magpie's shiny things

The world of bits and pol­i­tics is get­ting all het up again.

First there’s this lit­tle mat­ter of AT&T, Apple, GoogleVoice, and the
FCC. The fences around the play­grounds are com­ing down and the
prop­er­ty own­ers are not happy.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/01/att-responds-to-fcc-letter-re-google-voice-mobile-iphone-app/

Rep. Ed Markey (D‑MA) is try­ing for net neu­tral­i­ty leg­is­la­tion again.
A much more pro-neutrality admin­is­tra­tion might make a dif­fer­ence. PDF
link to the text includ­ed. At 13 pages this bill is considerably
eas­i­er to grasp than most.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/the-war-over-network-neutrality.ars

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It’s DefCon time and every­one is punditing.

More hack­ing of high secu­ri­ty locks and access sys­tems. I think these
guys are doing an impor­tant job but Bluzmanis’ grand­stand­ing egoism
and bul­ly­ing of the mak­ers of these sys­tems is quick­ly under­min­ing his
credibility.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/electronic-locks-defeated/

Schneier mounts the bul­ly pul­pit and decries China’s Green Dam Youth
Escort filter/spyware pack­age and then reminds us how much of that
tech­nol­o­gy we’ve allowed into our own net­works int he west.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/building_in_sur.html

One the oth­er hand you could get one of these and pre­tend you’re
secu­ri­ty con­scious. I think I’ve found a new desk lamp.
http://www.a2591.com/2009/08/im-not-security-camera.html

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Real Science is odd­er than sci­ence fic­tion. Welcome to the northern
most sci­en­tif­ic out­post. Be nice to the bar ten­ders, beware of the
birds.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/svalbard/

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Photography

Jakov Cordina takes great pic­tures. And he’s show cas­ing a, new to me,
wid­get that makes a flickr pho­to­stream embed­d­a­ble slide show. (cau­tion
there are a cou­ple of videos with music included)
http://www.jakovcordina.com/post/86633471/photostream-slide-show

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Architecture

Three entries today. First the “ledges” are Sears tow­er are open. So
you can now stand on a piece of glass 1300+ feet up in the air over
Chicago.  No way in hell you’re get­ting me up there but the sprogs
seem to like the float­ing over the city feeling.
http://sweetbakerygoods.com/architecture/architecture-sear-towers-1353-ft-high-glass-balconies/

Train cars are con­vert­ed into church­es in Russia. Some of these are
touch­ing­ly naive and some are small works of art. (The pho­tos rock
too.)
http://englishrussia.com/?p=2248

The exam­ples are of paint­ings and illus­tra­tion but the Bauhaus
move­ment pro­duced some Very Important Architecture. Never mind, just
read the sto­ry and look at the paintings.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/02/bauhaus-ninety-years-of-inspiration/

——————

Entertainment
Pop out and grab a cof­fee. You’ll about 10 min­utes for today’s video selections.

Amy Crehore is a blue grass fiend and puts up some fab­u­louslinks. This
one is  Josephine Baker and Thompson Jazz Orchestra from 1927. Can you
imag­ine watch­ing this woman in per­son? Electrifying. The accompanying
music is Ahmad Jamal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsXyDrf9HO0

Cab Calloway and Bettie Boop. This can not go wrong. There’s tons more
trea­sure in the Internet Archive’s col­lec­tion of vin­tage cartoons
includ­ing a whole lot of BB.
http://www.archive.org/details/bb_old_man_of_the_mountain

That’s it for today, enjoy.

Everyone is enti­tled to an opinion:

Gorgeous pic­ture of a crap bike.
http://www.bikeexif.com/confederate-p120-fighter

Crap pic­ture of a gor­geous bike.
http://www.bikeexif.com/krugger-overmile

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On August 26th the Mini Cooper will be 50 years old. Forbes put up a
nice lit­tle slide show.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/29/bmw-mini-cooper-lifestyle-vehicles-mini-car-50_slide_2.html

———–

Repurposed fur­ni­ture (com­po­nents). Does some­one have a bet­ter word
than repur­posed? It’s so made up.

