Nuru Rimington-Mkali’s award-winning short film And I Refuse to Forget is a lovely piece of work: evocative, intriguing and to the point.
[Via MetaFilter]
Is it just me, or does Matthew Gibeault look remarkably unconcerned at having been arrested?
[Via GromBlog]
I now know what a Schwerbelastungskörper is:
It’s a massive cylindrical block of concrete, standing 18 meters high and weighing in at 12,560 metric tons. It is located in the Berlin neighborhood of Tempelhof, where the eponymous airport is found.
The name is translated as “heavy load-bearing body,” although someone in the discussion page has suggested that “heavy load-exerting body” might be more accurate. It was constructed in 1941 to test how well the marshy ground upon which Berlin sits could handle the massive projects planned for Germania. More specifically, it was built to see how the landscape would react to Hitler’s gigantic Triumphal Arch, whose opening would have accommodated Paris’ Arc de Triomphe.
The results were not encouraging:
The Schwerbelastungskörper sank 7 inches in the three years it was to be used for testing, a maximum depth of 2.5 inches was allowed. Using the evidence gathered by these gargantuan devices, it is unlikely the soil could have supported such structures without further preparation.
Hitler dismissed these findings, perhaps confident that the landscape can be subjugated with fine Teutonic engineering. But Hitler’s capital had to wait. There was a war to be waged.
Jeffrey Zeldman, musing on the vanishing personal site:
Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.
Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices. [...]
I’ve been mulling over these issues lately, thinking about what to do with my sites. Food for thought…
The Guardian’s report on the travails of the Palm Jumeirah as residents move in and discover that the reality doesn’t quite match the brochure’s promises conjures up a picture of a thoroughly … cosmopolitan … neighbourhood:
The lab rats in this experiment are a strange mix. They include England footballers, a battalion of middle-class Britons from places such as Salisbury and Weybridge, and even, it is said, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, who is thought to have a house opposite Kieron Dyer, the West Ham midfielder.
Truly, Dubai is a strange place.
[Via Pruned]
Meet Johnny Crash.
A crash test dummy is tired of his job and secretly wants to be a great magician. So he quits his job and decides to realise his dream.
A very stylish animation.
[Via VideoSift]
When galaxies collide we get some really impressive pictures. (The first one on that page is especially fine.)
As I understand it, one day a few billion years from now it’ll be our turn.
[Via Seed]
Bob Brady found himself sharing his motorcycle with a green Marco Polo.
After the Office of Government Commerce unveiled an allegedly embarrassing logo, an anonymous spokesman gave the following explanation:
A spokesman for OGC said: “It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC – and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”
Heh…
[Via MetaFilter]
A postscript to this post from a couple of weeks ago:
Using a semicolon is like barbecuing:
I’m never quite sure I’m doing it correctly.
[Via Fritinancy]
Haunting images of abandoned hotels in the Sinai peninsula.
Director Kimberly Peirce on how Hollywood studios think:
… After “Boys Don’t Cry,” Hollywood came and offered me some very expensive projects, some very good stuff… I had one project that I got almost to fruition, “Silent Star,” about the unsolved murder of [the silent movie director] William Desmond Taylor in the 1920s. It was wonderful – the story of how Hollywood was built on an unsolved murder and a cover-up. We had it cast and ready to go, and the studio ran the numbers and they said, “We want to make it for x amount of money.” And I said, Uh, all right. But then they said, “We don’t want to spend that much, we want to spend 10 million dollars less.” I said, Well, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but I’ll go ahead and make the adjustments I can. And they said, “Well, we don’t want to see the version of the movie that we’re prepared to pay for. We want to see the version we’re not willing to pay for.”
Needless to say, this arrangement is justified using the magic phrase “anti-terrorism”:
THE UK Home Secretary secretively signed a “special certificate” last year that gives foreign security agencies real-time access to traffic camera images and related data monitoring British motorists on highways throughout the UK.
[...]
Under the authorisation signed last July 4 by Jacqui Smith, video feeds and still images captured from roadside TV cameras, along with personal data derived from them, can be transmitted out of the UK to countries such as the US, that are outside the European Economic Area.1
[Emphasis added]
Not just images of traffic, but ‘personal data’ derived from them? I wonder how far that goes. The name of the vehicle’s registered keeper? Their address? National Insurance number? Police record? DNA information? It all depends upon how elastic the term ‘derived from’ proves to be in practice.
An anonymous Home Office spokesperson commented:
“We would like to reassure the public that robust controls have been put in place to control and safeguard access to, and use of, the information.”
Not to worry, then.
[Via Qwghlm]
__________A couple of photos that caught my eye:
[Wayne Levin pictures via Monoscope]