Author: shacker

Posted on

Unpainted Sculpture

Unpainted-Sculpture Last couple trips to Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, I had admired Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture — the depth and total flatness of the gray primer covering every square millimeter of the wrecked vehicle (down to the primer-gray “Jesus is Lord” emblem on the back lip of the trunk) is totally enveloping.

Nothing is as it seems; yesterday realized the wreck isn’t what I thought it was at all. Ray did purchase a wreck from a junk yard. But he didn’t paint it. Instead, he disassembled it bit by bit, cast every last junked part in flat gray fiberglass, then painstakingly re-assembled the car from fiberglass simulacra over the course of two years.

He has said of his past work that he was trying to “make something that was so abstract it became real and so real that it became abstract.”

This photo doesn’t do it justice – you’ve got to get up close to see just how convincing the final product is. So now the concept — and the awareness of the labor — that went into this work deeply affects the way I perceive it. I no longer see a painted wreck, something virtually anyone could have done. I now see a thoughtful representation of a wreck — but one that looks exactly like a painted wreck that anyone could have done.

I want to believe that art speaks and stands for itself, that it needs no back-story to explain itself. But this wreck — or wreck-representation — makes that impossible. The back-story changed my eyes.

Posted on

Sonar Victory

Many congratulations to the National Resources Defense Council for their recent strides in protecting whales and other marine mammals from mid-frequency naval sonar.

Two weeks ago, NRDC attorneys raced to court to block the U.S. Navy from unleashing a barrage of ear-splitting sonar into the waters off Hawaii as part of a massive military training exercise. Whales exposed to mid-frequency sonar have repeatedly stranded and died on beaches around the world — but the Navy refused to adopt even common-sense measures during peacetime exercises to help protect marine life from this deadly threat.

In an infuriating attempt to avoid our lawsuit, the Navy took the unprecedented step — on the eve of the Fourth of July weekend — of declaring itself exempt from the primary U.S. law that requires measures to protect marine mammals. But the court sided with us and found that the Navy’s planned sonar use violated a second key environmental law as well, noting that NRDC had submitted “considerable convincing scientific evidence” of the dangers of sonar to marine life.

The judge blocked the navy’s exercises and ordered them to sit down with NRDC and come up with a set of measures to protect whales and dolphins from the brain-splitting blasts.

Go mammals (us and them)!

Posted on

Grilled Banana Splits

Various recipes found online recommend grilling bananas in the skins (with incisions) or in foil, but that’s totally unnecessary. Yesterday peeled 20 bananas (yes, I was feeding an army), cut them in half lengthwise, and put them flat-side down on a medium-hot grill for about 10 minutes. A few unlucky pieces fell through the grates, where they’ll ultimately smolder into nothingness, but the rest turned a bit soft and came back with lovely diagonal grill marks.

The 2nd key to this sundae is caramelized almonds – toast slivers in a small frying pan, then stir in brown sugar until it melts and coats the almonds.

Assembled grilled bananas, high-test vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, the caramelized almonds, (and other delights) and a slab of drizzled caramel. It was actually somewhat risky, trying this banana grilling business for the first time on 20 guinea pigs, but came out amazing – if you didn’t know better you’d think the whole thing was sitting in a pool of brandy.

Posted on

Cambrian House

On the heels of the crowdsourcing meme — Cambrian House is going all-out to leverage the wisdom of crowds to conceive and build new products. How it Works: “You think it, crowds test it, crowds build it, we sell it, you profit.” Though I’m not sure why the testing comes before the building in that diagram, the idea is cool, and the site is building up a nice database of ideas waiting to be worked on. Hmm… looks like this is bigger than I thought: “CambrianHouse.Com was rated by Alexa.Com in the top 100 most searched Canadian websites.”

Why Cambrian?

The term Cambrian Explosion swiped from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos when describing the initial internet boom, is recycled by Reiss: “[M]idtown Manhattan’s valley of old media dinosaurs is besieged by a Cambrian explosion of digitally empowered life-forms: podcasters, bloggers, burners, P2P buccaneers, mashup artists, phonecam paparazzi. Viewers are vanishing, shareholders are in revolt, advertisers are Googling for the exit.”

