18
Jun
President Obama’s Belfast Waterfront Hall Speech
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18
Jun
President Obama’s Belfast Waterfront Hall Speech
05
Feb
Welcome to the New York city apartment of Graham Hill, a Canadian-born architect committed to bringing sustainability into the mainstream. His apartment does more with less. It has a footprint of only 420 square feet. Yet it’s elegantly-designed and completely functional. What initially looks like a simple studio unfolds into much more, a Soho apartment that features no less than eight rooms – a bedroom, guest room, kitchen, office and the rest. We’ll let Graham, the founder of treehugger.com, take you on the grand tour, and we’ll leave you to wonder what a designer could do with this Parisian apartment measuring only 17 square feet….
H/T Jason G. via Gizmodo
02
Feb
Today is the birthday of James Joyce, who was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, and wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
To celebrate his life, we present an August 1929 recording of Joyce reading a melodious passage from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of his Work in Progress, which would be published ten years later as Finnegans Wake. The recording was made in Cambridge, England, at the arrangement of Joyce’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach. “How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is,” wrote Beach in her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, “and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue!”
Related Content:
Marilyn Monroe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Playground (1955)
James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
Death Masks: From Dante to James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche
30
Dec
Danza Subacquea, inspired by photographer Gregory Colbert’s traveling photography project Ashes and Snow.
Danza Subacquea applies Colbert’s vision of humans and animals to men an women. Many spiritual people believe that men and women once lived in greater harmony with each other, before monotheism made man woman’s lord and master.
For many people, attending the Ashes and Snow exhibit is a life-changing experience. Seeing the exhibition twice in New York in 2005 impacted me so greatly that I weep at the mere sight of the Gregory Colbert images of elephants, cheetahs and hawks as spirit guides and message-bearers.
Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and SnowThese images were born in Colbert’s travels to Kenya, Burma, Egypt and India where the nomadic photographer captures more than 40 species interacting with humans. This 21st century bestiary was originally attacked as a photoshop con job, with critics saying that it’s impossible to find humans and animals coexisting in this way.
‘In discovering the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals,” Colbert notes, “I am working towards restoring the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals.’
Critics and big game hunters alike accused Colbert of romanticizing man’s relationship with nature and denying Darwinian laws of the jungle. Colbert agreed that these relationships between the animals and humans were cultivated — over two years in some cases.
Colbert wants to share what is possible between humans and animals if we change our thinking.
Ashes and Snow Part 1
Ashes and Snow Part 2
I just wrote on my Facebook page that I do not go down on my knees with ease, but I do for the entire Gregory Colbert Ashes and Snow experience. My Cultural Creatives values were very much in transition at the time (2005), as I watched the impact of materialism on the world and here in America.
The ‘Ashes and Snow’ exhibit travels on the Nomadic Museum, launched in 1992 in Venice and subsequently traveling to New York, Tokyo, Santa Monica and Mexico City. ‘Ashes and Snow, the most attended exhibition by a living artist in history, closed in Brazil in 2009. The exhibit will travel to a yet unnamed place in 2012.
My friends want me to take up meditation, which isn’t so much my style, although the health benefits can be enormous, to say nothing of the benefits of settling one’s mind. If I do take up meditation, than the Ashes and Snow mantra: ‘feather to fire, fire to blood blood to bone, bone to marrow, marrow to ashes, ashes to snow’ seems like an excellent chanting mantra.
Gregory Colbert pushed me over the edge with ‘Ashes to Snow’, into the ocean of universal connections and spirituality, and I have barely come up for air since. The article below was written on Jan. 1, 2008 after AOC was first born in June 2007 as my personal journal. Anne
‘Ashes and Snow’ | Gregory Colbert’s Cathedral To Life AOC Green Beings
29
Dec
Honoring Nature-Inspired Omo Valley People
Today, we honor the Omo Valley people of Ethiopia. In particular, our Spring 2013 Collection will be inspired by two tribes of the Omo Valley, located near Lake Turkana (believed to be the origin of human civilization) — the Surma and the Mursi — whose couture-level, nature-inspired body decorations caught the eye of photographer Hans Silvester in his book ‘Natural Fashon: Tribal Decoration from Africa’. READ MORE
# GlamTribale project: blog and GlamTribale website
23
Dec
12
Dec
The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small
The Biblio-Mat in Toronto’s The Monkey’s Paw (via GalleyCat and Lisa Peet): curated randomness.
20
Nov
Nov 20, 2012 4:45 AM EST
Years ago, or so we’re told, a reclusive southern businessman, contemptuous of the world around him, decided to invent a country of his own. Using his vast fortune, he bankrolled a secretive organization of writers and intellectuals whose mission was to construct nothing less than every last detail of an alternate reality, similar to our own in many ways, but more orderly and elegant, in which anything could come true as long as enough people believed in it. The result was an enormously convincing fictional world, and its reception exceeded its creator’s most optimistic expectations. Presented with such a beautiful falsehood, the rest of humanity gratefully embraced the illusion. It began to study, teach, and debate a totally imaginary history and science, until the real thing, neglected, was all but forgotten.
