The sculpture of Kate Clark

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Clark puts human faces on the bodies of animals to create some of the most haunting sculptures I’ve ever seen. These are powerful and terrifying and the memory of seeing even these photos is likely to instill existential dread in me whenever it’s recalled. But all this fear on my part is probably just a subconscious recognition that we humans are animals, often wild, and yet seldom betray these qualities with our faces.

Untitled (Black Bear)

The Chess Master and the Computer, a book review by Garry Kasparov

I recently got my first smartphone and I’ve so far used it for chess more than any other application. I’ll start a game while morning coffee is brewing, play it throughout the day whenever I have time, and finish just before bedtime. Though I’ve set the chess program at the lowest level (it only thinks for one second as opposed to one minute, or five) , I have never managed to be handed anything less than demoralizing defeat from my cell phone’s microprocessor. It doesn’t just hurt when I lose, it megahertz.

But I feel better today after reading Kasparov’s review of Chess Metaphors, by Diego Rasskin-Gutman. He puts my recent failure in perspective.

The number of legal chess positions is 10⁴⁰, the number of different possible games, 10¹²⁰. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game.

At the article’s conclusion, Kasparov offers some insightful comments regarding poker as the “game for our times.”

The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic

Kevin Quealy, a graphic editor at the New York Times, reveals the method to the radness of the interactive Netflix queue graphic that went up on the Times’ website last week. His discussion of their primary design considerations hits upon precisely what makes the map a popular success:

the hardest part about this graphic was designing the interface. We wanted readers to be able to find a given movie quickly, but a search box didn’t really work visually. We also wanted to give readers an idea which movies were most popular and which were most critically acclaimed.

I mocked up at least ten versions. None were any good. The challenge was navigation. As a user, I wanted to be able to see one movie in a bunch of different cities, fast, or I wanted to see a bunch of movies in one city just as fast. So there are two major navigation elements – cities and movies – but the map itself still needed to be the visual focal point of the graphic.

The ability to jump from city to city without worrying about the formalities of zooms in and out makes playing with it plenty pleasant. Not mentioned but nearly as important is the second sentence of the two sentence summary, just below the map title (the bolding is mine):

Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Some titles with distinct patterns are Mad Men, Obsessed and Last Chance Harvey.

A statement as intriguing as that is like a sheet of bubble wrap left in your path on the way to work: it’s not a clear invitation to play, but you’ll pop it anyway.

Reverse Shot's best films of 2009

It’s been too long for this space to be called the “Daily” anything, at least with a straight face. Which explains why I might be smirking just a little.

The last post was a film-related link from Jeremy and so this one is, too. Like Mr. Bushnell, I had also only seen one of the films from the title-linked list (it was Inglorious Basterds, which I loved). After tonight, I’m up to two; I just finished watching Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (it’s available to watch instantly on Netflix). I haven’t read Reverse Shot’s discussion of the film since yesterday morning, so hopefully I’ll provide a fresh perspective on things (and without anything but the fuzziest of spoilers).

Stories involving the death of a matriarch or patriarch often center on the coming-together of the children, who then grapple with their relationship to one another in this strange world, freshly rid of a central figure in their lives. I immediately thought of Nate and David’s struggles from the first season of Six Feet Under, a series that spent a remarkable five years holding the profundity of grief and the mundanity of funeral arrangement in a fragile balance. But where Six Feet Under used funereal decision-making as a vehicle (a hearse, perhaps?) for its larger human dramas, Summer Hours opts to bring the decision-making to the fore.

Instead of giving us sibling rivalry, Assayas has turned in a tight little treatise on how objects and practices of our past relate to our present (and, in turn, how this relationship relates to that of the people we love). The last third of the film also offers a poignant study in how our relationships with objects—even those very familiar to us—are determined by the context in which we encounter them. This is Heideggerian in ways I’m only just beginning to uncover.

Twenty shots to be henceforth retired from film vocabulary

This list seems to cover most of the leading offenders, including:

4. Overhead shot of protagonist in the rain, arms spread, just letting the downpour COME.

10. Dude goes to open a safe or a refrigerator or whatever and PRESTO the camera’s shooting out from inside the safe or refrigerator or whatever. That’s some bush league My First Creative Camerawork shit.

The famous overhead shot in the rain from Shawshank Redemption ruined the movie for me.

Jailing kids is a proud American tradition

Thomas Frank gets his Jonathan Swift on regarding the juvenile detention kickback scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn’t have — until recently — were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That’s what the “kids for cash” judges were apparently experimenting with.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as “kickbacks,” but before long we will see them as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

I am rarely as outraged as I was upon hearing about the scandal in Luzerne County; I admire Frank’s ability to channel his outrage into something this brilliant and cutting.

Definition of "black-boxing"

Bruno Latour, in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies:

scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.

Uncovering what’s inside these black-boxes could become an important task for people researching the processes by which we construct everything from budgets to automobiles to maps. In their forthcoming book, Rethinking Maps, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins encourage researchers of maps and mapping

to open the “black-boxes” of mapping software, to start to interrogate algorithms and databases, and in particular to investigate the production of ready-made maps that appear almost magically on the interfaces of gadgets and devices we carry and use everyday, often without much overt thought about how they work and whose map they project onto their interface.

A couple of chapter downloads from Rethinking Maps are available on Martin Dodge’s website.

Tobacco plant virus may yield HIV drug

The production of griffithsin, a promising HIV-prevention drug, has been too expensive to warrant its widespread use. Researchers have recently injected a griffithsin-producing gene from red algae into the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and infected a TMV-susceptible species of tobacco plant with the virus. After infection, griffithsin can be extracted from the wilted leaves in larger amounts than through previous methods.

While it will most certainly be made into a cream, “[a] cigarette containing griffithsin hasn’t been discounted either,” said one of the researchers. Maybe one way for cigarette companies to change their image is to get us addicted to smoke containing antibodies to all the most deadly diseases. Cigarette packs would keep the Surgeon General’s warning:

Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

but they’d also carry a Surgeon General’s encouragement sticker:

Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

Cities and counties rely on U.S. immigrant detention fees

Municipalities in California and elsewhere—but mostly California—are increasingly tapping a new Federal revenue source.

Roughly two-thirds of the nation’s immigrant detainees are held in local jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal records and outstanding deportation orders.

Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house [immigrant] detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

As usual, the details of profit-seeking behavior are even more outrageous than the supply-side nonsense:

Santa Ana’s Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15% budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly price per detainee from $82 to $87.

“We treat [the jail] as a business,” Walters said. “The cuts could have been much deeper if it weren’t for the ability to raise money there.”

Japan: Blurring the line between bullets and trains

The country has ambitions for 310 mph bullet trains by 2025.

The trains planned for 2025 will reduce the travel time between Tokyo and Nagoya to 40 minutes from about 90 minutes. At that speed, commuters could go from L.A. to the Bay Area in just over an hour.

But can low-income Japanese afford to travel this way? Can the middle-class?