5 insane plans for feeding West Berlin you won’t believe are real
January 15, 2014 § Leave a comment
For the first time since the development of modern Chinese script more than 16 centuries ago, a way has been found to copy quickly all of the language’s thousands of complex characters. It is the unique “Mingkwai” (clear and quick) typewriter, invented by Lin Yutang, Chinese author.
Reducing a day’s hand copying to an hour’s typing, the electrically driven machine can print 90,000 characters and reproduce every known Chinese word. Chinese writing does not use the letters of an alphabet; instead, each word is an individual symbol. Other Chinese typewriters require memorizing the position of 5,000 characters and filling in missing words by hand.
A simple, “self-evident” keyboard, the result of 30 years’ research, is the secret of Mr. Lin’s typewriter. Perhaps even more important than the typewriter itself is the adaptability of the system to typesetting and teletype machines.
The keyboard has 72 keys: 36 representing the top and 28 the bottom sections of Chinese characters, plus eight printing keys. Pressing a top and a bottom key brings the type roller into position to print a “unit” of eight possible combinations of the basic sections–eight different words.
At the same time, duplicate cylinders bring a replica of this unit to where it can be seen by the typist through a “magic viewer” window. He then selects a character by pressing the corresponding key. This turns and shifts the type roller into position and prints the character.
The printing mechanism consists of six cylinders, each having six type rollers that contain 7,000 complete characters and over 1,400 components. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Brendan George Ko
O, there has been much throwing about of brains
January 14, 2014 § Leave a comment
Like when I’m among men and I see a woman take her clothes off in the name of art, im reminded that im primarily a sexual object. and maybe that makes me feel sexy sometimes. but when im with women only, seeing a naked woman just reminds me of the physical realities of my body. that im not pretty, that im aging, that i have a yeast infection i got from a uti that I got from sex.
Maybe I’m thinking so heteronormatively in part because I don’t think any woman could be attracted to my body. because I am a woman and I am my harshest critic. so I assume other women think the same about not only themselves but also me.
If men were at this performance, it would have gone over much better, I’m sure. They’re easy to please. They would have made excuses for me why my nudity was necessary in the context of the piece. They would have stood up for me and agreed it was my right to get naked if I wanted to. I would be happy to have them as allies, still fully understanding their true intentions behind their support, that they’re just happy to get a glimpse any way they can.
There would be of course men who would turn their noses down at me for my nudity but it would be because they’re scared their horniness will outweigh their intellectualism and they don’t want to seem like a caveman or something.
Maybe you feel my presentation of this piece isn’t artful or subtle enough. Maybe you think I should think less about myself and the way I am perceived.
You’ll go home and tell your roommates I sucked and im a terrible artist who makes self indulgent work with no craft or skill. or maybe at least a part of this will resonate with you and you’ll come up to me after and we can talk about how I stayed just above the line of being disgustingly self aware in a way that made you become more self aware about your own prejudices.
Ok I’m going to get dressed now because I want to end this performance. I don’t want to be naked when it ends. read more
SIGN & PHOTOGRAPH: Tim Etchells
my first memory is of a fire. I remember being thrown into the arms of a policeman from an upper window
January 13, 2014 § Leave a comment
A few years ago, Dirk Brockmann, a theoretical physicist from Germany, was visiting his American friend Dennis, and they got talking about population mobility. Dirk knew Americans move around a lot, but he wondered how to capture where they go, who they talk to. His friend said, “Have you ever heard of Where’s George?” Dirk hadn’t.
It’s a website that tracks the movement of dollar bills. Thousands of people participate. All you do is take a bill out of your wallet, type the denomination, serial number, the date and your zip code onto the Where’s George? site, and then, with a pen or a stamp, deface the bill with the words “WheresGeorge.com.” After which (and this is key), you spend it. So now your bill is moving from business to business, person to person, and if and when another Where’s George volunteer discovers it, she or he will note where, note when and spend it again. Since dollar bills pass between people, Dennis suggested why not us the “Where’s George?” data to get a sense of where people go, and, just as interesting, where they don’t go?
