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RIP John Baldessari
A small collection of artworks by John Baldessari, an amazing artist who died yesterday. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, A Brief History of John Baldessari is worth watching too.
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RIP Joe Frank
One of the great radio voices is gone. This is from Time- Old from a collection of Hearing Voices on PRX.
If billions of years preceded our existence on Earth, billions of years will surely follow after our existence as well. So that our life here is like one flash of a strobe light. The wink of an eye. And if your life is merely a microscopic blip in the vast dimension of time, is its importance to you just an illusion?
Also worth a listen: Dreamers on Unfictional.
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Grid Corrections
Grid Corrections shows, as Curt Meine puts it, “places where theory and reality meet.” Geoff Manaugh, writing for Travel + Leisure:
De Ruijter soon learned that these kinks and deviations were more than local design quirks. They are grid corrections, as he refers to them in a new photographic project: places where North American roads deviate from their otherwise logical grid lines in order to account for the curvature of the Earth. You could drive out there your whole life, de Ruijter realized, and not realize that certain stop signs and intersections exist not because of eccentric real estate deals, but because they are mathematical devices used to help planners wrap a rectilinear planning scheme onto the surface of a spherical planet. In order to avoid large-scale distortion, the Jeffersonian grid—shorthand for the founding father’s 18th-century geometric vision of six-square-mile township parcels, intended to guarantee equal and democratic land-distribution nationwide—is occasionally forced to go askew.
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Neil Freeman interviewed about his Electoral College Reform map
You may have seen Neil’s map before, where each of the US’s 50 states are redrawn to balance for population. It’s nice to see his project’s motivating ideas laid out like they are in this Paris Review interview:
I think that the biggest cultural change would be with the profusion of city-states. Many states overrepresent rural areas when it comes to divvying up funding for infrastructure projects and other spending. The alignment of metro areas and states would mean that decision-making power in land use and transportation would shift away from rural areas, which would probably mean less sprawl and more livable cities.
See also: Neil’s 50 states and 50 metros
The fifty largest metro areas, disaggregated from their states. Each has been scaled and sorted according to population.
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Interview with Josh On
The creator of They Rule was interviewed in 2004:
The way we are going to move forward in social movements is less around art-pranks and more on good social organizing with one another in real life … organizing places where people can come together to debate ideas.
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Doonesbury’s War
A profile of Garry Trudeau, whose story of B.D.—the national reservist amputee—has given Doonesbury a relevance you don’t often find in comics.
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Ideas for actions
Simple Adventures for Everyday Living by Joseph del Pesco.
The “scripts” below, which include many suggested by friends as part of a work in progress, began as simple adventures you could do by yourself without spending any money; later some turned more toward public interventions, while others became less literal and more performance-oriented.
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Bill McKibben in Mother Jones
From Are We Better Off: In Search of Common Ground by Bill McKibben:
But if the gross power of wealth is all we focus on, we may miss the chance for making real change. Because the greatest power of elites has been their ability to make us think like them. Our habits of mind imitate too many of theirs, and it hobbles us — how else to explain our willingness, in democracies, to let such bizarre inequality persist and grow? I mean, why did we let them cut taxes on the rich?
The answer, at least in part, is that we’ve abandoned a sense of common purpose for a pervasive hyperindividualism. Each of the crises listed above stems in some way from that willingness to think of our own particular interest as somehow divorced from that of everyone around us. At least since Reagan, we’ve come as a society to think of private as good and public as tawdry, and so it’s no surprise that we’re now outsourcing every government function short of pulling the trigger in battle, or that we watch with remarkable calm the steady erosion of our educational system.
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Brown v. Board launches
I had the pleasure of working on a website for the National American History museum’s exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education. The site uses semantic validating XHTML and is laid out using CSS. There were a few instances where I had to resort to tables for layout and inlined-styles abound, but for the most part I think the site strikes a good balance between forward-thinking and backwards-compatible.
It was a little challenging convincing my coworkers that using these newfangled techniques was worthwhile. Indeed, I spent a good deal of time figuring out new workarounds to the plethora of quirky browser bugs, but I’m still satisfied that the newer processes are a big improvement over the tables-and-single-pixel methods of the past.