button copy (11. 106)

Via Curious Brain, we enjoyed this short montage from Daniel McKee (previously) to music by Resonate that cycles through international traffic signs, showing the variations through different countries on warnings and restrictions. The title refers to the retroflective elements that follow the contours of sign legends caught by oncoming headlamps.

6x6 (11. 013)

schedule f: Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s plan to dismantle the administrative state, replacing federal workers with sycophants—via Miss Cellania  

chinoiserie: a grand tour of Rococo era architectural follies as homage and aspiration to Eastern aesthetics—see also  

disco demolition night: more on the publicity stunt that incited a riot and brought down a whole genre of music 

agrostology: of grasses and lawns  

we’re safety now, haven’t we: US federal consumer safety commission drops an album that includes some bangers—but hardly for the first 

time swing time for hitler: new audio book by Scott Simon explores how Nazis banned jazz as degenerate art and repurposed it to dispirit the Allies—with more on Lord Haw-Haw and other propagandists

 synchronoptica

one year ago: MERS-CoV (2012),  the premier of West Wing (1999), Putin addresses the public and announces a draft plus an early Hobbit computer game

two years ago: assorted links to revisit plus Fiddler on the Roof (1964)

three years ago: Ruth Bader Ginsburg lies in state, the last day of summer, more links to enjoy plus dazzling skylines made of dot-stickers

four years ago: exploring the Messel Pit plus a highly idiosyncratic language

five years ago: rehabilitating coral ecosystems with electricity, an AI makes college course catalogues, typhoon naming conventions plus an M-class exoplanet

the perils of penelope (10. 975)

Via ibīdem, we are referred a seemingly endless, seemingly exhaustive (there must be a reason for the particular signage and an attendant tale of tragedy) and international gallery replete with all pictogram figures in all variety of calamities as cautionary tales (see also) about potential dismemberment, electrocution, restricted areas and especially slips, trips and falls.

karambolage

From 1942 to 1990, Arnold Odermatt was employed as a forensics photographer for the Swiss canton of Nidwalden whose extensive portfolio documents encroaching modernity into this once isolated area, especially in traffic accidents, taking a second photograph for his own personal collection once the injured had been taken away.
Though his fascination is morbid and inscrutable as his motivation was never stated and the existence of the images were only disclosed by accident (his filmmaker son discovering the trove in a box in the attic one day and published them in a book that garnered attention in the late 1990s at the Frankfurter Buchmesse), there is, one might conjecture, a restorative property in seeing these husks of vehicles in an austere light, unmoving without drivers and passengers. Much more to explore at the link above including several galleries of Odermatt’s compositions, which includes many candid, happy scenes artfully captured as well.

anthropomorphic test device

Unveiled last February, the hyper-realistic, pliable figure known as Graham designed by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini (in collaboration with a forensics expert and a trauma surgeon) whose anatomical frame is modified to withstand low-impact car collisions has been nominated for London’s Design Museum annual award competition. Commissioned by Australia’s traffic safety board, the grotesque is sort of a reverse crash-test dummy, imaging how we might have evolved to survive automobile accidents if that were our only threat to contend with, and installs safety features in the passenger as a way to lobby the industry to make safer vehicles.

jellystone or where the buffalos roam

Via the always engrossing Everlasting Blört, we discover that not only is the generic human symbol resigned to his tortured fate of slips, trips and falls and now hapless goring by bison whilst visiting national parks, he also has a nickname, Helvetica Man. The origins of this luckless pictogram pre-date the typeface’s foundry and was called so to invoke the font’s neutrality—ever stoic, even in the face of the gauntlet of Olympian contests and undaunted by any and all hazards, and suggests the Vitruvian Man or one of those prehistoric victims of an avalanche or tumbling into a tar pit, unfrozen or extracted ages later.

rutherfords and risk-assessments

Immediately for me invoking recollections of that endless film franchise Final Destination, wherein some hapless teenagers have premonitions of freak accidents that are perpetuated by some Rube Goldberg chain of events and shoddy craftsmanship, the notion of the micromort, conceived by ethicist and information-scientist Ronald Howard of Stanford University, modestly and eloquently has further reaching meaning in terms of public literacy in probability and statistics, risky undertakings, and deflecting media bias.

As a unit or scale, the micromort roughly measures a one-in-a-million chance of dismem- berment or death from exposure to various activities—both bidden and unsolicited, like base-jumping, shark-attacks, skiing, drug use, quick-sand, terrorism, diet—allowing one to weigh the peril though in the end the odds seem to say on our side. I don’t think that this a model that insurance companies use, per se. Facts and figures can be easily turned into anecdotal evidence in support of any argument or newly-fashioned threat. Not to disparage the better intentions of keeping healthy, wealthy and wise, but the burden bore by saying that sitting is deadly and is ratcheting up one’s individual risk by—say a fifth, does not factor in prevalence and can be misrepresented as something huge and something that we’re morally obligated to counter. History is punctuated by moral panics and distortion, but even more so now, as we’re already couched in safety and leisure, and the idea of security and hygiene has supplanted superstition. Like the dread millisievert, the rutherford is also a doseage of radiation exposure and can also be easily taken out of context. What do you think? Does being informed carry with it a healthy degree of skepticism?