5x5

ancient aliens: a look at the three billion year old Klerksdorf Spheres mined in South Africa

∞: floating, figure-eight ferris wheel under construction in Macau casino

word wars: war reporting presented as a Star Wars opening exposition crawl

i am what i play: once in 1979, BBC 1 was turned over to David Bowie

life-long learning: an exploration of how architecture learns and grows after its been built

drivers’ education

The nonpareil BLDGBlog offers a fascinating and ponderous contrast between autonomous, driverless cars and one of select pilots qualified to operate planetary rovers who ply and steer in a similar sort of headspace.
While the unmanned automobiles navigate through a virtual recreation of our reality, the ensemble of Martian rovers—with the aim of allowing the little robots to ultimately exercise their own innate sense of curiosity, manoeuvres with a unique but directed compromise between their human engineers (the featured pilot honed her skills first operating tractors in India) of projection and instinct, as the distances between worlds are too great for real-time, defensive-driving. As our vehicles of both exploration and personal transit gain greater self-sufficiency, I wonder if those skeuomorphs, placebo-buttons and other vestiges of feeling in control will be retained even after choice or necessity is taken away and people are just back-seat drivers.

the big one or nxnw

Recommended reading from Kottke comes in the form of this absorbing article from the New Yorker on the science behind the hysteria over the North American Pacific Northwest earthquake that’s by the numbers long overdue.

Aside from the convincing and frightening exposition and eloquent, clear explanation of seismology and what geologists fear—as opposed to the fear we’re better at propagandizing (making useful and expedient) or thrilling but non-challenging cinematic spectacles—the discussion of consequences and policies that foreshorten the long view on planning and contingency was also quite thought-provoking, and not in the orthodox ways that dampen self-regard, response and precaution worse than the disaster or otherwise try to make things less scary. One of the more astounding points touched upon was how the expedition of Lewis and Clark did not think to ask the Native Americans that they encountered in the Cascades about seismic events—albeit, how could they know to, not that it’s like not being savvy enough to ask about a home-owners’ association’s by-laws before moving in, but it’s really quite jarring to compare Japan’s millennia of record-keeping (and the historic “orphaned” tsunamis that might give researchers clues about this region’s timeline) and their sobering embrace of reform and change compared to inertia and enthusiasm that might be characterised as geologic.

two hours of pushing broom…king of the grove

I have just started essaying the massive tome (the one volume, abridged paperback version) by the influential Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer. This ethnographic undertaking had its first best-selling runs around the turn of the past century and was absolutely devoured by scholastics and the reading public. Modern criticism is mostly directed at what strikes the politically-correct attuned ear as chauvinistic and racist and very much dated, and while contemporaries did wonder that Frazer himself was not as savage (or more so) as the primitives he studied in expounding such a monumental work premised on his own ignorance and confusion (the origins of the cycle of death and rebirth and the metaphoric rituals that have arisen that seem to defy explanation).
In Frazer’s own time, however, his work was most controversial in that Christianity’s customs were not spared from the rigourous analysis of how magical thinking creates totem and taboo and progresses onto religion. Subsequent editions of the Golden Bough, referring to the votive branch that gained Æneas entry to the Underworld and reminds me of the later parallel occurrence when Henry II (Henry Plantagenet, the Sprig-Bearer—specifically of a hedge called broom that was cultivated to form the enclosures of landholdings and a nickname that came before this encounter) of England and Normandy met with Philip II of France—under a elm tree near the border town of Gisors, between the kingdoms—and violently fell the innocent tree after their failed embassy (perhaps to negotiate a peace-settlement or as some imaginatively suggest the schism among the Western Christian Military Orders), tended to not subject native religion and customs to the same treatment—although it was clearly superfluous at this point since Frazer had already made his point. As I said, I am just getting started and it is a very dense work but I am already struck by the numerous lucid examples, which I think was a time for privileged witness before war and industry wholly swept away native superstitions, and categorisations of magical thinking and had never before appreciated how homeopathy—whether charms, potions or medicine, is based on the principle—misguided belief that ought to be dispelled, according to Frazer, that like engenders or attracts like. The Golden Bough is pretty dismissive of such recourse, no matter how strongly ingrained but is not an exposition on other merits over mechanisms and relations, and really leaves no room for alibis for practitioners other than medicine men. It’s slow-going, but I am excited to see how the argument progresses and to see whether the self-censorship was a faithful omission.

twenty minutes into the future or now we resume regular programming already in progress

