Category: Out there

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Extreme Telemarketing

Never thought I’d feel sympathy for a telemarketer, but get an earful of this. My heart goes out to the poor guy. Kind of. Despite the caller’s general craziness, she does raise a point with him that I’ve tried before in conversations with telemarketers: The practice violates the categorical imperative, from which all moral action derives (according to Kant, and I agree):

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law.

In other words, don’t do anything that you don’t think all other people should also be allowed to do in the same situation. In context, one should engage in telemarketing only if one believes that all marketers should be allowed to call people in their homes. Consider the massive amount of advertising around us at all times, and imagine that every advertiser pushed their product by calling people at home. Universalizing the practice of telemarketing to all practitioners would make the telephone utterly useless, since it would never stop ringing, much as e-mail spam has diminished the viability of e-mail (which is only rescued through the application of great piles of technology).

When faced with the categorical imperative (though of course the caller does not call it that :), the telemarketer starts to lie to cover his position, saying that marketers do call his home phone all day every day, and that he doesn’t mind a bit.

Unfortunately, the caller’s philosophically sound position is completely blown out of the water by absolutely insane levels of hysteria.

Music: Sylford Walker :: Deuteronomy
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The Joker, Cute Version

For all you “cute” fans out there (you know who you are), Fatboy Slim has a new cover out of Steve Miller’s classic “The Joker” that’s killing me and Miles here. Steve Miller provided the backing track for some of the best junior high parties and surf sessions ever, but we never saw it like this:

Trying to imagine the PETA reaction. Am I crazy or is that Boot-say’s voice in the background? Way too funky. In case you’ve ever wondered about “the pompatus of love,” Straight Dope has the dope.

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Singing Science

Experiment If you had been an elementary school student in the 1960s, there might have been a dusty record player in a corner of your classroom, and a stack of scratchy educational records to choose from. And you might have heard songs like these playing in the background while you built a papier mache’ volcano with an orange juice concentrate container for its core, which you would later fill with baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring the night the parents came to see what you had been up to all year.

Why anyone can tell you what a mammal is
anyone who understands
they’re warm-blooded, have hair on their bodies
and suckle their young from mammary glands.

Hy Zaret and Lou Singer produced an amazing collection of science songs for kids back in the day as a six-record set, now available as an essential pile of 160kbps MP3s.

via Dylan

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Spam Plants

Spamplants Romanian-born computer artist Alex Dragulescu turns crap into gold — he’s developed a computational analysis system to transform ordinary spam into renderings of organic-looking plants (though some look more like sea anemones to me). via c|net:


For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail–including subject lines, headers and footers–to detect relationships between that data. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it’s sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant’s ability to grow.

Dragulescu has also done similar projects with architecture, weblog text, transit, etc.

Music: Lou Reed and John Cale :: Nobody But You
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Plastination

Plastination Spent the day at St. Paul’s Museum of Science — mostly to see the amazing Body Worlds exhibit currently on display. Dozens of human bodies with liquids and fats replaced by polymers for permanent preservation — through the miracle of modern plastics, these are the mummies of our age. Actual circulatory and nervous systems in exact shape of the bodies they occupied. Brains and brain stems and spinal cords pulled from the skull and spine and draped out behind bodies like capes for maximum visibility of the musculature and skeletal systems that lay behind, as the bodies continued to do the things they had done in life – teach classes, shoot arrows, play basketball, run.

In some examples, bodies had been sliced into perfect longitudinal strips, allowing viewers to compare the organs and organization of healthy and unhealthy bodies. In others, brains sliced and plasticized in place so you could see dendrites descend into cerebellum, out through base of skull, down spinal cord, trace all the way to fingertips. Penises and vaginas in full, un-sexy, functional display (you can imagine the comments left in the guest books). A man’s entire musculature free of bones, standing free, touching its own skeleton as if friends. A man walking with his own skin draped over his shoulder, as though it were a coat. “Winged Man” with all muscle groups splayed outwards, enabling you to see the marvelous intricacy of related muscles. A father with young child riding on his shoulders, mother walking beside, all three of them composed of nothing but their own blood vessels.

A bit of revulsion after first entering, quickly replaced with absolute fascination, both at the marvelous intricacy of the human body (or in awe of God’s work, depending on your leaning), and at the amazing process that makes the examples possible. A few videos online at the Body Worlds meta-site.

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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.

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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.

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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