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]
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]
Pure genius: Point Break Live!
Point Break LIVE! is the absurdist stage adaptation of the 1992 Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze extreme-sports blockbuster that tells the story of former College football star, Johnny Utah, in pursuit of the surfing, bank robbing, skydiving, bare-hand-fighting adrenaline-junkie-cum-Zen-master Bodhi Sattva.
[...]
The starring role of Johnny Utah is selected from the audience each night, and reads their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting. The fun starts immediately with the "screen test" wherein the volunteer Keanus (usually 5-15 men and women vie for the role) go through a grueling audition process. The part is then cast via applaus-o-meter.
Whoah!
[Via jwz]
Chuck Klosterman thinks the producers of Lost have written themselves into a corner:
For three seasons, the ABC series Lost used flashbacks to illustrate elements of the narrative the audience never saw. Now they've gone the other way; now they're consistently using flash-forwards to show parts of the story we haven't yet experienced. It's made the series even more interesting than it already was. But something keeps occurring to me: Isn't this a dangerous move on behalf of the producers? They seem to be giving its central cast members the strongest negotiating leverage in TV history.
Stronger than, say, the position Jerry Seinfeld was in when he put his name in the title of his series? Stronger than the position the six Friends were in when they realised that by sticking together they could put enormous pressure on the network when contract renewals were due? I'm not convinced.
Lost has a core cast of around a dozen actors and a setting where a character can very easily be made to disappear in mysterious circumstances. The leverage any one actor has – even the ones playing Jack, Kate and Locke – is relatively small.
Let's say the actor who plays Sayid (Naveen Andrews) suddenly decides to ignore his current contract. Let's say he demands twice as much money as he's scheduled to receive and won't show up for work without it. What could ABC possibly do?
Make sure he never works for an American television or film company again, since a) he could easily spend the next three years fighting a breach of contract lawsuit, and b) other TV producers may be disinclined to hand recurring roles in their new projects to actors who are disinclined to stick around.
Naveen Andrews is a fine actor, but by no stretch of the imagination does he possess the sort of star power to pull a stunt like that.1
They can't just feed him to the smoke monster and write him off the show; we already know he definitely exists in an abstract tomorrow. By actively showing the future, the screenwriters have relinquished their ability to control the present.
Hardly. It just means that they can't easily show Sayid on-screen doing things he hasn't already been filmed doing. You can still have a scene where Jack and Kate talk about how Sayid ended up hunting down and torturing the head of the Hanso Foundation, you just can't show Sayid doing it without recasting the part or shooting it so that the audience never gets a good look at Sayid. Not ideal, but not an insurmountable problem.2
An even greater (and admittedly morbid) problem would be accidental death: What if Michael Emerson (the actor who portrays Ben) died in a car accident? Would the show simply have to end? How could his absence be reconciled?
Again, they either recast the part or write around the actor's absence. Granted, by letting the audience in on what is to come the writers have narrowed their options somewhat, but they can work round these problems if they have to.
From deadmessenger, posting at MetaFilter, on software usability:
"Using a computer should be easier than not using a computer."
Elevator design is an exacting discipline:
[Veteran elevator designer John Fortune...] carries a "probable stop" table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.
[Via FFFFOUND!]
Clive James has a good old whinge about the recently announced changes to the design of Britain's coins:
The Royal Mint's mode of embracing the future is to take those old coin designs that did nothing except to tell you what they were worth [...]
I really like the current designs: nothing but "1p", "2p", "5p", "10p", "50p", "£1" or "£2" in a nice, simple large sans serif font. It was a shame they had to drop all those coats of arms and portraits of monarchs and what have you when the Postmodern Art Police seized power a decade ago, but that's the price of progress.
[...] and turn them into works of post-modern art. This raises the question of whether there are any limits to the extent to which art should influence everyday life.
You might have thought that this question had already been answered by British Airways. Long before BA's participation in the recent and ongoing Terminal 5 launch happening – a multimedia event which has reinterpreted the connection between passengers and their luggage – BA turned the tailfins of its aircraft into display areas for modern paintings.
Though the BA PR brains who conceived the tailfin art initiative were convinced that their handiwork vouched for the nation's thrusting creativity, the travelling public made it clear that they felt safer in an aircraft that had no visible connection with an art gallery.
They felt "safer". Really?
There might be an art gallery in the city that the passengers left, and another art gallery in the city they were flying to, but they didn't want to be in an art galley as they flew between art galleries.
Or rather, they don't mind flying in an 'art gallery' one bit so long as it sticks to displaying a 'traditional' style of art.
Correcting the error cost almost as much money as committing it, but eventually things were put back more or less the way they were.
If turning the coinage into an art gallery similarly proves to be a mistake, it's going to be harder to find the money to correct it, because this mistake is being made with the money.
Does James imagine that the Royal Mint would issue a recall notice, requiring us all to hand in our coins over the course of a few weeks to have an old design stamped over with a replacement?
The wider argument Clive James makes – that there's a tendency for modern organisations to rebrand themselves far more frequently than is strictly necessary – is perfectly fine; the specific example he used to kick off his argument is deeply silly.