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Month January 2012

Entries 10 Total
30 Jan 2012

Metaphor as metastasis

An op-ed worth reading, if only for the opening epigraph (and, come to think of it, the essential closing verb in the quotation below).

What if, instead of that playful word bubble, we tried something a bit more accurately descriptive when growth at any cost became the goal. Say, “tumor”: “the dot-com tumor,” “the subprime tumor,” “the derivatives tumor.”

Would anyone seriously gainsay the highest possible vigilance over the proper functioning of their own body or doubt the need for strong regulation? Who, facing the prospect of a tumorous outbreak or living with a body demonstrably prone to such outbreaks, would entrust that body to a band of physicians blithely committed to laissez faire regarding these fatal bubbles of flesh?

Words matter. Metaphors frame thought. Pay them heed and tend them well.

from “The trouble with bubbles,” by Walter Murch and Lawrence Weschler, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 2010

Originally published at culture-making.com.

29 Jan 2012

Patent US690236

An old forgotten bit of culture-making, which may seem hilariously small now, but on the scale of an early twentieth century milking shed, not insignificant. “The object of my invention is the production of a cow-tail holder which is very simple in construction and operation and cheap in its production and which will not annoy the cow or interfere with the milking operation and which can be readily attached and detached.”

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from “Patent US690236 – COW-TAIL HOLDER,” awarded to C. W. Colwell of Delhi, New York, United States Patent Office, 31 December 1901 :: via Tweets of Old

Originally published at culture-making.com.

26 Jan 2012

The quietest place in the lower forty-eight

Quiet, at least, when it comes to manmade noise. I like the quote from a neuroscientist earlier in the article: “Hearing is designed to get information from much farther away than your eyes can reach … Hearing is not something that evolved so you can talk to me. It evolved so you can learn about your world.” It tends to be best done, then, at a distance.

“Olympic National Park is the listener’s Yosemite,” Hempton said of his decision to locate his One Square Inch within the park’s forested realm. “In a single day, you can listen to an alpine environment, a wilderness beach, and a temperate rain forest. And it has the longest noise-free interval of any national park I’ve been to, and I’ve been to them all.”

Part of Olympic’s quiet stems from its location: It sits on a peninsula in a secluded corner of the country. The park is not crossed by highways, navigable rivers, or utility rights of way; and it lies west of the major cross-country plane routes. Only three commercial-airline paths encroach upon its borders. Alaska Airlines is the most active, flying overhead 37 times each day in summer, but it tries to avoid the park during routine maintenance and training flights—a concession the carrier made to Hempton after he wrote asking it to change its flight patterns.

from “The Sound of Silence,” by Virginia Morell, Conde Nast Traveler, January 2012 :: via The Browser

Originally published at culture-making.com.

25 Jan 2012

City Silhouettes by Jasper James

Beijing-based photographer Jasper James has a wonderful series of portraits of people reflected against cityscapes. The images are all composed in camera—no compositing or Photoshopping beyond simple contrast adjustments. The result—giant humans superimposed on tiny buildings—inverts the usual urban experience, where the buildings dwarf each individual.

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from “City Silhouettes,” by Jasper James, 2010 :: via Feature Shoot and Petapixel

Originally published at culture-making.com.

21 Jan 2012

Dinner with strangers

The author of How Proust Can Change Your Life discovers that religion can too.

Religions, he thinks, have the buttons and know how to use them. His book considers the Catholic mass, early Christianitiy’s ritual of agape or love feasts, and Jewish Passover rituals to explore how religions encouraged us to overcome fear of strangers and create communities. He then tentatively imagines a so-called “agape restaurant” where, instead of dining with like-minded friends, you would be invited to eat with strangers. It would be the antithesis of Facebook.

from “Alain de Botton: a life in writing,” by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 20 January 2012 :: via more than 95 theses

Originally published at culture-making.com.

16 Jan 2012

Paving the home

Cement floors and the horizons of the possible.

Starting in 2000, a program in Mexico’s Coahuila state called “Piso Firme” (Firm Floor) offered up to $150 per home in mixed concrete, delivered directly to families who used it to cover their dirt floors. Scholar Paul Gertler evaluated the impact: Kids in houses that moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation rates drop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given month dropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitive tests went up by more than a third. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers in newly cemented houses reported less depression and greater life satisfaction.) By 2005, Piso Firme had spread to other states, and 300,000 households—about 10 percent of dirt-floor houses in Mexico—had taken part in the program.

It helps if the street outside the house gets paved, too—not so much for health reasons as for economic ones. Economists Marco Gonzalez-Navarro and Climent Quintana-Domeque found in a 2010 study that paving the street in the town of Acayucan, Mexico, added more than 50 percent to land values and caused a 31 percent rise in rental values. It also considerably increased households’ access to credit. As a result, households on paved streets were 40 percent more likely to have cars.

From “Paving Paradise”, by Charles Kenny, Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2012 :: via Koranteng

Originally published at culture-making.com.

14 Jan 2012

Forever Bicycles, by Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has an exhibition running through the end of this month at the Taipei Fine Art Museum—his first large-scale solo show, apparently, in the Chinese world. The show features a wide range of works in the border zone between sculpture and found object assembly. The knockout piece is undoubtedly this one, a layered vertical labyrinth of 1200 bicycles (sans seats and handlebars). The exhibition, incidentally, is titled Absent because Ai remains under a travel ban in China and won’t be able to attend.

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from “Forever Bicycles,” by Ai Weiwei, Taipei Art Museum, 2011 :: via Co.Design

Originally published at culture-making.com.

14 Jan 2012

fictional landscape, by Kyle Kirkpatrick

I’m pondering why this example of book-carving seems more attractive than the standard version. I think it’s because the books wind up resembling not just a landscape, but also an architect’s model of a landscape, with its stairstep topographical-map layers.

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fictional landscape with the small and minute,” by Kyle Kirkpatrick, photo by Leo Reynolds, 2009 :: via Collossal

Originally published at culture-making.com.

14 Jan 2012

The right to a horse

One of the key figures in the creation of the Internet suggests we should be careful about enshrining any technology as a human right. That it is tempting to do so says a lot about many technologies' ability to enable incredible (and deeply humanizing) things, but also about their tendency to seem more irresistible and permanent than they really are.

[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

from “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right,” by Vint Cerf, The New York Times, 4 January 2012 :: via Wired.com

Originally published at culture-making.com.

14 Jan 2012

New Years Rulin’s

From a list of folk singer Woody Guthrie's 1942 New Year's resolutions: a collection of low and high goals. The second page gets more metaphorical and far-seeing ("19. KEEP HOPING MACHINE RUNNING"; "31. LOVE EVERYBODY"). The item before "PLAY AND SING GOOD" strikes a pang: "SEND MARY AND KIDS MONEY", a reminder of the family he'd left behind for the rambling' lifestyle. Culture-making, however great, always comes at a cost. This July will mark the 100th anniversary of Woody's birth.

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from "New Year's Rulin's," by Woody Guthrie, 31 January1942, from the archives of the Woody Guthrie Foundation :: via Lists of Note

Originally published at culture-making.com.