I Am Still Alive

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).

via Daring Fireball

Composting is a lot like sex. It’s a healthy, natural process involving fertility, tumbling around, and – when it’s going right – steaminess. On top of that, some people call it dirty.

On the web, we’re making the same transition from classical to jazz. We’re improvising. We’ve moved from a hard-coded system of building pages to an open system of creating participatory environments.

I am not sure the “classical to jazz” analogy works, but I am definitely into the idea of building participatory environments. I have been thinking a lot about fostering this sort of incidental & relational participation with the new Artlog (re-launching next week – in one form or another).

Perhaps more significantly, the collective has signed a deal with Mark Batty Publisher, which (they hope), will secure the long-term future of their occasional publication, also called Le Gun, with its rolling, seamless (and ad-free) montage of images and texts.

That’s (potentially) great news. I really dig the journal/publication/occasional thing Le Gun publishes. I am looking forward to future editions.

But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

This may come in handy for some Arduino tinkering I am doing.

RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller. It also provides a set of Rake tasks for automating the compilation and upload process.

Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for “vertical farms,” stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would – theoretically – supply fresh produce for city residents year round.

Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable.

Perhaps those costs pencil out (although they almost certainly do not), but the plausibility of the idea itself is in some ways beside the point. Whatever the merits of vertical farms, the enthusiasm with which this idea has been received suggests that we’re becoming mightily reductive in the way that we think about sustainability. Local is good, the thinking goes, and more local is better

saw an exhibit of martin puryear’s work yesterday. while I loved the work, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the pieces are transported and installed. this link provides a glimpse into the installation if you click on ‘time-lapse’

My friend Caroline stepped in to write the “On Language” column in this week’s New York Times magazine. She touches on numerous subjects including two that are important to me: language and Rastafarianism.

One divergence stems from the Rastafarians, who intentionally developed a dialect of Jamaican Creole in order to break culturally from the English-speaking imperialists who once enslaved them. Their phrase “I and I” can be used in place of “I,” “we” or Rastafarians as a group, but generally expresses the oneness of the speaker with God and all people. “I and I” is thus, in some ways, a conscious deviation — really the exact opposite of the English ego-centered capital “I.”

A technical magazine focused on technical content and the happenings in the world of Ruby, Rails, Merb, and anything else related to our favorite programming language.

When we were children, we often wondered what we’d become in our adult lives. There were two obvious choices: turn into a movie star or a letterpress printer. Movie star? Printer? Movie star. Printer. But why couldn’t we become both?

Enter the Boxcar Institute Training Series, starring the dashing Pearl Press, the debonair Vandercook Universal III, the sidekicking polymer plates, the sultry Boxcar Base, and Harold. This will be an ongoing series focusing on printing well with photopolymer plates. Musical accompaniment is by Mouse on Mars.

Boxcar recently posted some instructional videos to their site as part of their Boxcar Institute Training Series (which I reckon you can buy). The videos don’t cover anything entirely revolutionary (“Base lockup and cleaning,” “Adjusting roller height,” & “Setting gauge pins”), but it’s nice to see the presses they have in the shop there, to get a sense for the folks/personalities over at Boxcar and to see companies like Boxcar trying fun/strange endeavors.

Here, I have to declare my colors because while I think [Crouwel] is a fine designer, the fetishization of his way of designing by a new generation of followers is as revealing as it is troubling. Crouwel was always much more interested in typography than images. His work appeals because it can be imbibed unproblematically as pure form, and the designers who most admire it often specialize in the same kind of modernist—or, more accurately now, neo-modernist—typographic craft. Today, much of this work is merely trendy; it couldn’t be further from the modernists’ utopian social dream. Its over-processed surfaces and sterile perfectionism reflect the sheen of the marketplace, without commenting on this commercial reality or questioning it in any way.

