A conceit: the thoroughly modern chop

I've been fascinated by the Chinese art of the chop

ever since I first saw them. I love the colour, and the format. I think

it's something about its squareness that suggests to me a great density

of communication. My first headshot on Multiply was a chop I

lifted from a museum exhibition years ago. I don't remember much about

it now, except that it translated to something like "In vain do I try

to stir the senses."

But this density of communication is kind of wasted on me, as I can't
read Chinese and probably wouldn't be able to decode it even if I did.
So here's a thoroughly modern, machine-readable version.

It's a QR code. It's a little less friendly than the human one, admittedly, and too
impersonal to be used as a headshot. But I have found other uses for
it, as a graphical device. In its defence, I think it has another sort of interest for our
monkey-brains... the property
that all deeply complicated, abstract shapes have: that of almost, but
not quite,
coalescing into something familiar.

(Almost) the easiest way of making (half a) million dollars

http://www.onethousandpaintings.com/home/
You have to hand it to Sala (he/she?). It's the ultimate expression of the 'limited edition print', I guess - except they're not, they're all handpainted canvases, about a foot square. I like the notion of these having a different 'price' and 'value' at the moment of being sold.

I reach a new low in geekiness

YES! I AM KING OF GEEKS! BOW BEFORE MY INCREDIBLY ARCANE POINTLESSNESS!
Honest, it looks a lot better in real life. Almost attractive, even. But still, probably one of those things I shouldn't really do if I'm ever to have any pretensions of having a life. I'm too ashamed to actually tell you what the barcode says.

Transient but interesting

There's treasure everywhere today:

Clearing through my backlog of articles, I come across the fact that in the UK we throw away more food than packaging (courtesy of the deliciously named Soggy Lettuce Report). Really not sure whether to be cheered or alarmed by that. I guess, if the figures weren't so high, it'd be a good thing - less plastic going into the environment, more of our waste is biodegrabale, etc.

Then, via a roundabout route including Charles Stross' blog (which has some real gems on it, by the way), I find the rather wonderful news that IBM have a secret island hideaway - inside a computer game. In true Bond-villain style, Big Blue have staked a claim to an island inside Second Life, and are using it for business meetings. I'm surprised they didn't phone Pixar and offer to buy the island in The Incredibles.

Transient but interesting

There's treasure everywhere today:

Clearing through my backlog of articles, I come across the fact that in the UK we throw away more food than packaging (courtesy of the deliciously named Soggy Lettuce Report). Really not sure whether to be cheered or alarmed by that. I guess, if the figures weren't so high, it'd be a good thing - less plastic going into the environment, etc.

Then, via a roundabout route including Charles Stross' blog (yes, the science fiction writer), I find the rather wonderful news that IBM have a secret island hideaway - inside a computer game. In true Bond-villain style, Big Blue have staked a claim to an island inside Second Life, and are using it for business meetings. I'm surprised they didn't phone Pixar and offer to buy the island in The Incredibles.

Termites' air conditioning

Just clearing through some old 'off-topic' articles that come across my desk, and I came across this article, analysing termite mounds to see what we can learn about their ventilation systems, and what lessons could be applied to human buildings. The intention appears to be to marry up this knowledge with the latest in Rapid Manufacturing to create organically shaped systems in our buildings. Personally, I'm sceptical. Okay, so termites have developed a system which doesn't use electricity, but what it does involve (if memory serves) is an awful lot of scurrying about and carrying crap from place to place on the part of the termites. I can't see people being paid to stand in corridors, just to block the airflow. I'm sure some valuable knowledge will come out of this, but when it comes to the future of large buildings, I'll pin my hopes on CFD and genetic algorithms, thanks all the same.

Big art for your home

BetterWall is a site which rescues old vinyl museum banners and sells them on as art for your walls. And if it helps you justify your extravagance, then remember a proportion of the price goes back to the museum, and you're also helping to keep quite a lot of vinyl from ending up in a landfill somewhere.

Unfortunately they don't seem to have reached the UK, but if anyone has $500 or so to spend on me then I could pretty much cope with any of the ones on their site.

(Via core77)

Verbing

Yesterday I found myself commoditizing stuff. Unsure as to whether I was spelling it right, I went online and discovered that 2 out of 3 online dictionaries said it didn't exist. I also got pulled up for using the Americanized spellings of several words.