Cold frames from the As-Is depart­ment at IKEA.
http://plantedathome.com/blog/2009/01/28/diy-cold-frames/

Sweet aviary from a bust­ed up wardrobe.
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/07/diy_aviary_from_old_armoire.html

—————–

Some nice black and white art — book plates. Einstein’s is at the bottom.
http://butdoesitfloat.com/51484

More nice black and white art — Styrofoam cof­fee cups. No, really.
http://www.booooooom.com/2009/07/30/cheeming-boey-coffee-cup-drawings/

———–

The IDEA awards for 2009 are out.These three pages give you little
links to all the prod­ucts. As usu­al, the stuff award­ed sil­ver and
bronze is much more inter­est­ing that the stuff giv­en gold medals.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0729_IDEA_awards_gold/
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0729_IDEA_awards_silver/
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0729_IDEA_awards_bronze/

————

Print Magazine gave four design firms a brief to design pack­ag­ing for
legal­ized mar­i­jua­na. The results are droll at best. Here’s a link to
cov­er­age from Fast Company that does a much bet­ter job of reviewing
the results than Print does on it’s very borked website.
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/imagine-pot-was-legal-how-would-you-brand-it

————–

The three lit­tle pigs would­n’t have stood a chance if the big bad wolf
had one of these. A vor­tex canon. Gather fun pro­pos­al #37. (Just
kid­ding.) Bonus mak­ing of video included.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/30/diy-vortex-cannon/

————-

Off to read Freak Angels episode 63. (You’ll need days to catch up but
it’s worth it if you like dark.)
http://www.freakangels.com/?p=102

Two from Scheier on the recent­ly dis­cussed top­ic of cloud computing
and stor­age. I find the com­ments on his blog to be of high­er quality
than most.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/risks_of_cloud.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/cloud_computing.html

Summary of Kaminsky’s talk on the SSL cert spoof­ing. Clearer than most.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/kaminsky/

As if you could­n’t tell it’s DefCon time. I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by the
hack­able badges of the last cou­ple of years. Here’s a pre­view of this
year’s badge and a link to the source code.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/defcon-badge/

There have been some great musi­cal guests on Sesame street. So after
all that scary tech stuff a lit­tle some­thing to remind you of what it
“tastes like being poor and small and Popsicles in summer.”
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/30181

Starting with some archi­tec­ture. 10 class­rooms designed specifically
to meet the chal­lenges of 10 sites and com­mu­ni­ties. The promise of
loca­tion appro­pri­ate archi­tec­ture ful­filled. (Mostly — no one’s
perfect)
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/updates/2009–07-22-finalists-announced-for-the-open-architecture-challenge

A mate­ri­als data­base site that is wicked fun to explore. You’ll want
to start projects just to use some of this stuff.
http://transmaterial.net/

Some paint­ings that I find appeal­ing. Airborne architecture?
http://butdoesitfloat.com/50911

A nice exam­ple of mak­ing num­bers come alive. I don’t know why
Hellman’s (mayo) is back­ing an eat local cam­paign in Canada but I’m
not going to com­plain much about some­thing that makes the imported
food indus­try look less appeal­ing. (yeah it’s flash.)
http://www.eatrealeatlocal.ca/

After that attempt to use illus­tra­tions to make some­thing clear.
Here’s Christopher Niemann’s attempt­ing to make the often muddled
process of mak­ing an illus­tra­tion, well, mud­dled. It’s fun­ny, trust
me.
http://www.christophniemann.com/man/bpages/gallery6.html

Boing-boing pro­vides a rather coher­ent giv­en the top­ic sum­ma­ry of the
AP’s recent­ly announced DRM-for-news scheme.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/29/associated-press-cla.html
And a link to the sav­age remix of the AP’s illus­tra­tion. (NSWF if your
boss is look­ing over your shoul­der or you work for a ‘news outlet’.
http://imgur.com/DzZdf.jpg

A news out­let that gets it right. NPR has a sub­tle but powerful
redesign for it’s site. Better look­ing, eas­i­er to use, excel­lent seek
and find tools… Nice.
http://www.npr.org/services/new_site/

In the last cou­ple of days I’ve seen a lot of high-concept fashion
pho­tog­ra­phy. It leaves me cold. This pho­to­graph of Richard Avedon
work­ing does not.
http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/post/150885070/avedon

Apple and the iPhone are begin­ning to look stu­pid­ly conflicted.