That’s what Dirk did. After checking 1,033,095 reports (describing the movement of 464,670 bills), he came up with this map. In the Seattle area, for example, his team found that over two weeks, only 7.8 percent of the bills moved more than 500 miles away. Most of the money stayed close. More interestingly, Dirk’s team began to notice virtual borders, lines that the money rarely crossed. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Caroline Mackintosh
And, you know, there is no such thing as ‘the market’. There are individual businessmen and businesswomen, and there are companies
January 10, 2014 § Leave a comment
For many years Denver International Airport was home to one of the most remarkable airport carpets ever created – a portrayal of man’s ascent from single-celled organism through fish and ape to homo sapiens. It even dared to look into the future where – around Gate 26 or so – it posited mankind as a fleet of interstellar brain-ships, travelling the galaxy in search of zinc. However, a politically influential Denver church objected to the carpet’s portrayal of evolution, and the carpet was unceremoniously removed in 2001. It was replaced by DEN’s present featureless carpet, which, as one proponent suggested, “does not distract us from raising our eyes to Heaven.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Laura H
I was interested once in the arts, but I can’t remember now which ones they were
January 9, 2014 § Leave a comment
In a new study, psychological scientist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University presents data showing that participants had worse memory for objects, and for specific object details, when they took photos of them…
Undergraduates were led on a tour around the museum and were asked to take note of certain objects, either by photographing them or by simply observing them. The next day, their memory for the objects was tested.
The data showed that participants were less accurate in recognizing the objects they had photographed compared to those they had only observed. Furthermore, they weren’t able to answer as many questions about the objects’ visual details for those objects they had photographed.
Henkel calls this the “photo-taking impairment effect”:
“When people rely on technology to remember for them — counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves — it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences,” she explains.
A second study replicated these findings, but it also presented an interesting twist: Taking a photograph of a specific detail on the object by zooming in on it with the camera seemed to preserve memory for the object, not just for the part that was zoomed in on but also for the part that was out of frame. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Minami Noritaka
Based on an incredible untrue story
January 8, 2014 § Leave a comment
Bodie, California is a ghost town. Or rather, it was a ghost town—now it is a historic park and tourist destination. It endures in a state of “arrested decay,” meaning that nothing can be newly constructed onsite, but neither are its standing buildings permitted to deteriorate any further. The state of California has suspended the town in its process of ruination, stabilizing its entropy and halting its decline. If its decay is forestalled, its grounds rigorously maintained and its aesthetic carefully cultivated, can it be called a ghost town any longer?
Bodie is a former gold rush encampment located on the remote eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, a dozen miles from the Nevada state border. It was hastily populated in the late 19th century and just as hastily deserted in the early 20th century, leaving a husk of a settlement in its wake. The town boasted ten thousand residents in 1880 and none by the early 1940s, after the mines had dried up and a devastating fire had driven the last few residents away. What remained after its abandonment was a captivating ruin—miners’ coats still hanging on hooks in wooden cabins, books still piled up on pupils’ desks in the schoolhouse, beakers and test tubes intact in the pharmacy, dusty coffins in the undertaker’s studio, and an unfinished billiards game in the saloon. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Mac Adams
Nearly all of human life has always passed far from hot baths
January 7, 2014 § Leave a comment
We are now in a position to demonstrate our proposition: the natural rate of interest is zero. First, to reiterate the argument thus far: Under a state money system with flexible exchange rates, the monetary system is tax driven. The federal government, as issuer of the currency, is not revenue constrained. Taxes do not finance spending, but taxation serves to create a notional demand for state money. Spending logically precedes tax collection, and total spending will normally exceed tax revenues. The government budget, from inception, will therefore normally be in deficit, which also allows the nongovernment sector to “net save” state money (this in fact has been observed in all state currencies).
