This may test your credulity, but, nevertheless… If you check out the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, you can fully access a truly awesome book: the Census Atlas of the United States. Hard to believe .gov gets anything right, but in the world of possibility, there’s always the exception.[via VSL]
Abu Dhabi aims to build the first carbon-neutral city. That’s either irony or thinking ahead — probably a little of both. Don’t miss the video version featuring an animated fly-through.
“In Abu Dhabi, there’s an area of nothing but wind-swept desert. But 10 years from now, if all goes according to plan, a city of 6 square kilometers housing 50,000 people will rise in the United Arab Emirates — and it will be carbon neutral.
The project, called Masdar City, will burn no gas or oil, so its contribution to greenhouse gases will be minimal. Masdar is the centerpiece of emirate Abu Dhabi’s plans to get into the renewable energy market, a hedge against the day its oil wells run dry.”
Boatyard at Sunset, Yscloskey, Louisiana, 2001
A mauve sunset blankets a boatyard in Yscloskey, Louisiana, in 2001. This and nearly all the other fishing hamlets in the marshlands of St. Bernard Parish southeast of New Orleans were flattened in the summer of 2005 by Hurricane Katrina’s 20-foot (6-meter) storm surge. Years later, the region’s fisheries and oil and gas industries are still rebuilding.(Photo shot on assignment by Medford Taylor for National Geographic magazine, July 2001.)
Granted, there are some big problems inherent in using a consumer spending index as a yardstick of national health. However, an interactive consumer spending infographic can be elucidating. Kudos to the New York Times. [via link]
When I started reading a story about a guy who joined the NSA after working at Disney’s Imagineering, my curiosity was peaked. What could a guy with that dossier look like? Exactly like Eric Haseltine, with the most perfect crossover face you can imagine. As a neuroscientist and ‘psycho-ecologist,’ Eric not only overuses phrases like “bad guys” and “war on terror”, but you can readily imagine him tracking villains both real and make believe.
In Haseltine’s estimation, something called Intellipedia is the biggest advance in the intelligence community since 9/11. Intellipedia is basically an internal Wikipedia for people who work for one of the 16 US intelligence agencies. Its goal is to break down some of the barriers between these agencies in terms of information sharing and colloboration.
Right at the end of the session, interviewer Jane Mayer asked Haseltine if perhaps the Bush administration is overreacting to terrorism…if the mindset that danger lurks everywhere is appropriate and realistic. He replied that since he got involved in the intelligence community, he doesn’t sleep well at night. “I know too much.” [via link]
One of the most fantastic things about building a suite of tools around a community, instead of the other way around, is that users are always willing to pitch in and help out others with tutorials and forum assistance. It’s A.viary’s plan to build their applications with a very deep set of community tools, built around forums, wiki-documentation, chat, sharable workspaces and user-made tutorials like this one for Chocolatizing a Statue.
A list of the 50 greatest commerclal parodies of all time in side-splitting video. [via link]
If this year’s never-ending primary season has made you wonder about the virtues of the electoral process, just remember: It could always be worse. {And I would be willing to venture most of us remember exactly when it was — in the Fall of 2000} Fortunately, it’s been documented through HBO’s upcoming made-for-TV movie “Recount” (premiering 5/25), which revisits the chaos in Florida following the 2000 presidential election. It’s being called a “surprisingly suspenseful and darkly comic tale in an event whose outcome is never in doubt.”
Told primarily from the perspective of Al Gore’s chief of staff, Ron Klain (played by Kevin Spacey), Recount illustrates how both Democratic and Republican operatives tried to use tactics legal and otherwise to their advantage in the aftermath of the all-but-tied Florida vote. Brilliant performances abound, particularly Laura Dern’s devilish send-up of the memorably self-involved Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state, and Tom Wilkinson’s dead-on portrayal of James Baker, the Bush family’s relentless consigliere. But you don’t have to be a politics wonk to appreciate the excruciatingly accurate scenes that remind you, again and again, how history very nearly could have gone in a completely different direction. {After watching the trailer, I have one comment: “Wow”} [via VSL]
Out of the pages of Salon, an eye opening read on a new kind of luxury community in the heart of the American West. Different from the typical recreation-based developments, utopian in concept, the Ameya Preserve would be a place of unsurpassed beauty, where bright and uncommonly well-heeled people could, however briefly, take their ease in a community implementing the kind of cutting-edge technology that could one day save the planet. Only problem was when the locals cried green-wash, the elite developer cried class envy. Welcome to Paradise Valley.
