work to just this principle (as she puts it, ‘I design around people’s natural behaviour, bending objects around the fine details of living’) with a pair of beautifully simple, efficient pieces of furniture, the ‘Push’ Table and Hallway Stand, both of which intentionally afford users what they’d like to do anyway, at just the right moment:

Clearing the table is a simple task made complicated by the search for an alternative surface to temporarily relocate anything removed. An easy and desirable solution is to push everything off the surface and out the way, yet this movement is contrary to what culture, experience and common sense has taught us.

This table is based around the ‘pushing’ action. The sloped surface gently catches falling items, containing them until next required. It allows the most basic and initial response to clearing the table to take place.

As someone whose filing system consists mostly of using every horizontal surface I can find to deposit strata of tools, books, papers, components, etc, the utility of the Push Table resonates very much. I can even imagine building (adjustable) separators into the sloped section, to allow a primitive physical filing system to emerge (but see also Anna Harris’s Ifiltro, discussed below).

Above: ‘Push’ Table; Below: Hallway Stand by Jennifer Hing.

The hallway… holds strong routines in preparation for departure, individual to everyone. It can range from busy and hectic to quiet and empty within seconds, it experiences different weights of traffic depending on the time of day and is the instant dumping ground for anything that may arrive through the front door. It is an intense yet brief environment… The Hallway Stand is the amalgamated solution to many of the little actions and issues we have in that particular environment. It provides one collected place for coats, shoes, bags, keys, post and anything else we allow to loiter there. The aim is to simplify and contain this highly functional area.

It’s angled so it can be leant against any wall, with the shelf/drawer/oddment tray horizontal, and has an array of peg-type hooks that by the look of it could be used for lots of different things. Again, almost inviting emergent behaviour. Jennifer’s personal statement is also, very rarely for a new graduate designer, clear and eloquent about what she wants to do: ‘I want to make better use of and develop people’s initiative alongside bringing ease and fluidity to everyday actions.’ I wish her the best of luck: this approach to design really is an open door waiting to be pushed, if only you can find where to push.

Above & below: My Table by Tiina Hakala

Tiina Hakala’s My Table embodies some similar thinking (as does her Stor chair):

This project started as a research how people misuse items, for example how we often sit on tables or hang our clothes on door handles. This ‘unintentional design’ worked as an inspiration for My Table. We often use our desks for something totally different than working… I tried to keep this in mind and find a storing solution for the endless items, lamps, pens, paper folders, etc, we keep on our desks.

My Table offers endless possibilities to customize your workspace. The re-configurable sheet metal parts slide between two tabletops that allow you to move them around and organize them in an order that fits perfectly for you.

Again, this is a clever and neat approach - the variety of parts reminded me of the kinds of add-on bins, brackets and workpiece holders often found around machine tools where experienced machinists have adapted their environment to match their workflow. (Looking in detail at how other people set up their workshops/studios/desktops (in all senses) is endlessly fascinating.) Tiina’s system uses a table top with a slot all the way round to hold the tab on the add-on parts, but a system with adjustable clamps (sprung or threaded) could also work very well, if perhaps not as elegantly.

In addition to the utility value, there’s also the ‘personalisation’ benefit, as Tiina (UCCA Rochester, Furniture & Product Design) mentions on her website: arranging these holders, lamps, bins, hooks and so on does allow a workspace to match the user’s mental model much more closely, while displaying some personality. (Still, I’ve held by the ‘messy desk a sign of a sophisticated mind’ philosophy ever since seeing a newspaper article with that title stuck to the underside of another kid’s desk lid at the age of 8 or 9.)

Above & below: Ifiltro table by Anna Harris

The Ifiltro table, by Anna Harris, is very clever indeed. As the accompanying cards explained:

Remove items from your pockets - Drop or place the contents onto the Ifiltro table top - Small items such as keys and money will filter through to a drawer below.

