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Entries for May 2021
Banksy Graffitied Walls And Wasn’t Sorry
Banksy Graffitied Walls And Wasn’t Sorry is biography of street artist Banksy written for children by Fausto Gilberti. Gilberti has also written kid’s books about other artists: Jackson Pollock Splashed Paint and Wasn’t Sorry, Yayoi Kusama Covered Everything in Dots and Wasn’t Sorry, and Yves Klein Painted Everything Blue and Wasn’t Sorry.
Lovely and insightful reflections on 20 years of blogging from Cory Doctorow. I nodded along to almost all of this.
Fauxliage - Disguised Cell Phone Towers
For the past several years, Annette LeMay Burke has been traveling the American West in search of disguised cell phone towers, collected in a project she calls Fauxliage.
As disguised cell phone towers proliferate, I find it ironic that instead of providing camouflage, their disguises actually unmask their true identities. The towers have an array of creative concealments. They often impersonate trees such as evergreens, palms, and saguaros. Some pillars serve other uses such as flagpoles or iconographic church crosses. Generally the towers are just simulacra. They are water towers that hold no water, windmills that provide no power, and trees that provide no oxygen. Yet they all provide five bars of service.
The photos are also available in book form. (via the morning news)
CDC says vaccinated Americans can go maskless outdoors and indoors in most situations. I worry this is premature.
David Bowie as Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton as David Bowie
It’s photoshopped (the original is here) but still. Mercy.
Everyday Objects, Sliced
Fabian Oefner takes physical objects apart and puts them back together into exploded/fragmented sculptures.
The sculptures of the Heisenberg Series are based on Werner Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle. This theory states, that you can not measure two separate parameters of a particle simultaneously. You can either determine one parameter and ignore the other or vice versa, but you can never know everything at once.
Oefner took this idea from the world of physics and created an artistic equivalent of it. The sculptures are made of five different everyday objects: shoes, a clock, a tape recorder and a black box. The artist filled these with resin and carefully sliced them into hundreds of individual parts. He then rearranged the slices into a distorted new version of the object, that lets you see its inner workings.
Through this transformation, the objects have a peculiar effect on their observer: When you look at them from a distance, you can easily identify the object. However, if you start to get closer to observe its inner workings, the shape of the object starts to get distorted and vanishes completely. As an observer you are never able to observe the object as a whole and its inner workings simultaneously. The more accurately we see one view, the less clearly we see the other.
When I first glanced at Oefner’s images, I thought they were uninterestingly digital — 3D-generated images digitally manipulated or some such — but they’re real-world things actually sliced apart. (via colossal)
Bart Simpson feat. Daft Punk & Giorgio Moroder
Part of what makes this so good & funny is the obvious level of care put into making it, right down to the smallest details. The audio distortion? Perfect lip syncing? The Doppler effect?! It’s just a meme, you didn’t have to go so hard! (via the xoxo slack)
“Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap”
Writing in the New Yorker and citing a report by Carbon Tracker Initiative, Bill McKibben provides some hope that we can address the climate crisis.
Titled “The Sky’s the Limit,” it begins by declaring that “solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over.” Taken by itself, that’s not a very bold claim: scientists have long noted that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too expensive to capture that power. That’s what has shifted — and so quickly and so dramatically that most of the world’s politicians are now living on a different planet than the one we actually inhabit. On the actual Earth, circa 2021, the report reads, “with current technology and in a subset of available locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. [petawatt-hours per year] from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global energy demand.” And this will not require covering the globe with solar arrays: “The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the country.” These are the kinds of numbers that reshape your understanding of the future.
But world governments will need to invest in renewable energy sooner rather than later and fossil fuel companies will fight tooth and nail to slow the transition to renewables. If they win in slow-walking the response to the climate crisis, as McKibben puts it, “no one will have an ice cap in the Arctic, either, and everyone who lives near a coast will be figuring out where on earth to go”.
Recent studies found that men who had Covid-19 were more likely to have severe erectile dysfunction, lower sperm counts, and decreased genital size. So…get vaccinated maybe, hesitant gents?
