Brave New Bold Planet

The President and Vice President met with Cabinet officials today to discuss the wide-ranging effects of the Recovery Act, as well as an ambitious plan announced by the Vice President this morning to accelerate efforts for the next 100 days called the Roadmap to Recovery.  In remarks before the meeting, the Vice President called these projects ambitious but realistic:

A couple weeks ago, I asked the Cabinet members to give me a list of new projects that they were absolutely certain of they could get up and running in the second hundred days that would build momentum and accelerate the job growth in the next hundred days.

And they each came back with new projects.  The 10 most significant of those projects, Mr. President, we've put in this book that we're going to give you -- it's called "Roadmap to Recovery"

Some of these projects include creating and building 1,129 health care facilities, improving veterans’ medical centers across the country, putting 5,500 law enforcement officers on the streets, and creating 135,000 education jobs.  In total, the Vice President said 600,000 jobs will be created in the next 100 days.

In May, we lost 345,000 jobs, which marks the smallest monthly job loss since September but which nonetheless represents 345,000 terrible stories.  Therefore, the Administration is boosting recovery efforts to build on the progress we’ve already made. The President emphasized that although we have a long way to go, the American people are already seeing progress:

Now I know that there are some who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still don't believe in the necessity and promise of this Recovery Act, and I would suggest to them that they talk to the companies who, because of this plan, scrapped the idea of laying off employees and in fact decided to hire employees.  Tell that to the Americans who receive that unexpected call saying, come back to work.  Tell it to the Americans poised to benefit from critical investments that this plan makes in our long-term growth and prosperity.

In the end, that's the only measure of progress, is whether or not the American people are seeing some progress in their own lives.  And so although we've seen some stabilizing in the financial markets and credit spreads have gone down, we're seeing a reduction in the fear that gripped the market just a few months ago, stock market is up a little bit -- all that stuff is not our ultimate goal.  Our ultimate goal is making sure that the average family out there -- mom working, dad working -- that they are able to pay their bills, feel some job security, make their mortgage payments; the small business owner there is starting to see customers coming back in, they can make payroll, they can even think about hiring a little bit more and expanding.  That's the measure, how ordinary families are helping to rebuild America once more.

In the first 100 days, the Recovery Act provided immediate relief with a tax break for 95 percent of Americans, expanded unemployment insurance and food assistance programs, and launched more than 4,000 infrastructure improvement projects, which will continue to create jobs in the next 100 days. The Recovery Act has also provided record investments in new technologies, which will lay the foundation for the future economy.  We are now going in the right direction, and this summer we will go down that road even faster.
 

(President Barack Obama listens as Vice President Joe Biden (left) presents the report on the Roadmap to
Recovery as he meets with his Cabinet in the State Dining Room of the White House, Monday, June 8, 2009.
Looking on at right are Attorney General Eric Holder and Housing and Urban Development
Secretary Shaun Donovan.  Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.)
 

ComplexCity (details) - Lee Jang Sub Picking up on the inherent similarity between transportation systems in cities and the morphology of leaves and trees, is Lee Jang Sub’s ComplexCity series of works. These elaborate mappings of roads and highways mimic the venation patterns in leaves and the rhizomatic configurations of tree branches, creating delicate organic filigree [...]

It’s been a little over 100 days since the Recovery Act was signed by the President.  We’ve come a long way –- we’ve created or saved over 150,000 jobs, cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, and made funds available for over 4,000 transportation projects.  But while we’ve made progress, we still have a lot more work to do on this road to recovery.  

To accelerate our recovery efforts, the Vice President announced the Roadmap to Recovery, ten major projects that will keep more teachers in the classroom, put more cops on our streets, and give more people access to healthcare over the next 100 days.

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As the Vice President says, "It’s going to be a busy summer!"  We’ll be revving up the recovery engine getting more dollars out the door and more money into the pockets of working families who need it most.  And most importantly, by the end of the summer, we’ll have created or saved another 600,000 American jobs.

