Category: Arts and Culture

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Doomsday Vault

In the Svalbard islands, floating halfway between Greenland and Norway in the Arctic ocean, researchers have begun construction of a vault designed to house seeds of all known varieties of the world’s crops, in the event of global catastrophe — a Noah’s Ark for the plant world.

The vault’s purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. At temperatures of minus 18C (minus 0.4F), the seeds could last hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even if all cooling systems failed … the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing …

The vault is eventually expected to house some three million seeds. And in case any smart-alec seed thieves get bright ideas, the place is crawling with polar bears.

Question: If nobody knows where the Svalbard islands are now, how the heck do we expect the few Mad Max humans who survive to figure out where they are, or how to get there? Oh, wait – Svalbardians will probably be the only survivors anyway, so they’ll be all set.

via antiweb

Music: Francois Bayne :: Rosace 3 from Vibrations Composees

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Musee Mechanique

Redboxman Father’s Day ferry trip to Musee Mechanique in San Francisco, “one of the world’s largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines.” Astonishing to learn just how much engineering prowess went into some of these, long before anyone had ever envisioned a programmable EEPROM. And how some of the machines had held up to decades of use with minimal maintenance (others had been completely restored). Kind of surprised that Miles was frightened by a lot of these – not like him. Behold the power of antique animatronics (Flickr set).

The collection was recently moved into a warehouse near Fisherman’s Wharf from its original home at the Cliff House, and the new environment seemed drab, kind of trashy, and unbefitting of this incredible collection.

Music: The Yardbirds :: Hot House Of Omagarashid
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Mutato Visual

Care Bear Speaking of Devo, little-known fact about Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed media postcard every day, for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, backing materials. Some gorgeous, some insane, but these seem to have very little scent of the kitsch of late-model Devo. Selections from the 2006 set are displayed online; not sure where to find the rest of the archive.

Music: Jonas Hellborg & Shawn Lane & Jeff Sipe :: Time Is The Enemy
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Facing the Past

OK, the reason for the Time Forward poll: A physorg.com piece on South America’s indigenous Aymara, who visualize the past in front of them and the future behind, indicating that even some of the most primal and seemingly universal metaphors are still human or linguistic constructs.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time. Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

The article mentions in passing that roughly half of English speakers will answer the question about a meeting being moved forward two days from Wednesday as “Monday,” the other half “Friday.” My small sampling seems to support that.

The other question is how 2000 daily visits to this site can yield only 21 respondents in two days; maybe I need to do another poll on why people don’t take polls.

Music: Mission of Burma :: OK/No Way

via Weblogsksy

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Rot at the Top

Had the privilege of listening to a Robert Reich lecture last weekend. He maintains that there are four basic themes that run through most great stories and movies, and that “big” news stories can generally be seen through one or more of these lenses (two of them hopeful, two fearful):

  • The Triumphant Individual
  • The Benevolent Community
  • The Mob at the Gate
  • Rot at the Top

Pick up today’s (any day’s) newspaper and see how many of the top stories can be characterized in these terms. Examples from today’s Chronicle:

  • The Triumphant Individual

    • (new appreciation for Gore, Nixon)

  • The Benevolent Community

    • (new breast cancer drug possible)

  • The Mob at the Gate

    • (terrorism, immigration)

  • Rot at the Top

    • (disintegration of Bushco)

His message to journalists: This is just observation of a human tendency toward oversimplification, and the media plays into it. Maybe journalists have a responsibility to achieve better clarity by resisting the impulse to simplify. You have to hear Reich talk to appreciate the power of these metaphors – incredibly eloquent. Kind of a new Joseph Campbell figure.

Music: Nancy Sinatra And Lee Hazlewood :: You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’
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Serious Games

So much more goes on in kids’ heads than meets the eye. Steven Berlin Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) on Serious Games for IT Conversations — relates an anecdote about demonstrating Sim City to his 7-yr-old nephew, giving a fairly superficial tour. “This is the house where the mayor lives, and these are the ports where the boats tie up. These are my factories, but I’m having trouble with them. The workers aren’t happy, and I just can’t seem to make the factories profitable. See how the workers are all covered in soot?”

The nephew, who had until now been listening in silence: “I think you should try lowering your industrial taxes.”

Music: Prince Far I :: Shine Eye Gal
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Play Pump

Historically, villagers in water-starved areas have worked hard to manually pump contaminated water up from shallow water tables for drinking – water they then have to carry in buckets back to their homes. People spending their time as beasts of burden.

Inventor Trevor Field is bringing clean, fresh drinking water from deep underground to villagers across Africa with the Play Pump, which harnesses the limitless energy of kids. In place of the traditional hand-cranked pump, Field’s team installs a merry-go-round connected to a deep well pump on school playgrounds. The kids, who often have virtually no access to playground equipment, love it.

The Play Pump can be installed in a few hours for just $7,000, and can bring drinking water to more than 2,500 people — water that’s cleaner than what came from the hand pumps it replaces, since it comes from deeper underground.

Field then sells ad space on the pump’s reservoir to finance pump maintenance — and reserves one ad panel for AIDS awareness campaigns: “We’ve got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active,” he says. “It seems to be working.”

According to comments on the Frontline story, other companies are using similar solutions to generate electricity.

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Tubab
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Bastard Chairs

Bastard Chair Photographer Michael Wolf chronicles worn out, improvised, screwed up, tricked out, workhorse street chairs from his travels in and around China. Junk but not junk. Something in this work reminds me of what Amy does so well – revealing all of the humanness we leave behind in the inanimate objects with which we spend time.

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World Without Numbers

A pair of stories (reproduced from The Globe and Mail and BBC News) about researchers’ discovery in 2004 that members of the Amazonian Piraha tribe apparently lack capacity for any kind of math whatsoever — not even simple counting. A few relativistic number words – “one-ish” and “two-ish” describe many and few, but that’s it. They are, apparently, alone in the world in their lack of any kind of numerical system.

… the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting. Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can’t learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

So can they not do numbers because their language doesn’t contain the concept, or do they not have number words because their brains don’t contain the concept?

“The question is, is there any case where not having words for something doesn’t allow you to think about it?” Prof. Gordon asked about the Piraha and the Whorfian thesis. “I think this is a case for just that.”

Music: Paul Bley :: Line Down
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Up With Grups

It used to be that people stopped being hip when they became parents, but those days are long gone. Parents today keep their hip selves right on truckin’, kids or no, on into their 40s. New York Metro on the new breed of “Grups:”

This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.

Music: Blind Lemon Jefferson :: Chock House Blues