things consumed 2

Delightful web discoveries, with the occasional link to my own projects and sites. All images and content are © their respective creators, including mine.

[nevver]

[visinfocat]

How to Make Money from Facebook

[mobilelene-blog]

Can't resist.

[unhistorical]

[booksandpublishing]

January 25, 1882: Virginia Woolf is born.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

[mobilelene-blog]

And is strewn still...

[mobilelene-blog]

An entire building complex being pirated? How wrong is that?

"Der Speigel reports that an unauthorised 'copy' of Zaha Hadid's Wangjing Soho office and retail complex in Beijing is being built in Chongqing, the emerging mega city 1,000 miles south west of the capital. What's more, Chongqing's copy of this 521,265m², 39 storey complex, dubbed Meiquan 22nd Century, could even be completed before the original is due to be finished, in 2014."

(via Zaha Hadid design becomes first 'faked' building | Architecture | Agenda | Phaidon)

[mobilelene-blog]

Assemblage's model for the new Iraqi parliament building.  (via London firm win Iraqi Parliament competition | Architecture | Agenda | Phaidon)  

It reminds me a bit of card houses I like to build, though mine aren't so round.  No, that's not really a statement about the complexity and delicacy of legislatures or democracies...

[mobilelene-blog]

Franck Allais (via Franck Allais subverts the city | Photography | Agenda | Phaidon)

[mobilelene-blog]

The UK Civil Divorce Records, 1858-1911 date from the year when the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the jurisdiction of divorce from the church and made it a civil matter. Before this, a full divorce required intervention by Parliament, which had only granted around 300 since 1668.

Imagine: parliament was an improvement over having your escape from a bad marriage dependent upon the church!

[mobilelene-blog]

In the first elections in Israeli history Arab parties ran as affiliates of the Mapai movement which was led by David Ben-Gurion, the architect of the state. Parties like The Democratic List of Nazareth may not have been very big but they were included in governing coalitions and they reflected the impulse of the left-wing founders of the new state that the Arab minority had to be included in the political process. Israel has changed a great deal since those days.

BBC News - Israel elections quandary for marginalised Arab citizens.  It is so rare to see the 20% or so of the population of Israel that is Arab mentioned.  

[mobilelene-blog]

Sculpture by Jeongmoon Choi (via JeongMoon [100 conversation])

[mobilelene-blog]

My favorite Onion video in a long time.

[mobilelene-blog]

The decision to give the US targeted-killing programme the appearance of legal propriety by codifying it, and now the temporary exemption granted from that codification to Pakistan, were both taken by Brennan. A counter-terrorism expert with 25 years experience in the CIA, his nomination to run the agency has raised eyebrows among civil liberties groups because of his senior role in the CIA under George W Bush at a time when torture was used on terror suspects and because of his fondness for drone strikes. Targeted killing has been a particularly pronounced facet of US strategy in Pakistan. The UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that there have been 362 drone strikes in the country since 2004 – 310 of them launched on Obama's watch. The strikes have killed up to 3,461 people, 891 of them civilians.

CIA to exempt strikes on Pakistan from drones codification – reports.  Extra-judicial killings across international borders are difficult to dress up as legal anywhere.  

[t-leafd]

Colonists On Mars Must Be Vegetarians

It’s already out there that space entrepreneur Elon Musk has plans to someday colonize Mars, and that those with the means are invited to become a part of his red planet oasis. But there’s a catch we just heard about: Colonists must also be vegetarians.

That’s the word from the RT news network, which published a report this morning saying that Musk —in line with his own personal ideology—said at an event at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London that he will only allow vegetarians to live in his settlement, a city for 80,000 space explorers that he first spoke of back in November.

[mobilelene-blog]

Well DUH.  It would be insane to make spacesuits and allot acres of imported grain, artificial oxygen, and thousands of gallons of water for livestock.  And the methane they produce would be dangerous!  It's not even sustainable at scale here...

[mobilelene-blog]

Proving you have the academic ability is one test; proving you have the money is another, and if you don't, the first test doesn't count.  Ouch.

[springwiseintelligence]

Serialized iPad novel unlocks extra content only at real-world locations

Often the enjoyment of a creative work can be enhanced by location, and we’ve seen this demonstrated before with the Bluebrain app, which reveals audio content specific to the area the listener is walking through. Now a similar innovation, this time in the publishing world, comes in the form of a new iPad novel titled The Silent History, which presents readers with short excerpts each day and offers additional content when they travel to specific real-world locations. READ MORE…

[mobilelene-blog]

This reminds me of William Gibson's references in his books to "locative art," which involved being able to experience/see/witness virtual data in real places.  (That Tardis with the virtual inside visible through your mobile device operates on a similar concept...)

[alliterate-deactivated20120901]

Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery.  (via yasodhara)

Our Lady of Hydrogen.

[laughingsquid]

Why Faking the Moon Landing Would Have Been Impossible

[mobilelene-blog]

A filmmaker's review of the technology used for the moon landing, debunking myths surrounding that event.  

The best point: conspiracy theories about history distract you from current, real world battles which SHOULD be capturing your full attention and energy.

[mobilelene-blog]

I feel wrong about predicting that the gift shop will sell shirts that say "I got screwed in Phoenix."  It seems inevitable, doesn't it?  (via Will BIG's viewing tower put Phoenix on the map? | Architecture | Agenda | Phaidon)

[fucktheory]

Speaking In Tongues

The first and most important requirement in my new school will be that every participant in our experiment must either speak at least 2 languages or begin studying a second one immediately on entering the school.  Because that’s how they separate us, that’s how they keep us from understanding each other, and that’s how we can access new modes of thought an action.  And that’s why I’m learning Arabic right now.  Because until I can read Arabic, I’m not going to weigh in on crap like “Islamophobia.”  See how that works?  First learn.  Then talk.  Preferably in a new language, using words you can explain, on your own conceptual plane of immanence. 

[mobilelene-blog]

This is wonderfully true: it is amazing to use words in languages beyond your mother tongue that are difficult to translate 'back' without entire sentences of culture and context explanation...  But which just 'work' in the language you are thinking in.

We know we know the purpose of our news media is to reinforce our own mythologies, rather than inform us of the views others hold.  Direct communication is key to understanding.

[Stories of my mother failing to teach me to swear in Polish, and of my father studying Korean or coming to the aid of German travelers who didn't expect fluent German from an African-American omitted in the interests of remembering to go to sleep tonight.]