Along the way, we’ll be telling the stories of recovery in your community.  Share your photos, videos or comments about recovery projects happening in your neighborhood.  We’ll be highlighting some of your submissions here on the Recovery blog.

While WhiteHouse.gov/Recovery will be the place where our story of Recovery is told, you can always go to Recovery.gov to make sure your recovery dollars are going where they should: jobs, jobs, jobs.

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

Over the past two weeks, in two separate cities, multiple sightings of IDEO-like user-generated adaptations have reframed the motorbike as an intriguing addition to the emerging category of street furniture.

[Image: Photo by Lucy Crosbie, used under a Creative Commons license].

The first example was spotted outside Richard Rogers's Channel 4 building in London, where a cluster of bike couriers had put their feet up onto their bikes' handlebars, tipping their helmets down over their faces, and allowing the seats to form a gently curved cradle for their spines. They thereby squeezed in a quick nap between jobs.

Then, last week, as the streets of Trastevere overflowed with Romans celebrating the Festa della Repubblica, an unlucky Vespa parked next to a bustling enoteca was claimed as a bar stool and drink stand by several different groups over the course of the evening.

In both cases, the bikes suddenly appeared remarkably well-designed for their off-menu functionality: the hammock-like seat cushion and broad, flat rear looked purpose-built for backs and beer, respectively. In fact, with just a few adaptations and some thoughtful urban planning, their potential as mobile street furniture could be taken to the next level.

Simple additions—such as a gently vibrating seat cushion to work out muscle knots while couriers are snoozing, or flip-out cup holders behind the seat of the Vespa—combined with reserved parking spots for motorbikes outside bars and popular brunch spots, would surely enhance city life.

Ambitious entrepreneurs could carve out a seasonal niche by deploying a fleet of specially customized motorbikes as on-demand mobile seating. Perhaps tourists visiting Rome for the day could even rent motorbikes in a shady side-street so as not to miss out on their expected siestas. And, particularly in London, where dedicated outdoor beer gardens—a losing proposition for at least three hundred days of the year, but the most desirable real-estate in the city on those few hot, sunny days—smart publicans would eagerly pay to rent a dozen Vespa bar stools for their clientele to enjoy.

In each case, the motorbikes would be gone by the time pedestrian and vehicle traffic started up again—their mobility ensuring that streets and sidewalks remain uncluttered at peak flow.

It would only be a matter of time before low-platform flat-bed trucks had rentable sofas installed in the back and were then parked at scenic overlooks, while empty lorries were re-purposed as hammock dormitories, circling airport terminals to snap up jet-lagged travelers intent on maximizing layover time. The first international Mobile Street Furniture Conference in Milan would be swiftly followed by the creation of an industry-sponsored urban planning lobbying arm, high-profile design contests, and premium membership schemes, allowing unlimited worldwide street furniture rental...

[Previous posts by Nicola Twilley include The Water Menu, Atmospheric Intoxication, Park Stories, and Zones of Exclusion, among many others].

[Image: A Roman Triumph following the sack of Jerusalem].

Amongst the many books I'm reading here in Rome this month – including Tobias Jones's surprisingly good Dark Heart of Italy, the incredible Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton (J.G. Ballard wrote that he "found Paxton's post-mortem deeply unsettling, with its strong hint that the corpse [of fascism] might sit up at any moment and seize us by the throat" – Exhibit A here might be Andrew Brons's election this week to the European Parliament), and Roger Deakin's Waterlog – I'm making my way through two books by Mary Beard.
Beard, of course, was the subject of a long, two-part interview with BLDGBLOG back in 2007.
What I want to mention here comes from her book The Roman Triumph; it's only a brief quotation, but I like it.
At one point Beard refers to the "theaters and porticoes" built in ancient Rome using wealth taken during Pompey's "eastern campaigns" in Armenia and elsewhere. However, she writes:

The term "theaters and porticoes" hardly does justice to this vast building complex, which stretched from the present day Piazza Campo del Fiori to the Largo Argentina, covering an area of some 45,000 square meters. A daring – and, for Rome, unprecedented – combination of temple, pleasure park, theater, and museum, it wrote Pompey's name permanently into the Roman cityscape. Even now, though no trace remains visible on the ground, its buried foundations (and particularly the distinct curve of the theater) determine the street plan and housing patterns of the city above; it remains a ghostly template which accounts for the surprising twists and turns of today's back-streets, alleyways, and mansions.

