The sculpture of Kate Clark

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.