2013-06-18
post/53306562345
“For a good time, call Edward Snowden” - pavement stencil, San Francisco (posted by Justin Miller).
post/53291104798
ATL, ORD, LAX, DFW - the four busiest airports in the United States, at the same scale (zoom level 14).
The imagery for this was taken from Stamen’s Mapstack project, using a base layer of Toner lines overlaid with the slightly different Terrain lines, masked. Those slight differences mean that runways shine through with other roads modified to just outlines.
(I’ve been to three of the four, but only at O’Hare have I left the airport; ATL was a transfer and LAX just a stop where I didn’t even leave the plane.)
See also: airportcity.spum.org.
post/53290649367
post/53290070715
blakegopnik (via fette):
DAILY PIC: These two iPhones are all there is to “The Distance of a Day”, an installation by the young Brooklyner David Horvitz that I just saw at the Art Basel fair, in the booth of Berlin’s Chert gallery. Last February, Horvitz got his mom to record a video of the sunset over the sea near Los Angeles, where he was born and grew up. At the same moment that she was taping, he was at a point almost opposite her on the globe, in the Maldives, taping the same sun as it rose. There was something poignant for me in imagining our great sun as a tenuous link between mother and son. There was also a kind of almost scientific rigor in the piece, as it demonstrated a basic truth of
heliocentricastronomy. And, of course, it was also about virtuality: A deeply physical project that involves two people and the places they’re in comes to us care of an ephemeral digital record – in fact presented on the very phones that recorded the scenes. And I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea of a single object being photographed at the same instant from opposite sides of the globe.
There are times of the year when the sun is visible from both San Francisco and London for hours, and (in December) times when it’s only visible from both for half an hour. This seems like a nice idea for the latter.
On Humans and Systems
Earlier this morning, I reblogged a quote from Edward Snowdon’s live chat with the Guardian, and added a note: “people have an unfortunate tendency to think about people, not systems”.
Simon Wistow took that line and posted it to Twitter, resulting in a discussion with Derek Powazek (and, privately, others) which seemed to see my wording as being at odds with empathy.
I think the best guide to my perspective is Clive Thompson’s Wired article from 2008 on Bill Gates and philanthropy. A couple of quotes:
In one recent experiment, Slovic presented subjects with a picture of “Rokia,” a starving child in Mali, and asked them how much they’d be willing to give to help feed her. Then he showed a different group photos of two Malinese children — “Rokia and Moussa.” The group presented with two kids gave 15 percent less than those shown just one child. In a related experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a dying child. When a second set of subjects was asked to donate to a group of eight children dying of the same cause, the average donation was 50 percent lower.
Slovic suspects this stuff is hardwired.
In other words, people can relate to another person, but once you start involving groups, they get worse. Or, in the context of Snowdon, it’s easier to look at the reposts of his girlfriend’s blog and private photos than it is to grapple with the systematic surveillance that technology is enabling.
As Thompson goes on to write,
Which brings me back to Gates. The guy is practically a social cripple, and at times he has seemed to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking concretely about giant numbers. Their imagination can scale up and down the powers of 10 — mega, giga, tera, peta — because their jobs demand it.
So maybe that’s why he is able to truly understand mass disease in Africa. We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad.
In other words, Gates can see the system, and despite (or because) of his seeming lack of a one-to-one empathy, he ends up being able to care more - and is luckily in the position to do more - than many.
Perhaps I should have written “People have an annoying habit of thinking about a person, not people.”
2013-06-17
post/53211705721
Nordkaphallen, a visitor center at the northernmost tip of Europe, in northern Norway, as seen in The Ends of the Road on The Atlantic’s In Focus (via)
post/53205269923
Edward Snowden, Guardian Q and A, 2013-06-17 (via gwire)
People have an unfortunate tendency to think about people, not systems.
post/53204688325
Nick Hornby: Stuff I’ve Been Reading in The Believer, June/July 2005 (via)
Excession is a close second as my favourite Iain (M) Banks novel (after Use Of Weapons), but I suppose I can see his point. For me “a trillion year old black-body sphere” is a perfectly meaningful sentence, but not everybody would get that (just as I don’t care about half - well, more than half - the music Hornby gets excited about in High Fidelity, and I certainly couldn’t give a shit about Arsenal).
Oh, and I find the incredibly dense message from the GCU Fate Amenable To Change about the discovery of the Excession to be fantastic. If only Hornby had got to the parts where it’s spelt out to two of the characters, eh?
post/53203536301
Disclaimer added to Google Maps widgets on DFID’s Development Tracker.
Borders are a problem.
