By way of Kottke comes this exhilirating collection of hurricane photographs taken from the International Space Station.
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On Wednesday I began attending classes in the Ph.D. program in Urban Affairs here at the University of Delaware. With the exception of a minor registration problem, everything has gone smoothly. I’m most impressed by the professionalism of the staff and by the number of lines in which I’ve had to wait since arriving on campus (zero).
Posting might be light in the coming weeks but I’ll try to use this, my clearing in the forest of the internet, as a space to grapple with some research challenges in these early stages of my doctoral career.
The L.A. Times offers their list of the 25 films from the past quarter-century best capturing the essence of Los Angeles.
I was most surprised by this little nugget, from the blurb for Speed (#17):
One out of every 31 Americans lives in Los Angeles County.
I’m fine with Jackie Browne at the third spot (instead of Pulp Fiction) but I would have put Boyz N the Hood (#4) higher on the list, perhaps at the top. While LA Confidential is merely a brilliant homage, Boyz N the Hood stands as an achievement to which homages are made. And not just in film: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is Boyz N the Hood stripped of all social conscience.
In one of many Current TV pods marking the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Jared Arsement documents a volunteer effort to rescue those stranded in New Orleans using an army of citizen owned and operated flat-bottom boats. Arsement observes something a few moments into the story that caught my attention:
“…it’s an interesting situation to try to launch boats into an area that doesn’t have boat launches to go into because it’s not a body of water, it’s a city.”
Is this something we should be discussing for our coastal cities? Do we need to emplace boat launches in potential flood zones in cities like Corpus Christi, Mobile, or even New York? Or will freeway on- and off-ramps serve our purposes for the next few decades?
Is anybody thinking about other types of rescue infrastructure?
David McRaney recently used Google Insights to discover and map the spatial distribution of Google searches involving the search term “sweet tea”. I love the idea, but I wish that Google allowed us to normalize the data against something like the number of total searches made per state or the populations for each. Or does it, in the former case, already normalize the data against the total number of searches for that state? I think it’s just against the aggregate for total searches performed in that country or even for the world as a whole.
My sense is that normalizing the data would lead to a map very similar to the one he produced, but what if it didn’t?What if the normalized map revealed that people in the southeastern United States actually conduct less searches of “sweet tea” per capita? I mean, southerners are more likely to already know how to make it, right? I learned how to make sweet tea from my mother, born in Atlanta, who learned how to make it from her mother, also born in Atlanta, who learned how to make it from the aunt who raised her, also born in Atlanta, and on and on like that for generations. Somebody in, say, Boise, might not have a family member to teach them the wonders of sweet tea. But they have Google: in the first ten search results for “sweet tea”, four are recipes.
A very simple yet effective Flash map of sweet tea locations in Virginia inspired McRaney’s project.
photo credit: ratterrell
Untitled (BR100CO), 1989
Oil, autobody compound, fiberglass over wood
62 1/2 x 56 1/2 x 3 inches
My new favorite sculptures are from Richard Prince’s Hoods series. In addition to his rephotography for this series, Prince created molds of car hoods and painted the resulting casts in Rothkoesque colors.
Can something be both a sculpture and a painting? Why not? Who cares? These are sculptures of paintings celebrating their own surface. And car hoods.
Jan Chipchase discusses single-occupancy vehicles in two (increasingly convergent?) contexts. In Los Angeles, single-occupancy is the norm; you won’t get any weird looks from fellow commuters. In Kabul, Afghanistan—where the occasional suicide bomber prefers to drive alone—security-minded drivers are more likely to give you both weirder looks and a wider berth.
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