Winners of the 2021 Type Directors Club Design Awards
The Type Directors Club has announced the winners of their two design competitions: TDC67 Communication Design and 24TDC Typeface Design. (via print)
Who Invented Heavy Metal?
In this video, Polyphonic explores the roots of heavy metal, from the increasingly distorted guitar sounds in 50s blues to the fast-picked guitars of surf rock to the heavy rock of English groups like The Who and The Beatles to the first metal bands, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. (via open culture)
A high-level report concludes that the WHO and national leaders should have acted faster and more decisively to try to curb the pandemic. “It is glaringly obvious that February 2020 was a lost month.”
11 Reasons to Keep Wearing a Mask After You’re Vaccinated and the Pandemic is “Over”
- You 100% do not want to get Covid-19.
- You are immunocompromised. Millions of people have immune conditions that make contracting Covid-19 much more dangerous for them.
- You’re traumatized from “the mental and emotional toll of the last year”.
- Because you need to be around people you suspect may not be vaccinated or taking Covid-19 seriously (e.g. as part of your job).
- You’re not feeling well and want to make sure to protect others around you.
- Because you want to signal to others that you are being safe and thinking of the health and wellness of those around you.
- You live in a household with unvaccinated people (kids, for example) and want to make sure to protect them.
- Because your personal risk tolerance is lower than other people’s.
- You need some time to feel comfortable enough taking your mask off around others after more than a year of that very behavior being dangerous.
- Because you want to.
- But mostly because it is NONE OF ANYONE’S GODDAMN CONCERN if you choose to keep wearing a mask. Fuck off! Mind your own business!
The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition. “I want [to] build up another world that is rooted in collective wellness, safety, and investment in the things that would actually bring those things about.”
“The Woman Who Made van Gogh”
There are certain writers that, when I see their byline, I read their stuff, even if it takes me a few weeks to find the time. Ever since reading his excellent The Island at the Center of the World, Russell Shorto has been one of those writers. His latest piece, The Woman Who Made van Gogh, tells the story of Jo van Gogh-Bonger who, after both her husband Theo and her brother-in-law Vincent died within a year and a half of each other, worked tirelessly for decades to get Vincent’s work out into the world.
The brothers’ dying so young, Vincent at 37 and Theo at 33, and without the artist having achieved renown — Theo had managed to sell only a few of his paintings — would seem to have ensured that Vincent van Gogh’s work would subsist eternally in a netherworld of obscurity. Instead, his name, art and story merged to form the basis of an industry that stormed the globe, arguably surpassing the fame of any other artist in history. That happened in large part thanks to Jo van Gogh-Bonger. She was small in stature and riddled with self-doubt, had no background in art or business and faced an art world that was a thoroughly male preserve. Her full story has only recently been uncovered. It is only now that we know how van Gogh became van Gogh.
Because of her work, Vincent van Gogh is a household name all over the world and even the way people think about artists and their art forever changed.
Health Conspiracy Theorists Hate Living in the World They Helped Create. “By fighting the most commonsense public health measures at every turn, the health conspiracy theorists helped create a climate where more restrictive ones are looking…necessary.”
The Final Border Humanity Will Never Cross
This video focuses on one of my favorite astrophysics facts: 94% of the observable universe is permanently unreachable by humans. (Unless we discover faster-than-light travel, but that’s fantasy at this point.)
This expansion means that there is a cosmological horizon around us. Everything beyond it, is traveling faster, relative to us, than the speed of light. So everything that passes the horizon, is irretrievably out of reach forever and we will never be able to interact with it again. In a sense it’s like a black hole’s event horizon, but all around us. 94% of the galaxies we can see today have already passed it and are lost to us forever.
“Since you started watching this video, around 22 million stars have moved out of our reach forever.” And future generations, billions of years from now, won’t even be able to see any other galaxies or detect cosmic background radiation, making knowledge about the Big Bang impossible.
