Smashing Telly presents Dr. Ben Goldacre laying waste to the media’s obsession with scare stories involving science and medicine. In the linked video Goldacre takes on anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, chiefly the LBC’s Jeni Barnett.
Goldacre writes The Guardian’s Bad Science column and maintains his own Bad Science blog. He’s also a delicious user, with plenty of good links but no tags.
The Diagram Group’s Book of Comparisons uses the size of familiar objects and experiences—a pencil, the capacity of a taxi, a walk around the block—to help us comprehend the size of less familiar objects and experiences—a giraffe, the capacity of a ship, a run around Manhattan. It’s an imperfect book but wonderfully illustrated and worth checking out.
Fantastic Journal, on frugal chic:
Our cities grow odd organic appendages at the weekends, temporary infestations from the countryside that spring up to sell expensive organic vegetables to a niche market troubled by supermarkets and urbanity. There is a sort of alchemy at work here, the turning of base metal into gold, or thrift into luxury. For coal tar soap and muddy potatoes were surely never meant to be luxury products. It takes a particularly weird intersection of class and socio-economics to make them so. And whilst Labour and Wait remains packed on a Sunday morning, my local Woolworths - that most genuinely thrifty of shops - is already a boarded up memory.
Charles Holland attributes some of the inspiration for his thinking to the recent Austerity Nostalgia post by Owen Hatherley.
Momus traces the poignant line connecting Dr. Evil, Batty from Blade Runner, and T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland.
We know these people must die for their difference, but we are also fascinated by it. We are wedded to monoculture, but subtly disturbed by pluricide. And so, just before they die, evil characters representing “the unacceptable other” are given speeches which allow us to glimpse, simultaneously, how unlike us they are, and yet how like us, if only by the fact that they have had experiences, as we have too.
See all of blackbeltjones’ bookmarks tagged momus.
A great post on how the structure of the internet—despite its “libertarian hippy capitalist” roots—potentially facilitates socially-networked, meatspace vigilantism.
All it takes is a right-wing or vigilante version of mySociety, with a less attractive civic vision, and this criminal geo-data can become scraped, distributed, then offered with a Shirky-esque ‘bargain’: ‘I will be outside this crim’s house with a plank of wood at 3am if 10 other people will do the same’. That would be the extreme case, but milder responses are surely inevitable and, to some degree intended. As some proto-Richard Stallman within the Home Office must have put it “information about local criminals wants to be free!
The Bandvagn 206 is an amphibious troop-transport vehicle originally designed for the Swedish military. Blackbeltjones saved this bookmark to his handsomelookinmachines tag.
This photo was taken by Flickr-user Steffe at the open house for a biofuel power plant in Jordbrom a suburb of Stockholm.
Jennifer Trausch
[via hawktrainer]
Trausch uses a 235 lb. polaroid camera to capture her amazingly clear images. Hawktrainer recommends the Skateland series; so do I. Especially the shot named Larry. There’s an interview with her from 2007 on The Daily F’log (along with a picture of her using the camera).
The Sky in Motion
[via migurski]
It’s a particularly striking example of a timelapse capture of the night sky, taken on Eagle Island, Maine.
Supersize mind
[via blackbeltjones]
the Extended Mind Thesis . . . fits my life intuitively. I feel that both technology and media extend my mind, and mingle it with other minds. This is why I do what I do; I like that promiscuity, that cultural reproduction.
[via TomC]
The video’s about how they did GIS in the punchcard era.
Sensity by Stanza
[via anne]
This artwork visualizes the dynamic data around my environment as an audio visual artwork. I set up a wireless sensor network around my house in London. I live nearby a railway line, a factory, some trees and a mobile phone mast. (This is using real data).
The city is made up of bits of data that change. This artwork captures this change to try to understand the underlying fabric of city space. The artwork monitors the environment for change and relays these changes via the sensors.
Terminus, the god
[via blackbeltjones]
In Roman religion, Terminus was the god who protected boundary markers; his name was the Latin word for such a marker.
Ancient writers believed that the worship of Terminus had been introduced to Rome during the reign of the first king Romulus (traditionally 753–717 BC) or his successor Numa (717–673 BC). Modern scholars have variously seen it as the survival of an early animistic reverence for the power inherent in the boundary marker, or as the Roman development of proto-Indo-European belief in a god concerned with the division of property.
Incidentally, Terminus was the first name for the settlement now known as Atlanta.
Torque Control
[via jbushnell]
“This is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.”
Principles of cartography
[via TomC]
Pretty much a one-stop shop for links to useful information on mapping. The outline format might turn off some visitors—the page seems to have been made to support lectures in a mapping class at Rutgers—but there’s plenty of good stuff here.
Case in point: this map of the Breckenridge Ski Resort [PDF!] has adopted the Tube map’s use of colored lines and circles instead of relying on decades of ski resort mapping tradition. Unlike these old, bird’s-eye views of airbrushed slopes, the new Breckenridge map gives skiers and snowboarders what they need when they’re actually on the mountain itself: relative positions for all the lifts and trails.
I expect network maps like this one will continue to show up in unexpected places as map users become more comfortable with the style. Take Mondrian: after the world warmed to his brand of minimalism, they put it on tubes of styling gel.
Richard Serra sculptures on Google Maps
[via blackbeltjones]
Richard Serra’s massive sheet metal sculptures are easily seen from the Google planes. Are there any artists consciously collaborating with our new abilities to drag and click from on high?
Cake Wrecks: when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong
[via jbushnell]
A collection of funny cake mistakes from Cake Wrecks.
‘Post-speculative melancholia’ [via blackbeltjones]
This post does what everybody circa 1999 thought blog posts would do nothing but: “I felt like X when I walked down the street today and saw Y.” What sets this post apart, of course, is that it describes and names that feeling X we’ve all been having lately when we walk down the street and see Y (let Y=any number of ridiculous iPod accessories). It’s post-speculative melancholia:
in which a sweeping utilitarianism suddenly arises, in which
technologies must do something or else get lost and the drugged
up sense of nothing mattering is followed by a come-down in which the
whole thing seems regrettable.
Through the sandglass: the man who figured out how deserts work
[via rodcorp]
An article about Ralph Bagnold, the man who “documented saltation, the process by which flying sand grains land and kick yet more grains into the air.” In his delicious comments for this bookmark, rodcorp wonders what else works like this? Any suggestions?
Oklahoma’s strip-mall graveyard
[via criticalspatialpractice]
A Native American cemetery in the middle of a parking lot:
View Larger Map
About
Every weekday, I use this space to share the best links from a select group of 21 people in my network on delicious.com. The membership of this select group (listed in the right-hand column above) is subject to change. That's where you come in.
Some Common Tags
Recent Archives
© The Daily Clique. Powered by WordPress using the DePo Clean Theme.