Here they are killing a Google Voice app at the behest of AT&T. Who’s
wear­ing the pants in that rela­tion­ship anyway?
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/07/28/apple-kills-google‑v.html

And here Apple is mak­ing some real­ly far-fetched claims about risks to
the cell net­work from jail-broken iPhones. Transparent attempt to
retain con­trol over the device in the face of upcom­ing FCC looking
into the state of the rela­tion­ship between hand­set man­u­fac­tur­ers and
car­ri­ers duly not­ed. And yawned over.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/jailbreak/

Much nicer apples. Sweet post-it notes from a Japanese design firm.
(No I can’t fig­ure out where to buy them. Someone was very patient to
have sift­ed through he design­ers’ unus­able web­site to find these.)
http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2009/07/fruit-shaped-sticky-notes/

stay cool,

If you don’t go any fur­ther this morn­ing, go here. Not only is this
exhib­it on the top­ic of gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da time­less but the
pro­duc­tion val­ues for the web­site encour­age exact­ly the kind of
explo­ration the top­ic deserves.
http://www.ushmm.org/propaganda/

On with the show.

What to do with a sane but ugly vehi­cle. Smart TwoTipping. Because
there aren’t enough cows in Amsterdam for a prop­er round of cow
tipping.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/smart-tossing/

A nicer design for an insane sport. Ice rac­ing. The video linked at
the bot­tom isn’t worth your time.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/audi-design-study-is-cold-as-ice/

From the sleek to the ungain­ly. You all have seen the EVE and all the
oth­er hot machines from Oshkosh. Here’s my favorite. Elvis.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/elvis-oshkosh/

Elvis is entire­ly func­tion­al design and ugly as sin. Here’s a bit of
func­tion­al design that’s eas­i­er on the eyes. The ori­gin and mean­ing of
the TV test pattern.
http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=38895

Because the blue rat is cute and the arti­cle con­tains the following
quote: “One of the rea­sons no one had done this before is that food
sci­ence is very sep­a­rate from neu­ro­science,” PETA rants will be
shit-canned.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/bluerats/

On to the arts:

Three short sto­ries from the Big Picture. The first one about a bride
cross­ing the Israeli-Syrian bor­der is manip­u­la­tive IMO. The second
about the plight of albi­nos in Tanzania is trag­ic and under reported
except as a “in odd news today” way. The third sto­ry — the one I’d
real­ly like to link to sep­a­rate­ly — is about the “Sea Gypsies” in
Borneo. So damned much smil­ing in one place. You can’t help but have a
bet­ter day.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/stories_from_israel_tanzania_a.html

Merce Cunningham has died at the age of 90.
http://www.merce.org/index-content.html

I was all up for grab­bing a plane down to LA tomor­row for the Secret
Identity: (The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster) Party.
Until I saw that I’d have to deal with the past their pull by date
Suicide Girls. I’ll just post a book review when my copy gets here.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/27/secret-identity-part.html

Here’s a pho­tog­ra­ph­er Madame Peripetie (prac­ti­cal­ly anony­mous) whose
work I find intrigu­ing but often inex­plic­a­ble, per­haps dense beyond my
comprehension.
http://cyanatrendland.com/2009/07/27/madame-peripetie-conceptual-photography/

Not my design but going on the stu­dio wall as an inspriation.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/downtothewiredesigns/3746548031/

And to leave you hap­py. Maurice Sendak talks to/about Spike Jonze
mak­ing where the Wild Things Are.
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/where-the-wild-things-are/featurette-maurice-sendak

More tomor­row,