I don’t know if Anna’s thinking was along the same lines as Jennifer and Tiina’s, but the design’s addressing a very similar area, and it’s something that’s simple and, fundamentally, elegant.

It reminds me of an example I saw in a (GCSE?) design & technology textbook, where a student’s design for a ‘machine to sort two different sizes of marbles’ (a brief which may conjure up images of sensors, comparators, gates, etc) was simply two diverging steel rails made out of coat hangers, with two trays underneath, so that as they rolled along the rails, smaller marbles dropped into the first tray and larger marbles into the second. We don’t see that sort of design thinking often enough - I guess it’s a kind of analogue computing (I know I’ve gone on about it before).

What do all these projects have in common? They’re fundamentally about matching the product’s affordances to what the user would like to be able to do in a situation, based on observations of users’ behaviour and unintended perceived affordances found in artefacts. That’s quite a mouthful. We could call it designing for behaviour, maybe. It’s design to match behaviour rather than design to cause behaviour (which is most of what I talk about on this site).

But then, the affordance of, say, the sloping section on Jennifer’s table, means that a user will perceive it and be more likely (probably) to use it, than sweep stuff onto the floor. So it does ’cause’ user behaviour, in a way, as does all design.

I’ll come back to this idea, as once we start looking at products with more technological content, it perhaps becomes easier to distinguish the ideas of ‘product behaviour’, ‘user behaviour’ and ‘overall behaviour’ (an idea I’m grateful to Ed Elias for).

(Via fulminate // Architectures of Control.)

Recetas Urbanas by Santiago Cirugeda:

All the urban prescriptions showed next are public domain and may be used in all its strategic and juridical proceedings by the citizens who may try out to do it.

Recommends a full research on the different urban locations and situations in which the citizen may want to intervene. Any physical or intellectual risk produced by such interventions will be on each citizen account.

Santiago Cirugeda _ Alquiler de azoteas from tv.edgargonzalez.com on Vimeo.

A how to rent your roof and generate housing without paying the taxes.

(Via Eyebeam reBlog.)

I’d never heard of the guy but this passage from his book “Infinite Jest” strikes a very personal chord.

-Monkey

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace:
Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who’ve gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul’s core systems — these persons know firsthand that there’s more than one kind of so-called `depression.’ One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia²⁸⁰ or simple melancholy. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sud den to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and . . . well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become sche mata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. i.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.

280. Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.

David Foster Wallace
from Infinite Jest

(Via BlogAsheville.)

Quantified Self in the Washington Post: “In the discussion following my previous post about FlowingData’s self-surveillance contest, JAHKNOW kindly points us to a Washington Post article from yesterday about the quantified self, BB pal Gary Wolf’s notion that you can examine your own body through a data-driven scientific lens. The article mentions sites to help you track sex acts, menstruation, exercise, and a variety of other activities and functions. From the Washington Post:

Members (of the Bay Area ‘quantified self show and tell’ group) plan to meet monthly to share with one another the tools and sites they’ve found helpful on their individual paths to self-digitization. Topics include, according to the group invite: behavior monitoring, location tracking, digitizing body info and non-invasive probes.

‘Don’t you think it’s kind of obvious that if you step on a scale, there should be something that sends the information to your computer?’ asks Gary Wolf, a contributing editor at Wired magazine and one of Quantified Self’s co-founders. ‘Isn’t it ridiculous to think that blood pressure shouldn’t be measured at least once a day, if not several times a day?’

Wolf is a tracker whose particular interest is the secret workings of his own body.

You listen to his questions — posed energetically and frequently interrupted by excited laughter — and you think No, Gary, no!

Most of us would prefer our scale’s number never saw light of day, much less light of database.

At some level, Wolf knows this. He theorizes that the impulse to self-track is one part available technology, one part geeky, data-driven personality. So far, only 10 people have RSVP’d affirmatively to Quantified Self’s first meeting, which is scheduled to take place mid-September. ‘This is,’ Wolf says, ‘probably a very small subset of humanity.’

