Coming full circle
Bikes I have ridden: year acquired/number of gears:
1975: 1
1976: 3
1983: 18
1992: 21
2001: 27
2008: 1
So a couple of days ago I succumbed to a long-felt need and bought a singlespeed bike, a Kona Paddy Wagon. Just one gear. Freewheel optional. Fantastic.
When the hill gets steeper, pedal harder.
Leaf, for Autumn
Just went to a lecture by John Tonkin which made me think I should put some of my art-squibs up. Accordingly, Leaf from October 2005.
Entropy and Empire
Fascinating article considering the hegemony and collapse of empires as thermodynamic events. It seems preposterous to narrate the arc of an entire people in entropic terms, but it’s fascinating—especially to me, over-susceptible to the charms of scientific analogy.
Alain de Botton writes too beautifully for my taste. I mean ego.
I’ve always regarded Alain de Botton as my alternate-life doppelgänger: we were both born in 1969, we’re smart, philosophically inclined and educated, and we’re both successful authors. Except that he is alone on that last thing. His Architecture of Happiness is superb: beautifully measured prose, restrained photography, insightful argument. I am at once inspired and deeply envious. Every time he publishes a book, I feel, for just a moment, a tiny poisonous emptiness inside my chest, an emptiness that can only be assuaged by buying and reading the book in question. Alain himself would no doubt understand.
All I can do is derive superficial satisfaction in the fact that I have far, far more hair on my head than he does.
Cultured (and beautiful) meat
James King’s Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow proposes an aesthetic dimension to “victimless” meat-eating.
The mobile animal MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] unit scours the countryside looking for the most beautiful examples of cows, pigs, chickens and other livestock. Once located, the creature is scanned from head to toe, creating accurate cross-sectional images of its inner organs.
The most interesting and aesthetically pleasing examples of anatomy are used as templates to create moulds for the in-vitro meat (we wouldn’t choose to eat the same old boring parts that we eat today). The result is a satisfyingly complicated and authentic form of food.
If there is a victim in all this, it is ourselves? What does it mean, to eat meat grown in a vat? Is this better than conventional carnivorousness? Probably.
[via we make money not art]
Tofu: the Food of Tomorrow, Today
In the future, assuming we’re not grubbing around for rats in the radioactive remnants of post-industrial civilisation, we will all be vegetarians. Population pressure, environmental concerns and ethical awareness will eventually make eating meat unacceptable, and future-oriented souls would do well to prepare to wean themselves off the flesh of beasts. To this end, I, hitherto an habitual omnivore, have started to experiment with a range of ‘tarian products. Tonight I’ve been snacking on the Sanitarium Vegie Delights range, in this case the Chicken Style Deli Slices, grayish circular slices of compressed solidity which approximate a chicken taste no less closely than does the more traditional chicken product – which is to say, not very closely at all.
In their chickeny quasi-verisimilitude, however, I detect a lack of ambition. One of the benefits of virtual meat is that one needn’t restrict oneself, tastewise, to domesticated or societally approved species. In the same way as virtual sex will no doubt lead to esoteric erotic experimentation, virtual meat could transcend the quotidian: chicken, beef, ham and pork, you bore me. I ‘d rather try okapi, armadillo, or capybara. While one’s at it, why stop at extant species? The dodo was reportedly a fine bird. I would enjoy a trilobite as much as a modern crustacean. And the bird-hipped Tyrannosaurus would, I presume, taste like giant, giant chicken. So think of virtualisation as a freedom from the traditional limitations of good taste, in both senses, and an opportunity for new taste experiences.
The next step, of course, is Hufu™. What diverse delights might await a committed Hufu gourmand? A textured-protein meal based on a steatopygous African buttock? A lean, intense Inuit loin? A wagyu Midwestern couch potato?
Somewhere in Tokyo
Somewhere in Tokyo is an underground workshop where Aibo robot dogs are recombined with power tools and consumer electronics. Aibos with nightvision and angle grinders stalk alleyways, gleaning parts from dumpsters and parked vehicles. Bluetooth-connected Aibo swarms pool their vision streams, reconstructing 3D spaces and exhibiting emergent behavior. At the heart of the hive, an Aibo queen, fibreoptically tethered to a server rack and a T1 line, downloads Google search data and reimagines the world: drones connect to her switched hub and suck on distilled knowledge.
tag memes
architecture design flash art mobile actionscript space algorithmic infovis tags blog datavisualisation green modular sleek tokyo travel urbanism visualization algorithms data development electronics flickr future hotel hotels interface museum photography processing reference scandinavia simulation spaces toread ubicomp urbanexploration writing advice animation API books-to-have business cinema computational cooking cosmology css culture dataviz dataworld economics energy environment envy flash8 folksonomy fonts food gehry genetic information infospace interaction internet japan landscape life london macintosh maps markets methods minimal modern modernist music networks nomadic nordic ontology opensource peakoil physical politics prefab programmatic prototyping realworld remix RFID robotics science sciencefiction search stock syntax tech theory tools tshirt tubemap unix urban video virtuality web
Out there, there are people whose tastes intersect mine. Someone (me?) should build a service to explore this. Also: t-shirts with same printed on them: ideal for speed dating, may get you beaten up.
Why are American Books so Ugly?
I live in Australia, and for the most part, books that I buy in stores have covers which I like. (I suspect that they design them that way to make me buy them, the fiends.) Sometimes, however, I (a) buy stuff from Amazon in the US, or (b) have Delicious Library suggest that a book of mine might look like the US edition. For the most part, said editions are very unattractive. Take, for example, The US and Australian (and UK) covers, respectively, for Gabriel Zaid’s rather lovely So Many Books:
It’s not too hard to guess which one I find more attractive. Question, though: is there anyone who would like the left-hand design more, anywhere? Clue: the sort of person who will buy this title probably likes books. They’re not afraid that they’re going to be crushed by the Giant Spiral Book Tower.
Would have been a bastard to set up the shoot, too, whereas the one on the right would take ten minutes. In this case, ten minutes well spent.