Photoshop Diplomacy

The revelation that Iran manipulated images of recent weapons exercises to include more missiles has predictably set alight the internet meme machine. I like this image in particular. It reminds me of a great Mark Twain quote: "Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense."



July 12th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Iran, international relations, Hello Kitty

Step 2: Put your kid in that box

From the Smithsonian's Flickr stream of historic, public domain photos, a shot commemorating the end of being able to ship your children by postal mail:



Reads the caption: "This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples."

Reposted from BoingBoing.
June 28th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: its my kid in a box baby

Suits me

Israeli suit manufacturer Bagir apparently clothes 1 in 6 European men. And now they are going to start doing it with plastic bottles.

Their new line of Eco-Gir clothing replaces wool and whatnot in favor of recycled plastic bottles. It takes about 30 pop bottles to fashion a complete suit that retails for $200. Lining and all.



No word on what happens if you put Mentos in the pocket of a suit made strictly from bottles of Diet Coke.

I do know what the Harry Rosen men's clothing store intends to do. So says Larry Rosen, Chairman and CEO, in response to my inquiry:

"Thank you for your e mail and for your patronage.

We will certainly be investigating the line of Eco-Gir clothing you mentioned, although we have no immediate plans to carry the Bagir line at this time. A new initiative we have undertaken is to ensure the recyclability of all our bags and boxes this year, as we do feel strongly about the environment."

May 27th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: eco-joy, PVC fashion, do want

Classifying Curiosities

I try not to repost all the glorious tidbits of miscellany I enjoy everyday from BoingBoing, but this piece is too incredible not to pass along.

Takeshi Miyakawa Design has come up with the perfect metaphor for our digital age. In an era when everything is miscellaneous, what better conceptual container than a recursively self-deconstructing fractal cabinet of wonders to put them in?

Cabinets of curiosities (also known by their far superior German name, Wunderkammer)have a long history. They became popular during the renaissance as a way for the wealthy and educated to display their knowledge of the world. Acting as a sort of periodic table of the elements for class, owners would display their finest and rarest curiosities in the upper-most drawers and arrange them based on their relation to other objects, either according to popular pseudo-scientific concepts such as "the humors", Ptolemaic cosmologies, or even Goethe's geologic models of Europe.

Takeshi's cabinet is therefore the perfect contemporary inversion of this concept, having no particular beginning or end and thereby placing every object in an unmediated relation with the others.

May 13th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Wunderkammer, fractal, miscellany

Copyfight Update

Here is the one 12-minute presentation Canadians need to watch to inform themselves of the ongoing Canadian copyright "debate".

The Harper Conversatives have proposed new legislation that will make many non-commercial aspects of "fair use" illegal on the internet, restricting Canadian creativity, commentary, and parody.

Prof. Geist's argument is that harshly restrictive intellectual property laws inhibit collective creativity, hamper incentives to develop new business, distribution and monetization models, pander to narrow "old-media" interests, and put Canada at a competitive disadvantage. He makes his argument by debunking copyright "myths" including the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM, aka anti-circumvention) technologies that lock down legitimate non-commercial acts such as home recording; the validity of locking consumers to the manufacturers closed standard (which is also anti-competitive); and the inability of content producers to protect themselves and profit under more open regimes.

In effect, these proposals place a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a minority few who simply can not be trusted to act in the public or cultural interest. Just last week, none other than Microsoft demonstrated this by declaring that it would no longer support its DRM-laden commercial music standard. Not only did this leave hundreds of thousands of honest consumers with worthless and unplayable music collections, it doubly punishes them for choosing to trust the corporation and buy their music rather than download DRM-free copies with the added flexibility to play on non-Microsoft music players and be sampled and remixed into new songs.



More info at Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

April 30th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: copyright, CIPPIC, DRM, monoculture

Worldometers

Watch the counter on human births tick by, a life a second, and tell me that Worldometers is anything other than an absolutely incredible website. It gives you an amazing sense of the living earth, its dynamism, and cumulative human activity by giving you something to sense. 6.6 billion is a big number, but it seems more tactile when watching the population ticker flit by. With every tick, I try to recall someone I know as if they were just being born. It is a heady experience to try and conceive of a life with every second, potential and actual lived experience and meaning compressed into a moment replaced only by the next and the next. What a wealth -- and what a burden. Probably your entire world will be exhausted in about 100 ticks. And for all that exhaustion, you then have to figure the sensation needs to be repeated another 66 million times before you've accounted for the human population of earth.

Try the same experiment with the other tracked objects. Testing the limits of the imagination to track the number of bikes produced in a minute (can you visualize 100 bikes as each pops into existence?) or the number of lightening strikes per second on earth (about 100) gives you a good sense of your sense of the earth, and your slice of it, on a daily basis.

April 29th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: simultaneity, worldometers, phenomenology, proximity

The Spiritual Algorithm

This is the first result of a Google Images search for "uncompromising beauty."



That's right -- it is the Excalibur 5, a window so convenient to wash that it truly is a beautiful thing. While grit and grime flit from this window like dandruff, the mind is set free to fret about other aesthetic matters. Such as the dangerous prevalence of order. Or the madness of having your wishes realized.

Now, changing the tense to create a non-existent word, "uncompromised beauty" nevertheless conjures the mien of courage precedent to any enduring existence. And indeed we find this:



This is no mere landscape though. It is framed by an advert which offers that "You Need Not Sacrifice Convenience For the Uncompromised Beauty This Parcel Presents!"

Google seems to have a curious privilege for confabulating beauty with "convenience" in one sense or another. It isn't clear which. Though in both examples it seems to be the convenience of having the time to think about things other than these beautiful things. In which case beauty would exist only to negate the things in which it is vested (things or concepts), and therefore exist effectively nowhere.

This is different from ascribing an "essence" to beauty as that which is uncompromising and uncompromisable. Essences have no home by definition, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they wouldn't find one in Google either. However, the twinge of melancholy in every beautiful object is that it is merely a trace or shadow of the beautiful essential potential. As a search engine, Google is a concept of concepts to which one would not be faulted for turning to divine hidden patterns. Can it be trusted to do so? In this case, Google seems to be up to something. There's a pattern displayed in these two images that seems to promote the value of convenience as pre-eminent to the essence of beauty. If we then search for the un-essence of beauty, what will we find?

Defining by negation, "compromised beauty" ranks this as the most representative image:



According to its parent website, this is an image from the 1990 Indian film "Haseena Atombomb". It is reviewed as "a masterpiece of gutter-trash-art. It is a breathtaking slice of the bizarre and the macabre as well as a searing sociopolitical indictment and commentary on a society gone haywire." The plot includes the following episode: "The film switches back to the present, and Atomic, having been rescued by Tubby on the emaciated Pegasus clone skips off homeward to enjoy her wedding to local stud, Cool Joe and village law enforcer who is one hell of a fellow. He also goes for white when it comes to transport - the four legged kind that is. Just as the marriage is about to be consummated the bliss is shattered as the vengeful goons who had been thrashed by Tubby return to satisfy their "animal lust"."

I'd say inverse Google is bang on. Atomically so.

April 24th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: no help from Google, priorities