The not entirely surprising realization that the present-day street grid of Rome is actually an articulation of other, previously buried cities – cities not lost to history, then, but accessible in outline through the indirect archaeology of contemporary urban planning – reminds me of something that came up back at Postopolis! LA.

[Image: Fallen Fruit's map of the lost orchards of Silver Lake].

During their presentation, the ingenious duo Fallen Fruit mentioned that, when they were mapping fruit trees in today's Los Angeles, they stumbled upon the borders of much older, abandoned fruit orchards.
In other words, what appeared simply to be a random fig tree growing in someone's front yard was, when seen on a map together with other such trees, actually the remnant presence of a now-forgotten farm.
Those trees, to use Beard's term, are the "ghostly template" from an earlier phase of land use.
There is a different grid inside the grid, you might say – where each tree becomes something like a legal document, marking the outer boundaries of a lost landholding.
Of course, both of these examples together bring to mind the lost airports of Los Angeles, those geographies of aerial experience that now sit buried and all but forgotten beneath millions of tons of pavement throughout the greater L.A. region.
Other such examples are easy to come by – but their interest, for me, never dissipates. Whether it's the lost rivers of London still giving shape to the street plan above (or lost streams of Manhattan turning into underground fishing ponds), there are remnant geographies and ghostly templates everywhere.
In fact, as I recently wrote in an introduction to photographer Shaun O'Boyle's forthcoming book Modern Ruins: Architectural Monuments of the Mid-Atlantic – definitely check it out upon publication in 2010 – this even includes our own bodies: forgotten anatomies still make themselves known through the structure and layout of our nerves and bones.
But Rome, Los Angeles, London – these urban examples simply give our ghostly ancestors architectural shape.

Just a quick note that I'm off to Turin tomorrow to participate in a conference called I Realize: The Art of Disruption, if any readers out there are in that city of long shadows and automobiles.

[Image: The massive Mole Antonelliana, Turin (1875); view larger].

The point of the conference is to look at "breaking radically with the past, moving the horizon and embracing ambitious challenges."
Even better, it takes place inside a "Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park" (here's a map) – and the other speakers include the one and only Bruce Sterling, legendary designer Peter Saville, architect Andrea Branzi, Nicolas Nova, Jennifer Higgie, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Nicola Perullo (director of Slow Food Italia), and many, many others.
If you're around, be sure to introduce yourself (although my Italian, unfortunately, è inesistente).

[Image: Photo by Moises Saman for The New York Times].

A New York Times article today about Stephen Colbert's recent trip to Iraq – where he filmed four new shows "in a former palace of Saddam Hussein" – includes a photograph taken by Moises Saman of Camp Victory... as also seen, in a different light, in BLDGBLOG's recent interview with photographer Richard Mosse.

[Images: "Thank you for your service" banner, Al-Faw Palace interior, Camp Victory, Iraq (2009); and Chandelier, Al-Faw Palace, Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq (2009). Photos by Richard Mosse].

In these two images by Mosse, seen directly above, you get a glimpse of the same room in Hussein's old palace before its transformation into a temporary television studio.
Of course, if you missed that interview, definitely check it out in full.

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June 8th, 2009: This week is a GUEST WEEK! It's where I went up to some cartoonists I admire and said "Hey would you like to do a Dinosaur Comic? You can do whatever you want, HONEST" and they said "YES, [WE] WILL!" and here we are! I am excited for these. Here's how it's going to go down!

Monday: Carly Monardo of Whirring Blender!
Tuesday: Ben Driscoll of Daisy Owl!
Wednesday: Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!
Thursday: Michael Firman of Moe!
Friday: Andrew Hussie of MS Paint Adventures!

this is gonna be awesome guys i can FEEL IT

After a two-month hiatus, a456 is back with an interesting post about the design history of the airplane cabin.