The Pantone Pee Chart
Urine color is an indicator of how hydrated you are and Pantone are the color experts, so of course they’ve teamed up with a Scottish bottled water company to produce a chart with 5 color gradations that help you determine your hydration level. But 10 glasses of water a day?! I’m not sure the science supports that, particularly since we get a lot of our recommended intake from regular food & beverage consumption.
It remains unclear where the “8 x 8” water intake recommendation comes from. Perhaps, this two-liter intake threshold is derived from a misinterpretation of original recommendations offered by the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board in 1945 as well as the 2017 European Food Safety Authority, which states the daily recommended amount of water includes all beverages plus the moisture contained in foods.
This means that the moisture contained in foods, especially fresh fruits, sodas, juices, soups, milk, coffee and, yes, even beer, contributes to this daily recommended water requirement. These guidelines go on to suggest that most of the recommended water content can be accomplished without drinking additional cups of plain water.
(via print)
Governor Abbott, Will You Save My Life?
Quintin Jones murdered his aunt in 1999 and is scheduled to be executed on May 19, 2021. He admits his guilt, his family has forgiven him, and in this video, he shares his thoughts about personal growth & death and asks Texas governor Greg Abbott to spare his life.
During his 21 years on death row, Quin has been the epitome of a prison success story. He entered at an unimaginable low, as lost as a soul can be. And through prayer, sobriety, reconciliation with his family, and longstanding correspondence with pen pals, he has found a way to lead a meaningful life, and even to enhance the lives of others. The victim’s family — who is also Quin’s family — has forgiven him.
Emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically, human beings are ships of Theseus — we are not the same people at 30 as we were at 20 or will be at 40. The death penalty is immoral, full stop. The sooner our system of retributive justice is replaced with restorative justice, the healthier and safer our communities and society will be.
On Monday, England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland recorded zero deaths from Covid-19. Lockdown + strong vaccine rollout saved thousands of lives.
Colette
Colette is a remarkable short documentary that won the Oscar this year in the Documentary Short Subject category. You can watch the film online courtesy of The Guardian.
90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine confronts her past by visiting the German concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora where her brother was killed. As a young girl, she fought Hitler’s Nazis as a member of the French Resistance. For 74 years, she has refused to step foot in Germany, but that changes when a young history student named Lucie enters her life. Prepared to re-open old wounds and revisit the terrors of that time, Marin-Catherine offers important lessons for us all.
Here’s an interview with the filmmakers. From our present historical distance, the horrific story and lessons of Nazism seem fairly straightforward. But as Colette shows, when you delve into the individual stories, the truth of people’s grief & experiences gets complicated. These stories are important to hear and to tell so we remember the real, human, feeling truth of how individual lives were damaged and wasted by the actions of the large and powerful.
Sports From Above
Photographer Brad Walls (Insta) makes aerial photos of people playing sports, providing a new angle on the actions of divers, gymnasts, tennis players, synchronized swimmers, and figure skaters. (via petapixel)
Vaccine Side Effect, or Have You Just Been Alive for 40 Years? “Q: Are you experiencing unusual nausea? A: I am nauseous, but it could be because I ate some fried food yesterday. Fried food upsets my stomach. So does spicy food. So does too much fiber.”
Half-Renovated Houses
When the mining industry declined in the Ruhr region of Germany, workers began selling their houses…but only half of them. Colossal explains:
When the once burgeoning coal industry in Ruhrgebiet, Germany, began to decline, many of the workers’ apartments were sold off. Oftentimes, new owners only purchased half of the building — miners maintained a lifelong right of residence to their quarters — creating a stark split between the left and right sides of the structure.
Photographer Wolfgang Fröhling documented a number of these split-personality houses where the two sides of the buildings have diverged post-sale, a particularly stark representation of gentrification.
It seems that con man Frank Abagnale, the basis of Spielberg’s ‘Catch Me if You Can’, made up many of his criminal exploits. We really should have seen this coming…
US Quarters to Honor Maya Angelou and Sally Ride
Starting in 2022, the US Mint will release into circulation 20 quarters featuring notable American women as part of the American Women Quarters Program. From the US Mint:
The American Women Quarters may feature contributions from a variety of fields, including, but not limited to, suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and the arts. The women honored will be from ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse backgrounds. The Public Law requires that no living person be featured in the coin designs.