‘Bytes of Life’ (WashingtonPost.com)

Previously on BB:
• FlowingData’s personal viz contest winner
• Seth Roberts’ fascinating self-experiments

”

(Via Clippings.)

ElectroVee’s “Popstars” video:

The song on this video by ElectroVee is catchy. I hope he makes more videos.

(Via Clippings.)

Three letters come to mind. W, T, and F.
-Monkey

How to make a squirrel sandwich:

Video of a cooking show host and her son hunting and killing a squirrel. Next, she shows how to make a tasty sandwich.

‘I promised him a squirrel sandwich and that is what he’s gonna get after school. You’ve heard of tuna melts or patty melts, well why not squirrel melts.’

Saturday Night Live couldn’t have done better than this.

(via Finkbuilt)

”

(Via Clippings.)

Andy Rooney on Public Art:

(Via Clippings.)

The Rhizotron of Illinois:
(All photos by Howard Falcon-Lang, Bill DiMichele and Scott Elrick. Source.)

Over the summer we heard a lot about the Rhizotron and the Xstrata at London’s Kew Gardens. In published reports, these new attractions were always twinned together; in fact, on the official website, it’s the ‘Rhizotron & Xstrata Treetop Walkway.’ Since the Xstrata literally takes visitors up to the canopies, we naturally thought the Rhizotron was its subterranean equivalent and, in terms of scale, design and engineering, was just as spectacular.

Of course, this was before we saw photographs of the Rhizotron, when we couldn’t help but picture garden lovers navigating through damp and dimly lit passages, bumping their heads into gigantic (simulated) roots, watching all manners of animals burrowing and nesting in the soil (behind glass), and learning firsthand all the different soil horizons. (‘The soil has architecture?!?!’ the pasteurized denizens of the concrete jungle will cry out.)

It was also when we have already worked ourselves up into a frenzy by imagining and choreographing its spatial experience: first a descent into the abyss like Jules Verne, then all sense of geography gets lost — or you literally get lost — before emerging at the other end, squinting hard at the fullness of the British sun as you ascend up, up, up to the trees, the heaviness and claustrophobia of the earth replaced with buoyancy and vistas.

Alas, to the disappointment of our own making, we later learned that the Rhizotron is no more than a concrete bunker, not that extensive and probably not even wholly subterranean. Up against one wall is a bronze installation, a stylized root system inlaid with educational multimedia. On the floor is a strip of flashing lights. How all of these could engender a meaningful engagement with the hidden landscape is quite puzzling.

Consider, then, ‘the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time.’ The discovery was first reported by practically everyone the summer before, and it is finding its way through the wires again this week with the report that these ancient rainforests — one of the first to evolve on the planet — was wiped out by global warming 300 million years ago.

What has always fascinated us about these mineralized landscapes is that they were found in underground coal mines in Illinois. To see them, you would have to put on a hard hat and maybe pack an emergency oxygen canister, because here, the proverbial walking through a forest means spelunking through an extensive underground network of tunnels.

Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park open to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.

There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Up against one wall is a dense mat of ferns, and on another are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the ‘giants of coal age forests,’ the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.

The walls, ceilings and floors are plastered with complex geometries in such a way that we are reminded of incomplete mosaic floorings of imperial Roman villas. Typical of Roman paintings, we have images of nature decorating an interior space. It’s a garden scene, in fact: a rainforest of the very distant past, a mythological age when the U.S. was straddling the equator, rendered with the tessarae of ‘ancient vegetation - now turned to rock.’

As splendid as the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux. As marvelous as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, though this might have a truer version of the Creation story.

In the Archives:
Accessing the Wilderness, or: A Proposal for a National Park of Abandoned Gold Mines

(Via Pruned.)

Nuclear Nation: “Perhaps in the spirit of the Wonders of the World, the nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, has been declared a national historic site.

[Image: By Stuart Isett for The New York Times].