The Natural Rate of Interest Is Zero
If spending is not revenue constrained, why does the government (conceived here as a consolidated Treasury and Central Bank) borrow (sell securities)? As spending logically precedes tax collection, the government must likewise spend sufficiently before it can borrow. Thus, government spending must also, as a point of logic, precede security sales. To cite a “real world” example, market participants recognize that when Treasury securities are paid for, increasing Treasury balances at the Fed, the Fed does “repos” on the same day; the Fed must “add” so the Treasury can get paid.
Since the currency issuer does not need to borrow its own money to spend, security sales, like taxes, must have some other purpose. That purpose in a typical state money system is to manage aggregate bank reserves and control short-term interest rates (over night interbank lending rate, or Fed funds rate in the United States).
In the contemporary economy, government “money” includes currency and central bank accounts known as member bank reserves. Government spending and lending adds reserves to the banking system. Government taxing and security sales drain (subtract) reserves from the banking system. When the government realizes a budget deficit, there is a net reserve add to the banking system. That is, government deficit spending results in net credits to member bank reserve accounts. If these net credits lead to excess reserve positions, overnight interest rates will be bid down by the member banks with excess reserves to the interest rate paid on reserves by the central bank (zero percent in the case of the USA and Japan, for example). If the central bank has a positive target for the overnight lending rate, either the central bank must pay interest on reserves or otherwise provide an interest-bearing alternative to non-interest-bearing reserve accounts. This is typically done by offering securities for sale in the open market to drain the excess reserves. Central Bank officials and traders recognize this as “offsetting operating factors,” since the sales are intended to offset the impact of the likes of fiscal policy, float, and so forth on reserves that would cause the Fed funds rate to move away from the Fed’s target rate.
Our main point is, in nations that include the USA, Japan, and others where interest is not paid on central bank reserves, the “penalty” for deficit spending and not issuing securities is not (apart from various self-imposed constraints) “bounced” government checks but a zero percent interbank rate, as in Japan today.
The overnight lending rate is the most important benchmark interest rate for many other important rates, including banks’ prime rates, mortgage rates, and consumer loan rates, and therefore the Fed funds rate serves as the “base rate” of interest in the economy. In a state money system with flexible exchange rates running a budget deficit—in other words, under the “normal” conditions or operations of the specified institutional context—without government intervention either to pay interest on reserves or to offer securities to drain excess reserves to actively support a nonzero, positive interest rate, thenatural or normal rate of interest of such a system is zero.
This analysis is supported by both recent research and experience. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Pixy Yijun Liao
“If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I’ll run every day and mark an X on the calendar every day I run. I can’t believe this was useful information to anybody!” He spreads his palms, a gesture conveying the sheer obviousness of the insight. “Really? There are people who think, ‘I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done’?”
January 6, 2014 § Leave a comment
In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers.
In one case, its fan tally rose from about 10,000 to more than 2.5 million. read more
COMPOSITE: Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF), NASA Hubble, NASA Chandra
Mr Francis Curle told me howe one Dr Bullein, the Queenes kinsman, had a dog which he doted on, soe much that the Queene vnderstanding of it requested he would graunt hir one desyre, and he should haue what soeuer he would aske. Shee demaunded his dogge; he gave it, and “Nowe Madame” quoth he, “you promised to give me my desyre.” “I will,” quoth she. “Then I pray you giue me my dog againe.”
January 3, 2014 § Leave a comment
Bogost writes, “hyperemployment offers a subtly different way to characterize all the tiny effort we contribute to Facebook and Instagram and the like. It’s not just that we’ve been duped into contributing free value to technology companies (although that’s also true), but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies.” This tacit agreement, however, extends beyond social media and e-mail and is really a form of housework and maintenance for our daily lives. In that regard, I wonder if calling the cozy arrangement between digital technologies, data economies, and invisible labor “employment” runs the danger of side-stepping the deeper (gendered and racialized) antagonisms inherent in the distinction between what is considered labor and what is considered “care.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
my nerves are bad to-night 