[Images: A £300-million private jet, complete with onboard car park; via a456 and the Daily Mail].

Among other things, Enrique Ramirez, the blog's author, writes that the "combination of luxury and mechanization" found inside the modern airliner "is problematized by dint of the fact that, like many other technologies in the postwar world, luxury and mechanization had a distinct military origin and purpose." Indeed, "The modern airliner, with pressurized cabins and articulated furniture, is a close relative of the nuclear bomber."
Check it out in full: Designing the Friendly Skies.

So this here is the beginning of a 10 page comic about the Garden of Eden. If you’re under age, you probably shouldn’t be reading this since it features Adam’s junk prominently, so go away.

3

Page 1 of 10

who would have thought?

here is a picture of me looking blurry, tired, out of it, and not the focus of this picture:

check out my way-too-wide robes. am i graduating, or a football player?

because you don’t know. you think you know, so let’s reduce that to you think. thinking is great, even i do it. just don’t confuse it with knowing. because you don’t know.

ugh there are so many people i want to follow on twitter but i can’t because it would be creepy. i need to keep up the whole two-way communication thing. also i need to not get caught up in the whole indirect communication thing. gosh all these new communication mediums are confusing the hell out of me. and then you have all these people making random assumptions about you, thinking they know but actually they just think.

there is an open-source google reader!! tiny tiny rss. yess

As previously mentioned, I am here in Boston at the SUSY 2009, the 17th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions. Since its inception 1993, the SUSY has become the meeting for everything around and everybody involved in physics beyond the Standard Model, from Supersymmetry and its breaking, via extra dimensions of any sort (large, universal, warped), String model building in general to Grand Unification and the phenomenology of Quantum Gravity (though mostly focussed on graviton and black hole production at the LHC). What was previously called the session on "alternatives" is now called "unconventional approaches." The word "alternative," it seems, is a bit worn out. The SUSY is a lively mix of experiment with theory, which is one of the reasons why I like it.

The meeting this year takes place at Northeastern University, where I had not been before. It is a nice place, very conveniently located, with a small but well maintained campus. (I took some photos, but unfortunately forgot the cable I need to upload them, so they will follow later). I had not known that Northeastern University was also where the first SUSY conference in 1993 was held. 

On Friday we had the first session of plenary talks with updates from the LHC and TeVatron, and a reception in the evening to get to say hello to familiar and unfamiliar faces. Every time I'm at the SUSY there seem to be more people. Maybe it's me getting old, but there are really a lot of young postdocs around this year many of whom are enthusiastic about their research and I'm sure they will make interesting contributions during their career. Most of them were crammed in the parallel sessions during the weekend. I too delivered my talk this afternoon (slides here), squeezed between SUSY breaking and degenerate vacua. I think it went reasonably well.

This evening, we also had a public lecture by Frank Wilczek from MIT (Nobel Prize 2004 together with David Gross and  David Politzer). Titled "Anticipating a New Golden Age," Wilczek explained what the LHC (The World's Largest Microscope) is and what it does, including the LHC Rap. He then went on to explain what Supersymmetry is and how it helps with the unification of the gauge couplings, expressing his conviction that Nature is giving us a clear sign that Supersymmetry is part of her workings (that part of the talk being identical to what he told at SciFoo last summer). He finished with the inspirational note that it's not only an exciting time to be a physicist, but an exiting time to be a thinking being - even if you are not actively working on these theories, we might be very close to unraveling some fundamental truth about reality. It was a very nice talk and I think the audience enjoyed it.

The EU had its elections today, and for whatever reason, the centre-lefts got pretty hammered by the centre-rights and the Liberals (these being real liberals [in favor of small government and civil liberties], not what the American leftists have tried to call themselves).