One of the premiere moments for animation—that is, when it came to the small screen and was widely broadcast in syndication—was infamously introduced in 1959 with a distinct lack of animated sequences with the adventures of Clutch Cargo and friends.
Higher art with greater production value was reserved for the cinema, featurettes like Gerald McBoing-Boing to be shown along with news reels to the audience before the film began, and many great animators honed their talents, debuting on the air-waves later in the following decade, like Chuck Jones and the team of Hanna-Barbera. Utilising a process called Syncro-Vox that superimposed the moving images of the voice-actors’ mouths on to a cartoon visage, a lot of live action and stock footage transitions, the studio could produce episodes at a fraction of the cost, and although this series seems crude and decidedly inanimate compared to the next generation (Jones derided that early stage as “illustrated radio” and it was really rather not much more than a comic strip) but in defense of this flatness, the stories were quite involving and imaginative and offered a chain of cliff-hanger chapters to be resolved Saturday mornings and had quite a cult following.
Before universal audiences were exposed to a reference in passing in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction—the flashback scene when a young Butch (Bruce Willis) is presented his treasured watch nearly left behind as they fled and there’s an cartoon Eskimo with a human mouth on the television set, there was a more garbled and chaotic and perhaps more localised with the 1987 incident called the Max Headroom Signal Interruption in Chicago. An unknown man with at least one accomplice (disguised as the recently created British character Max Headroom and as a French maid, respectively) hijacked two broadcast stations in the city—I guess as a demonstration to show that they could but no one knows as they were never caught and their identities are still a mystery, ranted on air and hummed the theme from Clutch Cargo and made a few references to its final episode—which seemed to resonate with the otherwise bewildered at home audience.

fictophone

The editors at Public Domain Review are treated to the grand tour of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments by its curators and invite us to tag along.
One might suppose that instruments never created either due to impracticality, impossibility or cruelty (there are sadistic specimens of an organ and a clavier that were to produce notes and chords from the torture of humans and cats respectively) would not have much truck with with reality or cultural currency, having not existed, but there is an interesting under-current championed by writers throughout several ages that use hypothetical horns, woodwinds and acoustic chambers as a philosophical lens and prevision all manner of things, from electronic music, music therapy and technological progress, just as much ones you’d encounter in the orchestra pit.

oh weal, oh woe and quid pro quo, so little time, so much to know

Via the peripatetic par excellence Dangerous Minds, comes this interesting and provocative book review from the Guardian of the encroaching post-capitalist era that’s taking place almost despite of ourselves. I hope against hope that the prognosis and synthesis is correct—that it is time for us to be utopians and maybe no longer be ingrates to the comforts that we’ve inherited that past visionaries would have surely deemed realised. The capitalists system is failing us and will moreover be our downfall if not more carefully mitigated, but it seems that no lessons from the distant or recent past have made much of an impression. I fear that revolutionaries and reformers have woefully underestimated the insidiously opportunist and adaptive nature of their opponent. The wealth gap, the disparity between rich and poor, is a significant measure—but I am starting to think that it is only that, a measure.

While certainly a problem and has enabled modern day slavery and serfdom to continue and grow unabated, I wonder if computer-generated alternatives, the sharing economy won’t just be creating more capitalist-controls in different guises. The creation of markets always results in winners and losers. Something that’s very dear but dangerously under-priced I think might be the engine that keeps the old system of avarice going. Governments and corporate influence through lobbying comes cheap and it’s the working classes and environment that pay. Peddling a little influence has led to massive deregulation and a virtual defanging of those mechanism meant to protect those loser disadvantaged by emerging markets, off-shoring, outsourcing, tax avoidance (that makes the position of the scoff-laws stronger) and most importantly, in my opinion, the dismantling and privatisation of public institutions and services contracted out. The battlefield is littered with all sorts of examples that have resulted in monumental miscarriages of the public good—from mercenaries in Iraq to the horrendous response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans—but the phenomenon perhaps most disturbing and far-reaching consequences is the breakdown of the educational system with rising tuition costs, for-profit colleges, defunding public schools, and sponsored educational material. Without even addressing the hardships and degradations that teachers face, the students themselves are matriculating into a system where competition goes unquestioned (because the classes are over-priced but obviously will deliver the same riches in kind upon graduation) and critical thinking is discouraged in favour of obsequiousness and thus the system is perpetuated. What do you think? Can the Sharing Economy run rings around old-money or will computers simply put us all out of our jobs?

5x5

sweded, swissted: minimal, moderne typographic calling cards for punk bands

shibui: fourteen Japanese words that make any language complete

trollface: candid photographs of the Der Fuhrer deemed unfit for public release

29 dresses: a look at the life and career of Bohemian designer Emilie Flöge who costumed Gustav Klimt’s models

the sphinx without a riddle: fascinating and comprehensive article on the Egyptian landmark