This is the plot of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” one of the most famous stories by the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, who belongs on any short list of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Borges has a lot of admirers, including me, but if the story above seems uncomfortably familiar, it may be due to the influence of one of his most avid fans. He’s a man who, in response to a Proust questionnaire in Vanity Fair, put Borges at the top of an alphabetical catalog of beloved authors, and playfully named the real Borges as his favorite hero of fiction. He mentions Borges prominently on his website, with an approving nod to the story about “the encyclopedia on a nation that doesn’t exist,” and in a video promoting one of his own books, although he has trouble pronouncing Borges’s name correctly. He is Karl Rove.
Oddly enough, aside from a recent humor piece by Nathaniel Stein on The New Yorker blog, Rove’s love of Borges has gone mostly unremarked, perhaps because it seems so incongruous. In general, members of the conservative establishment aren’t known for their taste in literature. Mitt Romney once acknowledged, in what is probably his second-most embarrassing online video, that his favorite novel is L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, and the identity of Paul Ryan’s novelist of choice is a matter of record. As a result, it’s surprising, and superficially encouraging, to find a prominent figure on the right who openly admires a writer numbered among Joyce and Kafka as one of the essential authors of the modern age.
Yet it isn’t hard to see why Rove is drawn to his work. The great theme in Borges, among all those labyrinths and mirrors, is how the world can be shaped, and even physically transformed, by the intellectual structures we impose on it. In his story “The Secret Miracle,” a man waiting to be executed pictures all the possible forms that his death might take, as if by imagining the worst, he can prevent it from happening—an attitude that many Democrats assumed before the recent election. “The Lottery in Babylon” describes a government so powerful that its actions can no longer be distinguished from the operations of the universe, which seems like a conservative’s nightmare of Obamacare, but which might also appeal to a man who once dreamed of a permanent Republican majority. (On his website,Rove refers to this story as involving “a lottery in Baghdad,” a Freudian slip of epic proportions.)
These ideas find their fullest expression in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In the fictional world invented by Borges’s army of scholars, the only science is psychology, and an idea, or even a physical object, can become real if enough people believe it exists. Rove has put this principle into action more aggressively than any other political figure in recent memory. It lurks behind the push polls in the South Carolina primary calculated to plant the rumor that John McCain had fathered a black child, and in the White House Iraq Group, chaired by Rove, designed to sell the public on the supposed threat of Saddam Hussein—a more targeted version of Orbis Tertius, with its secret group of intellectuals “directed by an obscure man of genius.”
On Fox News, Karl Rove accused the president of winning the election through suppression.
And then there’s Fox News, for which Rove has long served as a sort of spiritual godfather. Borges notes that mankind was seduced by the fictional universe of Tlön because its rules were more elegant than reality itself, which is precisely what Fox News provides. Its vision of the world is compellingly clear: it’s easier to believe that the president is a Muslim socialist who secretly wants to take our guns away than to understand the perplexing truth, which even many observers on the left have trouble accepting, that he’s a political moderate who draws much of his policy from the conservative playbook of the past. And unlike the shadowy cabal of Orbis Tertius, this systematic reordering and simplification of reality has taken place in plain sight.
Megyn Kelly wandered off to find answers in the labyrinth beyond the news desk, leaving Rove, like many a Borges protagonist before him, unable to free himself from his own illusions.
Borges himself was well aware that his story was more than just a fantasy. The countries that remake themselves after the model of Orbis Tertius are the same ones that had previously been drawn to communism, fascism, and any other system with a semblance of order. When the author notes that a world in which physical artifacts can be willed into existence allows for “the interrogation and even the modification of the past,” it’s hard not to connect this to the rewriting of history under authoritarian regimes. “The lies of a dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved,” Borges writes elsewhere. “They pertain to an intermediate plane, and their purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or atrocious realities.”
It’s tempting to think that these lies came crashing down on election night, in which Rove stuck obstinately to his guns on Fox News even as the reality at Obama headquarters threatened to break through from the other side of the split screen. Rove’s refusal to accept his own network’s call for Ohio was the logical culmination of the inability of such conservative pundits as Dick Morris to acknowledge the possibility of any outcome short of a Romney landslide. Like the characters in Borges, they’re idealists in the original, philosophical sense, who hope that if they believe something strongly enough—and say it as loudly as possible—it just might come true. In the end, anchorwoman Megyn Kelly wandered off to find answers in the labyrinth beyond the news desk, leaving Rove, like many a Borges protagonist before him, unable to free himself from his own illusions.
But his public meltdown shouldn’t fool us. The nonexistent nation is alive and well. In Borges’s imaginary universe, places survive as long as people believe in them, like the doorway that continued to exist only while it was frequented by a single beggar. Rove has far more true believers, and thanks to a media landscape as fragmented as any postmodern narrative, in which individuals of all political parties listen only to sources that confirm their own beliefs, that alternate reality is still standing. As Borges warns, what remains is a fictional history, “filled with moving episodes,” harmonized to remove all inconvenient facts. When the project of Orbis Tertius is complete, he writes, “The world will be Tlön.” And thanks largely to Rove and his successors, for much of the country, it already is.
