notes.husk.org

“The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of...

Fri, 04 May 2012 05:44:49 +0100

“The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue”, from an article in New Scientist reporting on a paper by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, The network of global corporate control:

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

"Ironies and politics pile up in Agnes Denes’s 1982 work Wheatfield - A Confrontation (below)...."

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:34:56 +0100

“Ironies and politics pile up in Agnes Denes’s 1982 work Wheatfield - A Confrontation (below). Denes planted wheat on New York City real estate worth billions. Spot the twin towers in the dense urban fringe - and note the harvest was fed to New York police horses. Trying to recreate the work on a scrap of forgotten land in industrial east London, however, only underlines the monumental scale Denes worked with - and the large vision.”

- Liz Else, in the New Scientist review of Radical Nature at the Barbican (previously).

"We are doing everything possible to create a global market with as much commonality and..."

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:19:00 +0100

“We are doing everything possible to create a global market with as much commonality and interoperability as possible, but NASA still can’t make the jump to metric”

- Mike Gold, of Bigelow Aerospace, quoted in a New Scientist story, NASA attacked for sticking to imperial units. (Edit to correct link, to a much longer version)

It concludes “NASA says that the $370 million cost to convert the Constellation programme to metric is too high.” Have these people not read all the bitchy asides in science fiction novels about how deep-future Man is still cursing feet and inches? Come on, NASA, get a grip.

via www.newscientist.com More here: This...

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:02:00 +0100

via www.newscientist.com

More here:

This “solargraph” (see image, right) shows the path taken by the sun as it travelled across the sky above the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK, between 19 December 2007 and 21 June 2008 (between the winter and summer solstices). It was taken in a single six-month exposure by photographer Justin Quinnell, using a pinhole camera