plumbline

This incredibly sharp, low angle satellite composite imagery of San Francisco, that we’re served up via Kottke, are the resolute heirs of undertakings like Britain from Above. Click on the image and click through to see it in all its detail as intended.  Given the striking unreality (a few exposures and filters to clear away the clouds but very much a faithful picture) of such vistas, I wonder if we’ve become overly attuned—even with the overview of take-offs and landings—to seeing the world as a something to be charted and parcelled from the perspective of a bombardier. Learn more and discover a larger gallery at the link up top.

challenge round

Via Maps Mania and just in time for the pivotal US midterm elections, Randall Munroe has collaborated with Kelsey Harris and Max Goodman to create an interactive xkcd-style map (previously) to chart all the contested races from congressional representative and governor down to county-clerk and dog-catcher. Names and party affiliation are indicated, linking to the website of the candidate and campaign, and the relative size represents the stakes of the outcome and how likely it is that the incumbent might be unseated.

parola del giorno

The local’s daily vocabulary dispatch furnishes us with quite a useful word to express suffering from the winter blues—that are already gaining a purchase here north of the Alps—and to suggest commiseration over the weather: meteopatico. Most speakers eschew the dictionary form—which is meteoropatico and doesn’t quite come trippingly off the tongue. An English near-synonym might be depressione invernale for seasonal affective disorder but meteopatico sounds more poetic and approachable.

architettura minore

 We appreciated the chance to make the acquaintance of preeminent architect, planner and educator Denise Scott Brown through an exhibition of her photography, which Scott Brown begs off as any art that comes of it being accidental and incidental, with her focus being solely on the architectural vernacular of a place.
A large part of the show features studies of the Las Vegas strip that Scott Brown compiled in 1972 as a heuristic device to explore forgotten or estranged symbolism and meaning in contemporary context but features a whole portfolio of images she captured in the 1950s and 1960s of disparate scenes—Venice and empty highways among them.