* Alec Nevala-Lee is the author of The Icon Thief, a suspense novel set in the New York art world. He blogs at nevalalee.com.
15
Nov
O portal Sapo vai disponibilizar uma ferramenta que mostra relações entre pessoas com base no número de vezes que estas foram mencionadas num mesmo artigo ao longo dos 25 anos de produção noticiosa da agência Lusa.
A novidade foi apresentada nesta sexta-feira, no arranque da sexta edição do Codebits, um evento para entusiastas da tecnologia que o Sapo organiza desde 2007 e que neste ano conta com 800 participantes reunidos no Pavilhão Atlântico, em Lisboa.
A visualização interactiva das redes de relações entre pessoas (de chefes de Estado a desportistas, passando por artistas, economistas e políticos) foi criada a partir de cerca de 2,5 milhões de artigos da Lusa, correspondentes à totalidade do arquivo da agência, que foi fundada em finais de 1986 (como sucessora da ANOP) e que começou a publicar a 1 de Janeiro de 1987.
A ferramenta mostrará as personalidades referidas nas notícias, cada uma representada por um círculo. A cor do círculo indica a temática das notícias em que uma dada pessoa surgiu mais vezes. Pessoas que tiverem sido referidas na mesma notícia surgem ligadas por um traço, que é tanto mais grosso quantos mais artigos existirem com menção às duas em simultâneo. O utilizador poderá ver apenas as relações mais frequentes ou optar por ver redes de relações mais fracas.
É possível filtrar a informação exibida com base no mês de publicação dos artigos e nas áreas temáticas em que estes foram categorizados pela Lusa: por exemplo, política, desporto, ciência e tecnologia, saúde e educação. A partir de cada uma das personalidades mostradas, o utilizador pode aceder às notícias em que esta é mencionada.
O trabalho faz parte do projecto REACTION (a sigla para a denominiação inglesa Retrieval, Extraction and Aggregation Computing Technology for Integrating and Organizing News - numa tradução livre, “Tecnologia Computacional de Recolha, Extracção e Agregação para a Integração e Organização de Notícias”). Do REACTION fazem parte, para além do Sapo, laboratórios da Universidade do Porto e da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, o Centro de Investigação Media e Jornalismo e o PÚBLICO.
Recentemente, o projecto produziu uma análise das palavras mais usadas nos comentários no Facebook de Pedro Passos Coelho e o portal Sapo já tem uma página para a visualização de relações entre personalidades, que assenta na tecnologia agora usada para a visualização do acervo da Lusa.
A ferramenta estará disponível para qualquer utilizador, mas o objectivo do REACTION é criar ferramentas que possam ser usadas em trabalhos de investigação jornalística, explicou ao PÚBLICO Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, durante uma demonstração da tecnologia no Codebits, onde a ferramenta está em mostra num grande ecrã sensível ao toque.
Do ponto de vista académico, notou a investigadora, a análise em larga escala de artigos jornalísticos coloca vários desafios: o processamento de grandes quantidades de dados, a análise de linguagem natural (a linguagem usada por humanos e que os computadores têm dificuldades em compreender) e ainda a construção de formas eficazes para a visualização dos dados.
Nos 2,5 milhões de notícias da Lusa, os computadores identificaram as personalidades referidas e ainda determinaram o cargo (ou cargos) de cada uma. Os algoritmos são capazes, por exemplo, de perceber que em 2009 José Sócrates era primeiro-ministro e que hoje é ex-primeiro-ministro – e a informação referente ao cargo é mostrada quando se visualiza a rede de relações de Sócrates e os artigos correspondentes.
O processo, porém, não está livre de erros: diferentes grafias para o mesmo nome (situação frequente com alguns nomes estrangeiros) ou simples erros ortográficos levam a que, em alguns casos, os computadores tratem uma pessoa como duas entidades distintas. O aperfeiçoamento dos algoritmos para ultrapassar este tipo de problemas é um dos desafios que os investigadores têm pela frente, referiu Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues. O REACTION termina em Setembro de 2013. link
Cf.
09
Nov
PBS Frontline’s ‘The Choice 2012’ is one of the most intimate and insightful looks at the two men competing for the US Presidency that you will see this election season. It also features images from the campaign trail by veteran political photographer Charles Ommanney.
Watch the full documentary online here.
Resume
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to tell their own stories, but in “The Choice 2012,” FRONTLINE goes far beyond the headlines on a journey deep into their worlds, among their friends and family, critics, and closest colleagues, to understand what drives these men. Based on dozens of new interviews and hundreds of hours of research, FRONTLINE’s authoritative profiles that emerge are also a portrait of America in an era of uncertainty — and a guide to the choices that lie ahead.
Cf. collection of rare “artifacts” from the candidates’ lives, as well as 25 full-length interviews with those who know the men best: HERE.
(Source: reportagebygettyimages)
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