Anyway, the centre-left coalition and the liberal coalition together took a majority, which means they are likely to take the helm of the EU parliament while the anti-EU dudes, the conservatives, and the leftists/socialists all become an odd and scattered opposition. Here's a link of the results:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ep1979-2004.png

The yellows are the liberals and the light blues are the liberal-conservatives. The red leftists got pretty hammered. We're still to who ends up actually getting on board with the winning coalition, and what the new policies will be, but expect: more free trade, slightly more pro-American bend, lower taxes, and probably some less regulation.

i know i’m like a month late. anyway, the new host, caitlin hill, is rly funny.

edit: somehow i managed to speak too soon. looks like she won’t be hosting rocketboom after all.

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I'm at MoCCA this weekend (see the post beneath the comic!) Dinosaur Comics returns Monday WITH SURPRISES

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

June 8th, 2009: This week is a GUEST WEEK! It's where I went up to some cartoonists I admire and said "Hey would you like to do a Dinosaur Comic? You can do whatever you want, HONEST" and they said "YES, [WE] WILL!" and here we are! I am excited for these. Here's how it's going to go down!

Monday: Carly Monardo of Whirring Blender!
Tuesday: Ben Driscoll of Daisy Owl!
Wednesday: Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!
Thursday: Michael Firman of Moe!
Friday: Andrew Hussie of MS Paint Adventures!

this is gonna be awesome guys i can FEEL IT

Old comics from my first Jumbly Junkery back in 2006. Hopefully an entertaining look back at what I was doing several years back.

I’m at the MoCCA Art Fest this weekend at the 69th Regiment Armory (25th & Lex-ish), table 328. Be sure to stop by if you can!

Reader Louis Schultz has pointed out the work of Lithuanian-born artist Aleksandra Kasuba, who used curved surfaces of fabric stretched and attached between space frames in order to create inhabitable rooms and corridors.

[Images: The Live-in-Environment (1971) by Aleksandra Kasuba; the project "was built on a parlor floor of a brownstone house in New York City," we read. "The intent was to abolish the 90-degree angle and create an environment that would capture changes in daylight, provide variations in terrain, and introduce the unexpectedness of views found in nature without simulating nature"].

These ephemeral installations were intended, spatially, as a way to "abolish the 90-degree angle and create an environment that would capture changes in daylight, provide variations in terrain, and introduce the unexpectedness of views found in nature without simulating nature." I love that latter caveat: to retain the experiential impact of unexpected natural vistas without simply copying, or simulating, the spatial details and material palette of the natural world.
Instead, a somewhat stark world of undecorated surfaces curves around us – call it biomorphic minimalism – thus eliding the differences between architecture and large-scale tailoring.
In any case, her Live-in-Environment, from 1971, seen in the images above, is a great example of this – but don't miss the Roof Deck Study from 1974; the Barbarella-meets-IBM world of torqued geometry from her Office Renovation Study (1975); the aerial tunnels of Art-in-Science I (1977), which look like some megafaunic form of undersea life, stretched through the canopies of a North American thicket ("With the assistance of three students during an eight week stay," Kasuba writes, "we explored the topology of 78 fabric structures, hardened 32 with resins, and erected 4 weather structures"); and the simplicity of Blue Shade (1978).
Better yet, Kasuba supplies a section called How It Was Done – where you can learn how to create finishes, arches, and doors, for instance – and this includes Kusaba's extraordinary, lo-fi guide to shells, tube structures, and minimal surfaces.
It's what The North Face might have become had their tent division been bought by Kenneth Snelson.

i think i’m going to have some fun with this blog.

the internet is so fun. it’s like anyone can be a celebrity (even star simpson!)

so my plan is to make all my friends celebrities. i mean, we basically are celebrities anyway. fuck i ported dropbox to linux for fuck sake!! stay tuned :)

In Normandy this morning, the President spoke at the 65th Anniversary Ceremony:

Lyndon Johnson once said that there are certain moments when "...history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom."  

