5 Intriguing Things
1. What happens when you average many, many photos of the same place.
"An iconic landmark such as the Statue of Liberty fractures into a dozen possible compositions, with each representing a different set of decisions about how the monument is best depicted—and thus, by extension, telling us something about how the photographers see the world. Do you place Ellis Island in the background, or the Manhattan skyline? What does that choice tell us about how you think of the Statue of Liberty? Are friends and family more often posed at the bottom left, the center, or the bottom right of the picture—and what can we learn from that about the unwritten visual conventions that frame our world?" (newyorker.com)
2. I'm OK. You're OK. Comic Sans is OK.
"Design matters and this isn’t great design. Having preferences, aligning with other people who share those preferences and spurning people who don’t align with those preferences is a big part of how we create our social identity. The font could be more elegant. It could, objectively, be better at being a font. And so people pile on Comic Sans in a way that they’d never pick on nerds in school. And every time you see your library or your community center making a poster with Comic Sans — 'Hey, come to the puppet show!' — there’s a bit of a nose wrinkle, an almost-sneer. Like they didn’t get the memo. Like they don’t even know. Like a puppet show is serious business." (hilobrow.com)
3. The project to build a database of all the police killings in the United States.
"Nowhere could I find out how many people died during interactions with police in the United States. Try as I might, I just couldn't wrap my head around that idea. How was it that, in the 21st century, this data wasn't being tracked, compiled, and made available to the public? How could journalists know if police were killing too many people in their town if they didn't have a way to compare to other cities? Hell, how could citizens or police? How could cops possibly know 'best practices' for dealing with any fluid situation? They couldn't." (gawker.com)
4. In search of the pond that used to sit at Five Points in Manhattan.
"Urban environmental history is often the pursuit of what's no longer there. Cities obliterate landscapes, filling in or paving over shorelines, streams and forests. Other vanished features tell happier stories of healing – think of Pittsburgh's choking smoke, or the Thames' filthy water. I've always been intrigued by stories of a lost feature of Manhattan's landscape: the Collect Pond. This small lake was located not far from the southern tip of the island. One of the city's original sources of fresh water, it was said to be up to 60 feet deep." (environmental-history-science.blogspot.ca)
+ This is roughly where we're talking about on a Google Map.
"Our first project was to find a cheaper way to monitor orangutan populations in Sumatra. Traditionally people have to walk the forest on foot and count the nests in the forest canopy, and from those counts they estimate the population of orangutans. There have been efforts to fly small manned aircraft and count the nests from above, but it’s very expensive to hire an aircraft. Many times pilots wouldn’t even want to fly because it’s quite risky — there’s no way to land the aircraft in case of any emergencies. So we have been flying our UAVs over the rainforest in Sumatra and have managed to get very high-resolution images of these nests. The resolutions can be as high as 1 to 2 centimeters per pixel, which allows us to not just count the nests, but also see what kinds of twigs they are using to build the nest, what kind of leaves, possibly even estimate how long the nests have been left in the tree – all sorts of information biologists had never had before." (e360.yale.edu)
Book 2. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. Let's let John Updike sell it: "When Julian Jaynes...speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence." Recommended by Sean Power.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
classified. In the sense (of material) 'forbidden to be disclosed except to specified people because of endangerment to national security' —modern US (classified information).
A Puppet Show Is Serious Business