Additional evidence that Cambrian House “gets it” — the use of vikings rather than pirates in their iconography (pirates are sooo 2004), and their stealing liberally from the BeOS desktop.

Posted on

Whale Watchers

Whale watchers in Norway got more than they bargained for recently:

While the tourists were admiring one of the great mammals of the sea, a Norwegian whaling boat approached and shot the whale in front of their eyes.

There’s a sort of cultural schizophrenia here, a country profiting both from selling the right to watch whales in all their native grace and also to kill them for profit. Not that much different from our own bizarre contradictions (we eat cows but not horses, chickens but not cats… why?) But weird when two sides of the public mind collide so viscerally.

via Weblogsky

Posted on

SMS411, Meg Cox

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two new domains:

sms411.net: How to use SMS to stay in touch with your friends and family, have fun, save money, get information, and maybe even communicate during an emergency.

megcox.com: Veteran journalist Meg Cox offers fresh insights and resources on the topics of her most recent books: today’s high-tech quilt world and contemporary family traditions.

Posted on

Bikes Inherently Dangerous?

San Francisco is home to the world’s most aggressive bicycle activists. It’s also home to one of the world’s most aggressive anti-bike activists. Dishwasher and blogger Rob Anderson has succeeded in convincing a judge to put a temporary halt to construction of any new bicycle lanes in the city, on environmental grounds (the lanes allegedly have “not received the level of environmental review required by the California Environmental Quality Act”).

Anderson’s premise is that bicycles are inherently dangerous and will therefore never become a realistic mass transit option. Apparently it’s never occurred to him that bikes are inherently dangerous primarily because of the extreme proliferation of cars?

Only thing worse than an irrational person is a mean irrational person. With power.

Posted on

websitegraphs

Websitegraphs-Bhouse websitegraphs lets you visualize a site through a system of dynamically arranged clusters, color coded to describe links, divs, images, line breaks, and other tags. Pictured here is this weblog, but every site graphed looks radically different. More fun than looking at the static images is watching a site being clustered in real-time – the animation is seductively elastic.

via mandric

Posted on

Tabs or Spaces?

Mentioned yesterday that I’ve been enjoying being part of a team programming project for the first time. One of the interesting things that comes up in a cooperative environment are all the conversations about preferred coding style — it’s not just you anymore, Buck-o. We’re all going to have to find a way to make our code flow together nicely. Conditional style, case preferences, and something I never knew was a long-standing religious debate before: tabs vs. spaces. All have been part of the conversation over the past six weeks (and all resolved amicably, FWIW).

Now the WordPress Hackers mailing list is having a protracted debate over the tabs. vs. spaces issue (apparently the first time it’s come up in three years). Jeremy Zawinski has a famous piece in favor of spaces. Lots of good arguments go the other way. I know where I stand. You?

Tabs or Spaces?

View Results

Posted on

News21

Got pulled off my regular job a couple months ago to work full time on the Carnegie-Knight “Initiative for the Future of Journalism,” an aggregate effort by five of the top journalism schools to revamp and renew approaches to journalism, and ultimately to transform the way journalism is taught.

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five participating deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.

Online now is a starter/brochure site, and currently all of the advance reportage is happening through external blogs. But a compadre and I (yes, we have two webmasters at the jschool now!) have been hard at work building a custom content management system* to meet the project’s fancy multimedia and nested template needs — the largest pure programming job I’ve ever been involved with, and the first time I’ve done any kind of team programming — a very satisfying experience. We’ll be rolling out the “official” site on top of our CMS later this summer. For now, the reporting fellows are scattered all over the globe, gathering material.

The project was recently blogged at Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, at Boing-Boing and also at Utterly Boring, though the interesting stuff is yet to come, once the story packages are completed by the fellows and we wrap up the CMS.

* Will have to post separately sometime on the old build vs. buy CMS question.