D-Day was such a moment.  One newspaper noted that "we have come to the hour for which we were born."  Had the Allies failed here, Hitler's occupation of this continent might have continued indefinitely.  Instead, victory here secured a foothold in France.  It opened a path to Berlin.  It made possible the achievements that followed the liberation of Europe:  the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the shared prosperity and security that flowed from each.   

It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.

More particularly, it came down to the men who landed here -- those who now rest in this place for eternity, and those who are with us here today.  Perhaps more than any other reason, you, the veterans of that landing, are why we still remember what happened on D-Day.  You're why we keep coming back.

For you remind us that in the end, human destiny is not determined by forces beyond our control.  You remind us that our future is not shaped by mere chance or circumstance.  Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman.  It has always been up to us.   

You could have done what Hitler believed you would do when you arrived here.  In the face of a merciless assault from these cliffs, you could have idled the boats offshore.  Amid a barrage of tracer bullets that lit the night sky, you could have stayed in those planes.  You could have hid in the hedgerows or waited behind the seawall.  You could have done only what was necessary to ensure your own survival. 

But that's not what you did.  That's not the story you told on D-Day.  Your story was written by men like Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd Airborne, who parachuted into a dark marsh, far from his objective and his men.  Lost and alone, he still managed to fight his way through the gunfire and help liberate the town in which he landed -- a town where a street now bears his name.   

It's a story written by men like Anthony Ruggiero, an Army Ranger who saw half the men on his landing craft drown when it was hit by shellfire just a thousand yards off this beach.  He spent three hours in freezing water, and was one of only 90 Rangers to survive out of the 225 who were sent to scale the cliffs.

And it's a story written by so many who are no longer with us, like Carlton Barrett.  Private Barrett was only supposed to serve as a guide for the 1st Infantry Division, but he instead became one of its heroes.  After wading ashore in neck-deep water, he returned to the water again and again and again to save his wounded and drowning comrades.  And under the heaviest possible enemy fire, he carried them to safety.  He carried them in his own arms. 

(President Barack Obama (L-R), Britain's Prince Charles, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Canada's
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy arrive at the Colleville-sur-Mer
cemetery to attend a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy
June 6, 2009. Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

(Carli Bruni, First Lady Michelle Obama and Charles Payne listen to President Barack Obama speak during the
ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy at the Normandy American
Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville sur Mer in Western France, Saturday, June 6, 2009.
Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
 

(President Barack Obama speaks during the ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the Allied D-Day
landings in Normandy at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville sur Mer in
Western France, Saturday, June 6, 2009. Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

 

what’s the difference????

int float2int(float x) {
 return (int) x;
}

int float2int(float x) {
 return *(int *) &x;
}

me and jacob got sucked into that c++ map that’s floating around. (lol get it?)

such a wonderful feeling

kudos to you if this has happened to you

[Image: Little Rome Ruins by Bernat Gallemí].

An early burst of thunder woke me up this morning, before a brief wash of rain blew through – but what was extraordinary was that the sound of the thunder didn't pass all at once: it kept opening and echoing, as if moving outward through the city to trace the shapes of piazzas, streets, river banks, and alleyways.
There was a kind of Dopplered geometry to it – an acoustic version of Rome exactly opposite the city's angles and walls. Live here long enough, and perhaps you could even tell when a storm has reached the Campo del Fiori – echolocating yourself amidst urban geography – because the thunder has opened out again, getting louder, or more resonant, only then to dampen itself back in a tight squeeze through surrounding alleyways. The sound moves through the city like a spider.
You might say that thunder could be used here as a kind of horizontal space-detection device. It's urban radar: an acoustic sensing of the city that moves through that city, seeking out cracks and passageways. Only to fill those empty spaces with sound.
A guild of blind mapmakers uses thunderstorms to pursue prehistoric radar cartography.
It occurred to me, though, that every city – or, at least, every city with a different street grid – must react to thunder differently. Urban design becomes a direct sonic engagement with the atmosphere through storms, using the unique form of your city as a precise acoustic frame for the sky.
Could there even be building types that funnel the sound of thunder? Like Athanasius Kircher's talking statues, they would be talking buildings: acoustically activated by thunder for the purpose of public spectacle.
You could actually test people with this: put them blindfolded in different locations during foreign thunderstorms and ask them to deduce where they are from the widening concussions of sound around them.
Moscow, Cairo, Rome, Fez. London, Barcelona, New York. All with their own sonic signatures: you pinpoint an aerial detonation and acoustically trace its spatial after-effects.