‘National Historic Landmarks,’ the Department of Energy explains, ‘can be nationally significant districts, sites, buildings, structures, and/or objects that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.’
In a late-August news release (PDF) we read:

U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Acting Deputy Secretary Jeffrey F. Kupfer today announced the designation of DOE’s B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark and unveiled DOE’s plan for a new public access program to enable American citizens to visit B Reactor during the 2009 tourist season. The B Reactor at DOE’s Hanford Site in southeast Washington State was the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium for the atomic weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II (WWII).

As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, however, Hanford is but ‘one of five Manhattan Project facilities designated as historic landmarks, including the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn.’ Another site is the so-called Chicago Pile.
The atomic infrastructure of mid-century American warfare is thus slowly being converted into a distributed landscape of historic monuments.
Perhaps it’s dark tourism with a physics bent – the national memory of nuclear fission, a geography of Cold War nostalgia. They are places where the atom opened up – a series of small entryways into matter.”

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

Future Slum: [Image: New flats, part of the AHMM master plan in Barking, England, specifically cited by the BBC as being so small that they're mere slums in the making; via Building Design].

‘Are the gleaming new apartment buildings of the past decade the inner-city slums of tomorrow?’ the BBC asks this morning in an interesting, if insufficiently argued, opinion piece about the state of private housing in England.
New, privately developed apartment complexes there – the exact same apartment complexes of visual interest to architecture magazines such as the one for which I work – might, in the end, simply be too small and too cramped to become anything other than the slums of tomorrow.
Affordable now, ghettoized later.
The problem, the essay argues, is that there are no real minimum space standards for private housing developments in England. Tiny flats suitable only for single men and women, or for weekend getaways, are filling up valuable land in city centers – which is great for the duration of a real estate boom, but which might have sociologically frightening future implications.
‘Alone in the UK,’ the BBC points out, ‘Scotland does have legislation on minimum sizes for homes in the commercial sector. Northern Ireland has rules on social housing – while in England and Wales many local authorities also have size regulations for affordable housing. But none of this covers private sector developments.’
One point, by no means minor, that goes totally unexplored comes from the BBC’s own table of apartment space data. There we see that the average apartment size in Italy is actually smaller than the average apartment size in England.
So why all the scare talk about future slums and ghettos? Is there a legitimate concern here that smaller living spaces might become crime-infested labyrinths when the economy dries up – or is this simply fear of other forms of social organization?
Nuclear families living in several comfortable rooms = good.
Single men and women living alone in small apartments = moral hazard.
In any case, I thought suburbs were the next slums?
In fact, it’d be interesting to do a kind of comparative slum futurology: to see what building types different countries and cultures fear will become the ‘next slum.’ What does it say about you, politically? On the left, perhaps, you think it’s the suburbs, waiting to be taken over by wildcats and gangs; on the right, you think it’s affordable housing.
But who’s got the data on their side?”

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

Why we drink:

(Via Life as an Artificial Lifeform.)

Did the Saudis do it again?:

By Tom Philpott

Oil prices have plunged by a third since June. What happened?

Damned if I know. This is an extremely murky market. Information about supply is notoriously patchy. As for demand, people are writing dissertations about the mentality of mega-fund managers who plunge into securities like oil futures one day, only to bail en masse another.

But from from Wednesday’s New York Times article, there are two factors driving the fall in oil prices:

1) The Saudis have opened their taps.

‘We have worked very hard since June to bring prices to where they are now,’ [Saudi oil minister] Ali Al-Naimi told reporters Tuesday morning. ‘We have been very successful.’ Mr. Naimi was referring to a pledge Saudi Arabia made in June at a meeting of producers and consumers in Jeddah to keep pumping at full throttle to bring prices down. The kingdom is producing about 9.5 million barrels a day, 600,000 barrels a day more than its official OPEC quota.

(On Thursday, Naimi announced Saudi Arabia would maintain its higher-than-quota pumping in defiance of a recent OPEC decision to cut production.)

