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.

tafl top

Our gratitude to TYWKIWDBI for the introduction to the family of Nordic and Celtic strategy board games played out on a grid with asymmetrical armies with the player on the defensive clustered at the centre of the board—protecting a king or castle from capture.
Known as hnefatafl (fist-table—I guess for pounding the table and upsetting the pieces out of frustration over losing) or Viking chess, variants were played in the British Isles and Scandinavia for centuries—with the received rules written down by natural philosopher Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, but so rife with errors and mistranslations that the rules needed to be re-written and the original form of play was lost. Trying to reconstruct this ancient game, however, and watching it evolve has proven to be a fun and fertile activity. Learn more at the link up top.

ny-12

On this day, US election day a half a century ago, not only did Richard Nixon defeat incumbent Democratic vice president and presidential contenders Hubert Humphrey and George C Wallace, Shirley Anita Chisholm (*1924 – †2005)—as depicted here by illustrator and regular contributor to the New Yorker, Kadir Nelson, commissioned in 2008 by the US House of Representatives to posthumously create her official portrait—became the first black woman elected to congress. Serving her constituency in Brooklyn and Queens for seven terms from 1969 to 1983, Chisholm also campaigned for president herself in 1972.