I admit I react badly to people criticizing my work at the best of times. And there have been times in the past when I would have reacted to other peoples' Americanizations in just the same way (didn't we invent the damn language in the first place? Harrumph). But my rather snippy reaction was as follows: a language is a living thing. A dictionary does not provide a definitive version of what the language should be, it's simply a record of how the language is being spoken. New words are added all the time (incidentally, is 'blog' not the ugliest word ever?). Phrases and words gain new meanings: my own particular bete noire at the moment is 'not fit for purpose' - it seems to have been pounced on by politicians, who are using it with gay abandon. And just as nobody uses the UK definition of 'billion' any more, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that z's scrabble score probably needs to be devalued a bit as more and more words get '-ized'.

IWOOT (x): Street Art Shelving

Following on from Chris' post about graffiti-by-selective-cleaning, I just stumbled across these rather natty shelf units on Inhabitat. They're 'designed' by a guy called Ryan Frank, who takes plain boards down to Hackney and sticks them on walls in prominently graffiti'd areas. After a couple of weeks to 'mature', he takes them down again and makes furniture from them. It's another good example of 'less is more' in design terms - and I think it looks pretty cool.

Pecha Kucha night, Glasgow

Start:	Oct 12, '06 7:00p
End:	Oct 19, '06
Location:	Glasgow Lighthouse

Show-and-tell for grownups, basically.

It's INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!

Arrr. That it be. And I be nearly forgettin'. Avast, ye scurvy dogs!

It's INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!

Arrr. That it be.

Idea for a fringe show

(Note for non-Scottish people: the Edinburgh Fringe is a big festival of performance arts,

mostly - but not restricted to - comedy)

Having watched two handymen at work take half an hour to change a lightbulb, I'm figuring it would be perfectly possible to stage an hour-long show which would consist entirely of
stagehands fiddling with things. With the right sort of long-drawn-out comic
effect, I think it could work.

So far (i.e. in about two minutes), I've only got the second half of the show worked out:

Bob and Wayne mount an extremely rickety ladder, one on each side, in order to change a gel filter on one of the lights (sorry, no technical terms available). Potential magical-realist moment here, with flocks of spanners swooping across the stage?). As Wayne reaches behind himself to adjust a mounting screw, Bob hugs him round the waist for support. Wayne stops, and gives him a look. Bob looks bashful. Bob then retreats down the ladder to go fetch something. There's an almighty bang (preferably with smoke), the ladder collapses neatly onto the stage, and Wayne is left hanging there, looking very scared. Eventually he manages to hook a leg round the frame, but not without some impressive acrobatics, I'm thinking. In fact, he could heroically change the filter while hanging from his feet - that'd be good. Bob can throw him tools, in a little bit of a juggling act. At some point, however, Wayne's feet lose their grip and he is left hanging by his fingertips from the lighting rig. In the moment of terrified silence, the gel filter he's just heroically replaced flutters to the ground, watched in mute silence by our two stagehands. At this point, Bob walks to the edge of the stage, unties a couple of ropes, and lowers the entire lighting rig to the stage. Wayne can then drop all of eighteen inches and lie on the stage making terrified burbling noises. Bob steps over him and nonchalantly replaces the gel filter.

Hmmm. Maybe not. Never mind; as Thomas Edison said, "If you want to have a good idea, have lots of them."

Places to see before I die: Alang Beach

Ever since I first heard such places existed, the idea of
the Alang ship-breaking yards
has haunted my imagination
(scroll north - it keeps going for a while).
This is where the world's shipping goes to
die: one long beach where vessels are run aground, to be stripped down
and chopped
up by workers of all ages in the most horrendous conditions, using axes
and hammers and their bare hands.
I'm not sure how close I could get, as a westerner - but I'd sure like
to try and see it for myself. The image of this enormous beach,
scattered with these vast steel behemoths shimmering in the heat haze
of a thousand oxy-axetylene torches, while people swarm over them like
ants over a carcass...

Oi, Summer Girl!

1000 words of advice to design students, from core77's Allen Chochinov. And yeah, I said design, but some of it still applies to art students, I think. Particularly the stuff about getting off-campus and photographing your work.

Oi, Summer Girl!

1000 words of advice to design students, from core77's Allen Chochinov. And yeah, I said design, but some of it still applies to art students, I think. Particularly the stuff about getting off-campus and photographing your work.

Oh! Purdy! (vase)

Pretty vases! A little Dali-esque, if memory serves? From Little Wonder in Philadelphia, but distributed by a German company. So I don't know where they'll end up being sold. Nice, though. Thought some of you might like them.

And while I'm trawling the interweb, look at this! Holy crap! It's a sofa that turns into a set of bunk beds! Wow. I bet it's not very comfortable as a sofa, though.

