I love the concept of a shipping container home. It works well with my fetish for straight lines and open spaces. Tristan sent me this link of a great video showing off a several container version in California. I love the small footprint, open vista, and the ease of modular construction. As many of you know, I am quite interested in creating a modular home at the cottage. More about that later but, for now, here is the link.
Never heard of the patch?
In the “I didn’t think people could be any stupider” file goes this article on some dude who put a cage over his head to stop smoking…. except it probably doesn’t help his willpower when he takes it off to eat.
I would like to break into this guys house and replace his head cage with one that weighs several hundred pounds.
Im thinking that this guy is just doing it to avoid kissing his wife.
Misc. postings since I am lazy and on vacation
Varia
Space pron: An incredible manipulation of actual space imagery to fake motion. This technique, pioneered for this film is quite amazing and the IMAX movie looks fantastic! The artist has manipulated actual photographs with really high resolution and detail. More here.
It turns out, according to this British study, that class inheritance is strongly correlated with your grandparents choice of occupation even taking into account the class of the parents. According to researcher Dr Tak Wing Chan, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, said: ‘The “grandparents effect” in social mobility is found to operate throughout society and is not restricted to the top or bottom of the social class structure in Britain. It may work through a number of channels including the inheritance of wealth and property, and may be aided by durable social institutions such as generation-skipping trusts, residential segregation, and other demographic processes. Further investigation needs to be done to establish the precise mechanisms by which the grandparents effect endures, but our study of 17,000 Britons reveals that grandparents have a substantial effect on where their grandchildren end up in the British class system.’
And while up at the cottage in a few weeks I will be using this night painting technique for some experimental photography! Check this out!
Liking isn’t Helping
Crises Relief Singapore has released a new ad campaign that is designed to shock. Quite effective! It is called “liking isn’t helping” designed to make people aware that clicking a mouse is a far less effective way to help people than to actually, er, helping people through a donation of your time.
update on the zombies!
OK. I have made a serious dent in World War Z. Yup. I am really enjoying it so far, its narrative structure as a series of journal entries from around the world documenting the incarnation of the disease. Great tension builder. Like the Japanese sailors wondering why their boat is shaking just before the emergence of Godzilla. We know what’s coming. They don’t. The book is better than what I was expecting and I can see how it will translate at the theatres. But I have to go bed. I would love to pull an all-nighter!
I finally broke down….
… and put my air conditioner on. I have been attempting to tough it out but I had to throw in the towel when I had to do dishes this afternoon. And I cooked as well. Roast chicken and sweet potato purée. Very nice! The weather is stormy but the rain has yet to break the back of this humidity. I have the AC cranked up high. Sorry, environment. I will turn it off when the sun goes down. 🙂
And a group of us are seeing World War Z this week! So I stole a minute to run across the street today at work and bought the book. I’ll start it as soon as I finish this post! I have heard that the movie, while good, is a superficial storyline that neglects the serious questions posed and abandons the deeper elements made by the author in the book. See the Venn diagram here.
More History of Debt
If you haven’t had the chance to read anthropologist David Graebner’s book Debt then you will have another book to put on your reading list.
The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good by Richard Dienst is reviewed here at Dissent magazine and looks well worth a read. I am quite fascinated by this emergent topic and how it is becoming a focal point for people outside of Occupy circles. Main stream academics are now seeing that it is the social construct of debt that is at the core of political economy and until we deal with that, every other element of social philosophy will suffer. Along with a lot of people.
Yup…. my bad….
I have been quite busy lately so I apologize for the lack of updates!
The weather here is hot and humid. And I mean hot! All this week is in the 40s with the humidex but I am still resisting the call to put in my air conditioner! I was tempted last night as I cooked dinner but I survived!
If you are in the market for a new DSLR since your 16 megapixel camera just doesn’t cut it, try this.
A link here to some absolutely incredible time lapse movies of cities across the world. I love these!
And finally, for today (I promise to get back to a regular schedule soon!) is a fascinating look at artist Katerina Panikanova work painting books, you really have to see this for yourself here! Hmmm, perhaps her gallery deserves a visit when I am in Rome.
And yes, I will be posting my itinerary soon!
Oh, and I will be adding a post with photos of the artist in my building who puts up small drawn cutouts in the stairwells on my building. I just stumbled across this, more wonderfully imaginative images!
Superman!
So Tristan and I went to see Superman in 3d last night. I was expecting the story to be overwhelmed by the special effects but I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. I, like the author of this review in The New Yorker, appreciated the deeper allegories and metaphors littering the story. Some were too much, the scene of Clark Kent discussing who he is with a stained glass of Jesus in the background, mentioning TWICE that he was 33 (year of Jesus’ supposed death). That, and some other simmering religious allegory does, however, provide a clue to the utility of the original storyline created in the early 1930s and why this movie works: the desire for someone to save mankind from itself is desired in difficult times. Mired in what later came to be know as the Great Depression, many longed for salvation. The German people would elect Adolf Hitler as Roosevelt replaced Hoover. The novus homo was strength incarnate. But this is (and was) a morality play: what limits does power put to itself? I noted that young Superman was looking for those answers in Plato. Perhaps more people should.
But someone really needs a steadi-cam for their birthday. Enough already with overused shaky in-you-face camera work! It was quite distracting in the first part of the movie but perhaps someone had a discussion with the Director of Photography since it did get better, and less distracting. But boy did I love those space scenes with the fast focus pull perfected in Caprica. Awesome graphics when they were not over-used, which happens a couple of times, but is entirely forgivable!