The Mint recently announced that the first two women to be featured are astronaut Sally Ride and writer Maya Angelou. The designs for the two new coins were revealed in the NY Times yesterday.
The World’s Most Beautiful Gas Stations
I pulled some of my favorite images of gas stations from the following sources: Get Pumped: 8 Filling Stations Fueled By Great Design, It’s a Gas!: The Allure of the Gas Station, Gas Station Design — The World’s 10 Best Filling Stations for 2017, It’s Weird, But We’re Super Inspired by Gas Station Design, and Sometimes, Gas Stations Are Beautiful. May these buildings and their less attractive brethren soon fade into obsolescence, be converted to electric car/bike charging stations, or be repurposed for other things.
Thom Yorke, From The Basement
In 2005, Thom Yorke recorded a 15-minute set for the From The Basement series — just him, a piano, and a microphone. He sang Videotape from In Rainbows and Last Flowers & Down Is the New Up from In Rainbows Disk 2. Lovely.
See also Radiohead, From The Basement.
Low Poly Landscapes
Lovely work here by Elyse Dodge — these look like half-finished renderings by the machine that’s simulating our universe. You can keep up with her work on Instagram or get some for yourself in her shop. (via moss & fog)
Shadows in the Sky
Always a treat to watch a new time lapse storm video from Mike Olbinski. It’s in 8K as well, so if you have the bandwidth and the screen resolution, this is going to look extra good. You can see more of Olbinski’s breathtaking videos here as well as plenty more cloud content. kottke.org: home of fine cloud products. (via colossal)
The Otherworldly Sounds of Ice
The holes drilled into Arctic, Antarctic, and glacial ice to harvest ice cores can be up to 2 miles deep. One of my all-time favorite sounds is created by dropping ice down into one of these holes — it makes a super-cool pinging noise, as demonstrated in these two videos:
Ice makes similar sounds under other conditions, like if you skip rocks on a frozen lake:
Or skate on really thin ice (ok this might actually be my favorite sound, with apologies to the ice core holes):
Headphones are recommended for all of these videos. The explanation for this distinctive pinging sound, which sounds like a Star Wars blaster, has to do with how fast different sound frequencies move through the ice, as explained in this video:
(via the kid should see this)
The Fashionable Mark Bryan
For the past year, robotic engineer Mark Bryan has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram by cataloguing his daily outfits that include skirts and heels. From a profile in Interview:
By all accounts, Mark Bryan is an average, run-of-the-mill guy. The 61-year-old grandfather of four has been happily married to his wife for the past 11 years. In 2010, he moved from Texas to a town near Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, where he now works in robotics engineering and coaches a local football team. He loves cycling and fast cars and beautiful women, and he tries to exercise at least twice a week. Oh, and he looks great in a pencil skirt and a pair of six-inch stilettos.
He looks fantastic. If I have legs like that when I’m 61, I might wear skirts and heels all the time too. Here’s the caption from his first Instagram post in Feb 2020:
I am just a normal happily married straight guy that loves Porsche’s, beautiful women, and likes to incorporate a skirt and heels into his daily wardrobe. Clothes and shoes should have no gender.
A list of the 100 best sitcoms of all time. Frasier over Fleabag? No thank you.
How Internal Combustion Engines Work
Although it was first developed in the 19th century, the internal combustion engine is perhaps the defining technology of the 20th century. If you don’t quite know how they work, this fantastic interactive demonstration from Bartosz Ciechanowski is a great place to start. I lived in the country when I was a kid and helped my dad, who was a crackerjack mechanic, out in the garage a lot, so I know how engines work, but even so this is really illuminating, especially when it comes to the details. Turns out that an engine is basically just tiny cannons attached to a crank — and from thence the rapid industrialization of the world (and all the resulting benefits and challenges).
See also some of Ciechanowski’s other interactive explainers like Cameras and Lenses, Earth and Sun, and Gears.
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