As a model for the role that the graphic designer might occupy as a critical public communicator, Van Toorn’s work was always much richer than Crouwel’s, and it is an enduring refutation of Crouwel’s unnecessarily circumscribed definition of design. While its confrontational content and abrasive, even ugly, texture might alarm some designers, it has a lot to offer anyone who thinks that the most significant visual communication concerns itself with the task of articulating and complicating meaning through form. Smooth, disengaged, and aesthetically enraptured design is much too easy now. We need a few more awkward, socially motivated designers with the nerve to irritate, provoke, challenge, and involve viewers. We need a new generation of Van Toorns.

I’ll read anything Poynor writes, but I found this particularly fascinating and thought-provoking.

Brent Simmons, developer of NetNewsWire, writes about his approach to re-factoring applications.

When working on a new version of the app, before I think about the features I want to add, I take a look at what I can get rid of first. It’s a quality-of-app thing. I think of it as making space for the new stuff — but first I have to take the wrecking ball to some old stuff. (If I don’t, you get feature sprawl. Yuck.)

But, the thing is, these are features that some people somewhere use and like. And they’ll be sad to see them go. It’s worse than skunks-in-the-fridge, it’s exploding skunks in bed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I re-work Artlog. It’s super tough making decisions about what should stay and what would make everything else better by getting dropped (no, not you, honey; you are fine right where you are). Always good to see other developers (especially really, really good ones) successfully working through the same issues. [via Dan]

Artlog members are invited to ride the Artlog Shuttle on Saturday July 26th for a special day trip to SCOPE Hamptons.

Artloggers will meet at the Soho House at 10:30am and a chartered luxury bus will transport you to the SCOPE Hamptons art fair at East Hamptons Studios. SCOPE President Alexis Hubshman will greet you in the VIP lounge where the first silent SCOPE Foundation Collector Mentorship Auction will be taking place. Continuing its “Art Fair as Resource” mandate, this silent auction features seasoned collectors Beth Rudin DeWoody, Melva Bucksbaum, Raymond Learsy, Eileen and Richard Ekstract, Adam Lindemann, Enrique Norten, Jed Walentas, Rick Wester, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Seltzer, Kim Levin and others donating an hour of their time to mentor less experienced art enthusiasts.

After touring SCOPE Hamptons, the Artlog Shuttle will take you to Elie Tahari to enjoy a cocktail while viewing More Than This, a site specific show curated by Andrea Salerno. The shuttle will depart the Hamptons around 6pm, arriving back in the city by 8pm.

This event supports two projects backed by SCOPE Foundation, The Arctic Circle and The Girl Project. The Arctic Circle (tac) is a series of artist led expeditions to remote destinations with the goal of capturing amazing art and sharing it with the public. The Girl Project is sending 5,000 cameras to teenage girls with the hopes of representing life seen through the eyes of young women in America.

But my entirely anecdotal opinion is that the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the AppleTV each tempts their users to slide back to dumbing-down their passwords in exchange for better ease-of-use. The most annoying device in your chain ends up driving the passwords you use for everything. Right now, it’s such a pain to enter a secure password on a device like the iPhone or the AppleTV, that I’m betting a few of you have already fallen back on your ferret. Or “pencil.” Or your ATM PIN.

Another good observation by Merlin. I’ve actually been resisting the urge to simplify passwords for iTunes and various web apps since I’ve started using the new iPhone for more non-telephone activities and also set up an auto-lock for the first time. But assuredly the temptation to simplify passwords given somewhat tedious touch keypads is strong.

I’m simply not convinced explanation or content gets in the way of art — though I will agree that there is no replacement for its experience.

Street term ‘Yo’ is being used by kids as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, according to researchers.

via project.ioni.st

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The southern wall of the Grand Concourse, facing 42nd Street, has semicircular grills high up, with small curlicued spaces like those in a leafy tree. Many of those spaces act like the aperture of a pinhole camera, reflecting an image of the sun that, when it reaches the floor, will be 8 to 12 inches wide. The smaller grill spaces will produce dimmer but sharper solar images on your paper.

Large sunspots, regions of intense magnetic activity that are cooler than the surrounding surface, will appear as dark blemishes on the solar disk. And the edges of the disk will appear darker, because the edges show mostly the sun’s outer surface, which is cooler than the center.