I'm in Rome now for the month of June, living across from a prison near the banks of the Tiber, listening to seagulls, on a fairly awful and inexplicably expensive wireless internet connection, fearing that I might only be able to post every few days (unless TIM suddenly super-boosts its mobile signals).

In fact, my early morning attempts to find domestic hotspots – putting my computer near the windows, or moving books and papers just a few more feet away – reminds me of stories I've read about high-end audio equipment aficionados, people who purchase arcane bits of scientifically dismissible, wildly overpriced stereo attachments in the hopes that they can affect, clarify, or otherwise improve their home-listening experience.
Pieces of piezoelectric crystal, or unsustainably harvested rain forest wood milled into odd shapes – combined with bizarre new alloys imported from metallurgical research labs in southern Germany – all wired up to $7,250 cables, are placed around your home stereo, like a deviant altar. Where consumer goods meet Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law.
But is there an equivalent for wireless internet connections?
You put a small piece of copper near your USB port, hoping for magical cross-interference, or, in a fit of antihistamine-influenced mania, you rewire your whole house, splicing electrically unnecessary strands of tellurium through the switchboards inside the walls.
Or why not take the Ghostbusters route and construct a whole building as an urban antenna, an architectural attractor for that strange wireless haunting that allows you to Google things in foreign cities from a desktop that isn't yours.
In other words, are there micro-practices of wireless superstition that people engage in so that they can achieve, or believe they achieve, stronger wireless internet signals?
You implant rods inside all of Rome's statuary, and inside the ruined walls of the city's periphery, in order to boost your home internet access. A conspiratorial geometry of antennas that no one else recognizes, pulsing with airborne data.
Rome, reconceived as a counter-Vatican of wireless downloads. Catholicism of the megabyte.
It's what might happen if Telecom Italia opened an urban design wing after reading too much Aleister Crowley.
In any case, while the internet is still functioning here, I also wanted to thank everybody who came out to see Thrilling Wonder Stories last week at the Architectural Association. My own talk was something of a jumble, to be honest – sorry about that, especially for those of you who were meeting me for the first time – but the rest of the day really impressed.
For those of you who missed it, participant Jim Rossignol has a great write-up of the event on his blog; Rossignol's account of Francois Roche is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

Then the most extraordinary storm of science-madness came from Francois Roche (of architects R&Sie) whose thick accent masked incredible phrases: “strategies of sickness,” “protocolising the witch in the forest,” “the necrosis of the building,” “the penis of the wall”… He talked about feeding death and traditional fairy tales into design, and about creating a machine that would build an un-navigable glass maze in the courtyard between buildings, into which people would wander, and then die, unable to escape without GPS. “They die to become part of the building,” he said, grinning, and propping expensive sunglasses on his styled bonce. He talked about a building which would be constructed from vast, moulded versions of bullet holes on wet clay, covered in rotting vegetation collected from the Korean de-militarized zone by a purpose-built “witch” robot, referencing Tarkovsky’s Stalker on the way.

With any luck, the whole of Thrilling Wonder Stories will soon be made into an AA publication by the end of this summer.
So expect more posts soon – and if anyone has tips for obscure archaeological sites in Rome that need to be visited, let me know.

Old comics from my first Jumbly Junkery back in 2006. Hopefully an entertaining look back at what I was doing several years back.

I’m at the MoCCA Art Fest this weekend at the 69th Regiment Armory (25th & Lex-ish), table 328. Be sure to stop by if you can!

The President makes clear that as Congress works through health care reform legislation, it must include fundamental changes that lower costs, ensure Americans have choices, and establish access to quality, affordable health care for all Americans. "But what we can’t welcome," the President says, "is reform that just invests more money in the status quo – reform that throws good money after bad habits."