2) Demand in the developed countries is falling, partly because of slow or negative economic growth, partly because of consumer cutbacks in response to high prices.

What strikes me is this seems like the same old oil market: Prices are tied directly to economic growth, and the Saudis have the power to push down prices just by opening their taps. Not so long ago, peak-oil zealots were assuring us that the Saudis no longer had to capacity to push down prices. Well?

We’ve been down this road before. In past times of heightened prices, when words like ‘conservation’ and ‘renewable’ started to get kicked around in developed countries, the Saudis merely flooded the market (cheered on, no doubt, by many of the same folks now knocking around the White House). The last time this happened, we got the SUV.

Falling oil prices complicate things across the political spectrum. If prices keep plunging, what does that do to the GOP’s ‘drill here, drill now’ strategy?

More importantly, what does it do to the green agenda? Rhetoric about the ‘end of cheap oil’ has driven much of the push behind everything from renewable energy sources to local food in recent years. What happens if oil settles in for a while at, say $50 per barrel?

Meanwhile, the OPEC nations themselves seem nervous about the prospect of a crash. Interestingly, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela — all of whom are more or less hostile to the U.S. — are pushing for production cuts. Good thing our dear friend Saudi Arabia is telling them to go to hell!

I think the message here is that the oil market is not our friend. We can’t count on ever-escalating oil prices to bail us out on climate change, or rebuild robust local economies. These critical tasks are going to require hard political organizing no matter what, and they may have to take place in a climate of cheap(ish) oil.

(Via Gristmill.)

Titles from Little Nemo in Slumberland:

AZ sez, ‘Here’s a beautiful collection of title panels from cartoonist Winsor McCay’s classic (early 1900’s) series ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’.’

Slumberland Titles

(Thanks, AZ!)

See also: Gigantic Little Nemo book does justice to the loveliest comic ever

(Via Boing Boing.)

China Wants UN To Help Trace Sources On Internet: “An anonymous reader brings us a CNet story, which begins: ‘A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous. The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the ‘IP Traceback’ drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public. The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network.’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

20/20 Report on Music Video (1980):

(Via Rhizome.org.)

Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” sung by octagenerian Aussie ladies:

The video above is taken from the exhibition ‘no future’ by Christoph Büchel, at the Sydney Biennale 2008:

‘no future’ transforms the gallery into a rehearsal space for a punk band of volunteers who are over the age of 80 years. in the space they rehearse the 1977 sex pistol’s hit, ‘god save the queen’, originally called ‘no future’, which was banned from BBC, but still made its way to the top of the charts despite this. the band gathers for practice and performs in public whenever they please during the gallery’s opening hours, during which their sessions are video-taped and recorded and will be released on DVD and CD at the end of the biennale.

christoph büchel at the biennale of sydney 2008 (designboom, thanks Susannah Breslin)
Image: ‘Lead singer jill mckay practices ‘god save the queen’ with her band mates photo courtesy of lisa wiltse’

”

(Via Boing Boing.)

COUNTRY MUSICIANS CAN’T BE DEMOCRATS!:

Here are the Red State Update guys talking about Toby Keith being a Democrat:

It might be useful for starting a discussion about the way country music is so associated with conservative politics and the Republican party today, and why we would be surprised that a guy like Toby Keith (who has proudly acknowledged smoking pot-liberal!-but also wrote the song ‘Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue’-conservative!) would be a Democrat-what does that say about our ideas of what a Democrat (or Republican) must be or act like? You might contrast that with the number of country artists in the first half of the 20th century who were often progressive Democrats or (gasp!) even socialists. It’s pretty fascinating how much the politics associated with country music have changed, and how ‘obvious’ it seems to people today that country musicians would be conservative, to the point that country music has in many ways become a symbol of conservatism (as opposed to ‘alt country,’ which is often associated with a more liberal outlook*).

For an excellent discussion of the early political culture of the California country music scene, see Pete LaChapelle’s book Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California.

(Via Sociological Images.)