Urgh

Why on Earth am I here? What am I doing with my life? How the hell did I end up here, doing this? More to the point, who picked up my life, 'cause this one sure doesn't feel like it belongs to me. And whoever's got it, can I have it back, please?

...urgh. Not yet 9am, and already I'm riven by self-doubt. It's gonna be a bad day. Oh well - nothing for it but to crank up the Radiohead and knuckle down. Like the man said, some days you're the grasshopper, some days you're the ant.

Right now, though, I feel more like the slime left in the bottom of the washing machine drawer.

Urgh

Why on Earth am I here? What am I doing with my life? How the hell did I end up here, doing this? More to the point, who picked up my life, 'cause this one sure doesn't feel like it belongs to me. And whoever's got it, can I have it back, please?

...urgh. Not yet 9am, and already I'm riven by self-doubt. It's gonna be a bad day.

Prison - punishment or rehabilitation?

Should criminals be punished or rehabilitated?

They need to know they've done wrong, and the victims need to know their pain has been recognized. Therefore, punishment is vital

 

 8

I'd rather not be mugged again, thanks, and I'll trade in my savage glee at seeing them suffer if that's what it takes.

 

 4

This is silly. Obviously there's a happy medium. The current system isn't so bad.

 

 2

A thief should have his/her hand cut off.

 

 1

Given five minutes before work this morning, I can only find UK reoffending rates statistics for 10-17 year-olds. Apparently, in 2004, 41.3% of young offenders reoffended within a year.

Now I've had my car broken into a couple of times, but in my book that barely qualifies as being a victim of crime compared to some crime against your person, like being mugged or (God forbid) actual bodily harm. So my point of view is probably off to one end of the scale (the Bleeding Heart Liberal end, obviously - duh). But speaking personally, even if I was the victim of some sort of serious crime, I'd like to think that I'd prefer a rehabilitation policy to one of punishment. I'd like to think that, if you could absolutely guarantee that I would never be a victim of crime again, I'd be happy to see the criminal go unpunished.

That's a slightly misleading statement, because it links punishment and rehabilitation - and I think most of the evidence shows that there is no link. Some might argue that that is because the punishments we hand down aren't extreme enough - but we only have to look at Dickensian England and the origin of the phrase "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb", to see that it doesn't stamp out crime. It might reduce the level, but it pushes the remainder to increased levels of desperation and violence. That's not good.To my mind, that condones a level of barbarism into society which is precisely the wrong direction for society to progress in.

Oh, and for the record, I do not believe that the state has the right to take the life of any of its citizens, for any reason. But that's not the debate I wanted to have. I want to concentrate here on the prison system, and what it achieves or fails to achieve. And what that says about us, and what we demand of it.

Okay, well, that's my rather facile opinion on the matter, thrown together in ten minutes this morning. What do you think?

(and Moom, having lit the blue touchpaper, retires...)

Prison - punishment or rehabilitation?

Given five minutes before work this morning, I can only find UK reoffending rates statistics for 10-17 year-olds. Apparently, in 2004, 41.3% of young offenders reoffended within a year.

Now I've had my car broken into a couple of times, but in my book that barely qualifies as being a victim of crime compared to some crime against your person, like being mugged or (God forbid) actual bodily harm. So my point of view is probably off to one end of the scale (the Bleeding Heart Liberal end, obviously - duh). But speaking personally, even if I was the victim of some sort of serious crime, I'd like to think that I'd prefer a rehabilitation policy to one of punishment. I'd like to think that, if you could absolutely guarantee that I would never be a victim of crime again, I'd be happy to see the criminal go unpunished.

That's a slightly misleading statement, because it links punishment and rehabilitation - and I think most of the evidence shows that there is no link. Some might argue that that is because the punishments we hand down aren't extreme enough - but we only have to look at Dickensian England and the origin of the phrase "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb", to see that it doesn't stamp out crime. It might reduce the level, but it pushes the remainder to increased levels of desperation and violence. That's not good.To my mind, that condones a level of barbarism into society which is precisely the wrong direction for society to progress in.

Oh, and for the record, I do not believe that the state has the right to take the life of any of its citizens, for any reason. But that's not the debate I wanted to have. I want to concentrate here on the prison system, and what it achieves or fails to achieve. And what that says about us, and what we demand of it.

Okay, well, that's my rather facile opinion on the matter, thrown together in ten minutes this morning. What do you think?

(and Moom, having lit the blue touchpaper, retires...)

What is the messiest fruit?

Are oranges the messiest fruit to eat, or what? I always make a complete mess of peeling them.