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download .mp3 or .mp4 (51.1 Mb)  |  also available here  |  read transcript

review from the NYT



White House.gov blog post with link to transcript

some highlights:

But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." (Applause.)

And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. (Applause.)

But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. (Applause.) Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.

This was awesome because he said all this stuff praising Islam and the Muslim audience was really feeling good, but you could tell people were balking at the idea that they also need to change their perception of America but that they still wanted to get behind what Obama was saying because it was so logical. Obama made it clear that it is a two-way street.

The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. (Applause.)

America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and we will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. (Applause.) We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.

People have been saying that Obama is mainly a realist like Bush I, except he uses idealistic rhetoric. People have expressed disappointment that he has "given up" on promoting democracy. I think that's a good thing, though. And while I'm glad he's a pragmatist like Bush I, I think his world view and foreign policy is much more nuanced and embodies a new kind of idealism that's more ambitious in some ways than conventional liberal idealism. Bush I was a pragmatist in that he didn't really know what to do, and he was not particularly interested in promoting peace or solving problems around the world. On the other hand, Obama is interested, but he has a pragmatic approach to solving these problems. He has strong convictions about the nature of these problems and strategies on how to solve them. The key parts of his policy that's really idealistic are :

1.) lead by example instead of demanding democratic reform
2.) win people over by being nice to them to marginalize extremists

the Chinese government's diversion tactics now include "umbrella men"

also, many websites in China are down for "maintenance." people in china have dubbed it "national internet maintenance day."

it's Machiavellian but hilarious.

Hillary Clinton put out a statement. actually, it's pretty good.

Ryan Howard of the World Series Champion Philadelphia Phillies recently got a tour of the new White House garden and spoke with White House chef Sam Kass about the importance of a healthy diet.
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11:35: Nancy-Ann DeParle just opened the Women's Health Care Stakeholder meeting. This is a remarkable gathering of 30 women who are here to discuss how we can make the health care system work for women. Premiums in the private market for young women are often higher than they are for men, and 21 million women and girls went without health insurance in 2007. To set the scene: sitting beside Nancy-Ann at the table are Melody Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, Director of the Office of Public Engagement Tina Tchen, and HHS's Neera Tanden. Nancy-Ann emphasized in her opening remarks that this meeting is just one way we are hearing from women as we work to reform our health care system this year.

neato study about the causes of bankruptcy. Guess it really makes sense.

where have i been? i think i wrote something like this before. sometimes i just stop caring. sometimes i am just like fuck it. i heard somewhere someone say “fuck it? that’s all you ever have to say about anything.” i don’t want to be that kind of person except that… right now, fuck it.

sigh. i am an idiot because when it comes to knowing other people i have no patience. maybe i come off as desperate? i don’t think i seem outright desperate. closeness is a kind of dance. i am open to closeness so impatiently every time i meet someone new. maybe i kind of cheapen myself. that’s really not my intention. i can see how it could feel boring after that. i don’t understand the whole having fun / being bored thing. i don’t really ever feel like that. my two feelings are being warm in someone’s arms and not. it doesn’t really translate for me.

twitter is hard to use. just like, i am hardly ever doing anything /that/ interesting these days. actually i am kind of embarrassed by my life / lifestyle. isn’t that wonderful? i think that could be a reason for why i suck at twitter now.

mike told me that google analytics is tracking like 75% of all websites. dunno if that is bogus or not but yeah i’m probably removing my google analytics.

“you don’t like sending the first im, do you?” HAH cute

he imed me. and told me he got a boyfriend. something he never admitted of our six-month relationship.   in other news, i started special orthogonal groups in the 18.701/2 book.

Page 17 of 17!!
THE END.

(seriously. That was all there was of the poem)

In other news, I’ve got my comics all stapled and boxed up, ready to bring to MoCCA this weekend! I’m really excited about it. I think this new mini comic is the best yet. Here are some of the covers drying in my kitchen:

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