40 years ago next month, the streets of the French capital saw workers and students protesting against the increasing levels of unemployment and poverty that were all too apparent under Charles de Gaulle’s conservative government. As a reminder of the power of self-initiated protest, May 68: Street Posters from the Paris Rebellion, launches this Thursday at the Hayward Project Space in London and brings together a range of handmade posters that were used to convey the protestors’ grievances during the uprisings. Before the show opens, we talked to the exhibition’s organiser and curator, Johan Kugelberg, about how this vibrant and uncompromising graphic art came about and what it means today… [MORE]
ABOVE: An anonymous poster from the Paris student uprisings of May, 1968
Isabella Rossini’s “Green Porn” series is now live on the Sundance Channel’s website. No introduction can possibly prepare you for this Zoobooks-meets-Hustler experience. [via link]
Commencement advice from P.J. O’Rourke that you’re unlikely to hear anywhere else. One not unsurprising point of note:
“Politics won’t allow for the truth.”
Tom Hanks has a preferred candidate, but what makes his endorsement interesting is not the person he chooses, but how he frames that choice. This video, which appeared on the actor’s MySpace
page, seems as much a comment on the celebrity endorsement as it is an endorsement by a celebrity. [via truthdig]
The wondrous art of the pixel.
Kirby’s Cupcake. A painting in the pixel-art-style. Created by Ashley Anderson.
Communication City. Pixorama one more time. iPods seem to be pretty happy. The six birds too.
Darth Vader. José Eduardo Contreras Moral designs Darth Vader.
The new fashion accessory {that might be a stretch since it resembles a leftover from “Bubble Boy”} being heralded as the “ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon.” The Nubrella. Just like it sounds, this hands-free umbrella keeps your Burberry and Blackberry conspicuously dry. Comes with its own tutorial: http://www.nubrella.com. Worth a look {would you really want to be seen in this?} and like the writer suggests, someone will undoubtedly try going over Niagara Falls in it.
Another eye opening read out of truthdig that targets the media’s consensus on the war in Iraq: Sunday’s New York Times had a series of articles marking the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” victory speech on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The title of the collection, “How to See This Mission Accomplished,” seems fit more for a motivational-speaking seminar than a critical intervention in the discourse of war. It gestures to the inadequacies that riddle the mainstream media’s analysis of the war in Iraq.
And then you begin to read the articles.
The Times asked nine “experts” on military affairs to each write a short blurb on the “significant challenges facing the American and Iraqi leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge.”
Of the nine:
Three currently hold positions with the deliriously hawkish American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Seven supported and/or participated in the war from its infancy.
Four currently support the U.S. occupation of Iraq without any mention of a troop reduction.
The Digital Scriptorium is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
Live television — two words that conjure up excitement, suspense, and a good kind of danger — is today mostly defined by sporting events, breaking news from the campaign trail, or yet another chance to watch Paula Abdul steer TV’s most lucrative vehicle into a concrete barrier wall.
Back in its day, however, television was nearly all live — and frequently great, if this five-minute clip gaining new life on the Web is any indication. Watch as Sid Caesar (star of Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour) deftly pantomimes a domestic argument with Nanette Fabray — a sort of battling Bickersons meets Beethoven. Caesar’s legacy has often been overshadowed by the later careers of his writing staff (Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon). But as this sketch delightfully demonstrates, Caesar needed very few words — if any — to bring down the house. A classic! [via VSL]
New research shows for the first time that we process cash and social values in the same part of our brain (the striatum)—and likely weigh them against one another when making decisions. So what’s more important—money or social standing? It might be the latter, according to two new studies published in the journal Neuron.
“Our study shows that both behaviorally and in the brain, people place an importance on social status,” says Caroline Zink, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md., and co-author of one of studies. “It’s hugely influential even [when we're not] in direct competition with someone else.”
On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television. It is a documentary most Americans will never see, explaining how the gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
“For millennia, farmers have saved seeds from season to season. But when Monsanto developed GM seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, Monsanto patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed for seed patents in a five-to-four decision, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply.” [via link]
This past Saturday, May 3, scrapbooking enthusiasts across the United States celebrated National Scrapbooking Day, heralding the meteoric rise of a pastime which has, over the course of the past decade, become the nation’s fastest-growing hobby.
But what of the countless numbers of scrapbooks produced in the years preceding this booming trend? Herewith, an excerpt from my next book, which traces the history of scrapbooking in America during the first half of the Twentieth Century — a period that witnessed, among other things, the sinking of the Titanic, the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the advent of two World Wars. In spite (or more likely, as a result of) such hardships, people everywhere kept scrapbooks, filled to overflowing with things that mattered to them, fragments of visual evidence rescued from everyday life. Their stories, told through collage, montage, annotation — and even, as in the case of the scrapbook featured here, omission — reveal a remarkable snapshot of life in America at the dawn of the modern age.
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