Letters From Here

Links etc. related to places, and contemporary notions of place, that are of interest to Rob Walker, author of Letters From New Orleans and co-founder of The Hypothetical Development Organization. See also: Rob Walker blog on Design Observer.

[lettersfromhere]

Uh oh!

[nevver]

Pattern recognition, The Jefferson Grid

[lettersfromhere]

Rats can be trained to perform search and rescue missions

Search and rescue dogs are commonly used to find people trapped in the debris of collapsed buildings, but are search and rescue rats next? A new study suggests the rodents can be trained to find people and then return to their release point after hearing a signal.

[thingsmagazine]

Distances in days from London: the Isochronic World Map, 1914

[lettersfromhere]

What Post-Katrina New Orleans Taught Us About Urban Rats

A team of ecologists looks at how disasters affect rat populations and human exposure to disease.

[lettersfromhere]

Second Life is very much like a slowly dying star. It’s not as active and engaging as it used to be, but for a 12-year-old game, it’s still active enough to be worth keeping the lights on, with 900,000 monthly active users, according to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg. And much like a slow-dying star, it’s huge.

via This Video Shows Just How Big ‘Second Life’ Really Is | Motherboard

This almost makes me want to fire up my long-dormant Second Life account. Almost.

But seriously, it’s fascinating that SL has 900k active users a month at this point.

[lettersfromhere]

Big news from our pal Robert W. Harwood:

Finally, seven years after the first edition and eleven years after their precursor, A Rake's Progress, the second (and definitely final) edition of I Went Down to St. James Infirmary has returned from the printer. This edition is 75 pages longer, includes a comprehensive index, and has been extensively rewritten. Information not available back in 2008 has been stirred in. We are very proud of this book.

It is available through our website for $20 plus $9.50 shipping and handling (regardless of destination), or through amazon.com for $35.

More: I Went Down to St. James Infirmary: The Second Edition of IWDtSJI is now available!

[lettersfromhere]

The Photo-Auto Guides were the forerunner of an image based way-finding system of seismic impact: Google Street View. ...

[The guides] allowed a traveller to preview images of the trip before departing. They were a proto-virtual tour. As a result, some of the mystery of travel was lost, but a degree of precision was gained: it’s helpful to know to take a right at a junction, especially if you’ve already previewed what the turn will look like. 

I’d never heard of these. Nice piece by Adam Harrison Levy: The History of Being Found: Design Observer

[lettersfromhere]

Yes, Rats Can Swim Up Your Toilet. And It Gets Worse Than That.

They eat our food. They furnish their nests with our detritus. They chew through our sheet metal, our lead pipes and our concrete. They outsmart us at every turn. They are our shadow, our enemy, ou...

Corrigan said he agreed with Gregg in part: To wipe out an infestation you have to think like a rat. “But I also think it’s not difficult to out-think a rat,” he said. Unlike many animals, a rat must have both food and water every single day to survive. No skipping meals. Alamy Alamy “If it doesn’t have food and water, it goes into this kind of ‘crazy mode,'” Corrigan said. Rats have a very low tolerance for hunger—so to get rid of them simply ask where they’re getting food and eliminate the source.

[lettersfromhere]

How do we deal with symbols that no longer fit our sensibilities? Let us count the ways.

People, places and things erased by history:

For as long as humans have lived with symbols we have created strategies for effacing or revaluing them. Destruction is the most dramatic.

But statues can also be reinstalled in less symbolically fraught places, or moved to the edge of the civic realm. Forgetting is a powerful force, as well, and Washington is full of graven images of men and women who, if their legacies were evaluated afresh, would likely never pass muster with contemporary moralists. Iconoclasm can be accidental or purposeful, an act of liberation or oppression, and there’s never any guarantee that it will work.

Ham-fisted destruction of symbols is a sure sign of the totalitarian mind-set — and an image destroyed in the physical world can have extraordinary longevity and power in the collective conscious. The following is a field guide to the loss of symbols, here and around the world.

Here.

[lettersfromhere]

The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies has released a free PDF anthology of images of earth's protected wonders, like development right up to the edge of New Zealand’s Mount Egmont National Park.

(via Free PDF book includes amazing satellite shots of protected places - Boing Boing)

[grossnational]

[lettersfromhere]

These Are the Most Vermin-Filled Cities in the U.S.

Roach motels, mouse traps, and rat nests

Tampa, Fla., is among the roachiest big cities in America. Seattle may be the rattiest. Philadelphia has more mouse sightings per housing unit than any other U.S. city. These are some of the filthy highlights from the U.S. Census Bureau's biennial accounting of rat, mouse, and cockroach sightings across the country. The most recent numbers, collected in 2013, were released last month.

[lettersfromhere]

Data Visualization Shows How Segregated Our Cities Are

The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has assembled a map that shows just how segregated out cities can be. The results can be used to help understand how racial problems affect communities and authorities.

The map pulls its data from the 2010 Census, and displays 308,745,538 individual dots, each color coded by ethnicity. The resulting visualization shows just how stark racial boundaries are throughout the United States. Additionally, it shows the geographical spread of the entire US population by race. Predominantly, racial groups are concentrated within cities, while fewer groups are present throughout rural America.

Zooming in on this map is enlightening: as you zoom in on major cities, a complicated picture appears showing the mix of ethnicities resolves down to a cencus block level. For more on their methodology, you can stop by their website, where they explain how the map came together.

[lettersfromhere]

The Most Fantastic Architecture of the Soviet Union Was Built on Paper

Restricted by the aesthetic limits on architecture in the Soviet Union, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin imagined the most fantastic cities and wondrous structures on paper.

From 1978 until the end of their partnership in 1993, Brodsky and Utkin collaborated on etchings dense with precarious scaffolding, classical domes, huge glass towers, and other visionary architecture that referenced everything from ancient tombs to Le Corbusier’s sprawling city plans.

This month, Princeton Architectural Press is releasing the third edition of Brodsky & Utkin. First published in 1991 and reprinted in 2003, the book’s illustrations are shadowy manifestations of urban landscapes somewhere between a dream and a chaotic future, where all the history of architecture collides. Brodsky and Utkin’s prints are also currently on view at the Tate Modern in London as part of the ongoing Poetry and Dream displays from the museum collections.

[lettersfromhere]

Since 2007, artist Mike Winkelmann has been producing an image a day, primarily using Cinema 4D, though all the specific tools differ year by year.

While I'm deliberately focusing on architectural or landscape-oriented imagery, his work is also strong with abstract technological scenes of circuits, robotized organic forms, abstract sprays of light, abandoned atmospheric-processing towers on floodplains, colossal elevator shafts, microscopic views of disturbed crystal growth, and more. 

(via BLDGBLOG: Informational Topographics)

[lettersfromhere]

This is from Wikipedia (see below), which I was consulting to figure out which states were part of the Confederacy and which weren’t. (I couldn’t recall the deal with Kentucky and Maryland, in particular.) This animated map answers all questions & is pretty cool — much better than anything I expected to find. 

But please note: If, when I hit “post now” I determine that animation doesn’t work in the dashboard and/or on the Letters from Here site, I will probably just take it down and delete, because as a static map it’s useless.

Credit: "CSA states evolution" by User:Golbez - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CSA_states_evolution.gif#/media/File:CSA_states_evolution.gif