In Future, Technology, Voice on
27 November 2008 with no comments
I’ve been wondering to what extent my descendants 100 years from now will look back on recordings of me and think not that my voice sounds funny but that my vocabulary does. Then I turned this thought over, wondering if anybody alive 100 years ago ever closed their net around that same butterfly of an idea: yes, it’s a given that the outfit of words I wear right now will be severely out-of fashion in five generations, but what will it look like next to the clothing on tomorrow’s tongues?
I can imagine Thomas Edison—the man who in those early days probably thought more about the implications of his inventions than anyone else—once had this thought in the 1870’s, when working on the phonograph. He would have been the first, then, to take that thought as anything more than fleeting speculation. He would have winced to himself—not chuckled—at those first thoughts. And I’m thankful for for Thomas Edison, who perfected a way for the “lackaday”-wielding denizens of 19th-century America to tinnily annoy us, ad infinitum. I once thought we took this technology for granted. I still do.
It’s just that now I know we have good reason to take some things for granted. We know that recording ourselves is a method for propelling some aspect of ourselves into the future, but we also realize that this just means people will laugh and point at what we’re wearing when we get there.
If you're new to Tightgrid, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In Cars, Development, Transportation on
21 November 2008 with no comments
Last Friday, the Rudin Center at NYU hosted a conference on Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Over the course of a few posts, I’d like to offer a summary of some of the best ideas that were thrown around the room that day. Here’s what keynote speaker Doug Foy—an environmental activist and former head of the Massachusetts state development office—had to say:
Foy asked us to pay attention to capital flows and be on guard against city ordinances that discourage development in central cities and thus contribute to our reliance on the automobile for all but the shortest trips.
For instance, due to minimal playing field size requirements, schools are increasingly being built outside of towns and cities. Another exampe he cited are regulations forbidding additional sewerage capacity within central cities, which in many cases have prevented development that would add value to these areas as public transportation destinations.
Though mostly provocative, some of the rhetorical questions Foy asked point to a number of issues we should be addressing to make our towns and cities more livable. Chief among those he posed are: “Can every child walk to a library?” This question uses walkability as a lens through which to view other community issues, such as safety, education, and the role of government institutions.
In light of the recent electoral victories for public transportation projects, Foy also urged the democratization of transit funding issues. On these issues, he said, “voters are ahead of politicians.”
In Uncategorized on
17 November 2008 with no comments
I think you can often judge the greatness of a work of art by its most negative reviews just as by its most glowing. But it’s very difficult to find harsh critics of my favorite television show, The Wire. Take Amazon: out of more than 600 reviews, there are only six one-star reviews for the entire series (Season 1: 4 one-star reviews, Season 2: 0, Season 3: 1, Season 4: 0, and Season 5: 1*). Even with this small a sample we can still receive a clear vision of the show’s brilliance through the warped lens of a review by Johnathon, entitled “Very boring to watch - dehumanizing, densensitizing, coarse”:
I had 1000’s of hours of viewing movies, television series, and television programming behind me before I sat down to watch this series on DVD, season one, the box in my hand. I was very dissapointed. This series stinks. I watched only episode 1, and have the experience and perception to know that it won’t get any better.
The story settled in episode 1 on 3 places - a rundown, neglected inner city lower class neighborhood, the offices of the detectives, and it goes back and forth between a courtroom and the street busts of drug dealers from vans and unmarked cars.
I didn’t like the profanity. It went on for too long, filled every one’s mouths, and didn’t have a point to it after the first 40 minutes. Everyone was swearing and cursing and it bored me.
I got bored with it. It didn’t help to develop character or story and offended me after having it fill my ears for 40 minutes.
The profanity was so thick in the first 35 minutes I got bored. I coulden’t understand what anyone was saying to each other because of the broken english, cursing and swearing, and lude and immature banter everyone engages in. In short, I coulden’t follow the story. If gangster talk and street slang wasn’t worse enough, the profanity and constant cursing just filled in the rest of the dialogue, it felt like the scriptwriters got bored with developing character and story.
Realistic depictions of the life, the neighborhood and what the characters do could be done in less time, with less coarse language, and with more skill. Slow motion, some music, careful planning of the shots, some better storytelling, and the same messages would have come across in half the time. Obviouslly, the people behind the show lack that kind of talent to pull it off.
If watching cheap white trash and cheap black trash destroy themselves and probably each other interests you, this is for you. I have a better way to spend my evenings. I experience enough negativity in the world on a daily basis, that I don’t have to put it in my dvd player after dinner for it to “entertain” me.
When I was a child I did as children did, but when I became a man I put away childish things.
Less then 1 star is my vote.
* WARNING: There are some spoilers in the one-star review for Season 5.
In Economics, Literature, Mapping, Transportation on
17 October 2008 with no comments
My friend Kirbie recently discovered that the corner of Easy Street and Poverty Lane is in Salem, South Carolina. Really.
View Larger Map
While I wanted to credit the optimism of whoever named the roads (Poverty Lane is a deadend, Easy Street links two major roads), I just realized that Easy Street is the only way to enter or exit Poverty Lane. This calls to mind an essay by Garrison Keillor.
In Uncategorized on
6 October 2008 with no comments
Iceland is in trouble.
This North Atlantic volcanic island, which is the size of Cuba, with a population of 320,000 - the size of Coventry’s - is an unlikely player on the global financial stage. It is famous for its fish, geysers and for winning the UN’s 2007 ‘best country to live in’ poll. But Iceland built its extraordinary wealth on the crest of the worldwide credit boom and now the crunch is sweeping it away, bankrupting a people for whom the past eight years have been, for most of them and by their own admission, one long party.
Many Icelanders bought cars using foreign loans, which have gone up as much as 90 percent against the collapse of the krona, Iceland’s currency.
Foreign currency loans are a problem for homeowners, too. ‘Loans have been very cheap, house prices rose and there was a lot of good-quality housebuilding. But the building has halted, nothing is being finished, nothing is selling. The interest rates are staggering. What people are doing now is swapping houses if they want to go bigger or smaller. That is what is keeping us afloat,’ says estate agent Ingolfur Gissurarson. His mobile goes off - the ringtone is A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles. ‘I changed it to suit the times,’ he smiles.
In Military, War on
20 September 2008 with no comments
Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.
—Paul Virilio (2000)
In Military, Research, Technology on
18 September 2008 with no comments
Has there been any discussion of the military’s growing reliance on “civilian” research and development, when for at least the past half-century it seems to have been the other way around? I’m thinking of video games, in particular, but I’m sure one could dredge up an abundance of other examples. And I’m not referring to private sector R&D—the military has long relied on innovations from private contractors, of course—this discussion would instead focus exclusively on consumer goods and technology that have been appropriated for the purposes of waging war.
Maybe this isn’t a trend in the first place but rather a continuation of a long tradition of military applications for civilian technology. Still, I can’t help but think it’s largely been the other way around.
