I try very hard to avoid just repeating what you can and may read elsewhere but this is something I had to highlight. Photographer Kyle Cassidy has released “preview photos”:http://www.armedamerica.org/index.html from an upcoming book entitled “Armed in America: Portraits of gun owners in their homes.” They are, in a word, stunning. The American fetish for firearms is something I never understood and though I’m probably no closer now than before, these pictures moved me to place myself a little closer to those I’d always feared.
The thing that really surprised me is how very normally-American all these people look. Often pictured with their little children or pets in suburban living rooms, these are no gun nuts. And yet, for a lot of the subjects, toting an assault rifle looks just as natural as a TV remote.
This online exhibition has acted to further solidify my love for portraiture. There’s something so intrinsically human about looking at another person without pretension and in their own milieu. A few weeks ago I blogged about another portrait series that’s also an internet-photography must-see featuring gangsters in New Guinea and militant Palestinians. Check that out “here”:http://duenos.net/article/23/the-human-face-of-violence
Nutrition data at your finger-tips
At “NutritionData.com”:http://www.nutritiondata.com/ , you can enter any recipe or food and get an exact breakdown of what’s in it. I’ve been mostly vegetarian for about three years now and I’ve been off and on worried about whether I’m getting the right nutrients to be healthy. Now I can find out exactly what I’m eating down to which amino acids I’m getting from what foods. As an example of the level of detail this site goes into, here are some graphs that came up after I searched for white mushrooms. It turns out mom was right, they are good for you. I’m sure you’ve seen at least some of his art in your life but Julian Beever is worth another look. Using just chalk and the pavement beneath his feet, this artist makes things come to life in three dimensions by manipulating our perspective. The French have long had a term for it, ‘trompe l’oeil’ but it seems the current master of the technique is an Englishman named Julian. Evolution happens. Whether it’s a dog breed artificially selected to be long and hot dog-like or a group of people adapting an economic system that seemed to have worked for their more prosperous neighbors, things evolve. As yet another example of primate intelligence and social evolution happening right out in nature, Senegalese chimps have been seen using spears to hunt bushbabies. This report comes as complete hearsay with absolutely no evidence but it’s still so damned exciting I just had to share it. Apparently the full story will be published in the next issue of “Current Biology”:http://www.current-biology.com/ but here’s a “synopsis”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6387611.stm from our friends at the BBC. One of my favorite board games is set to make its XBOX Live Arcade debut. For anyone who hasn’t played it, Settlers of Catan is absolutely the height of analog (board) games. Developed by game genius Klaus Teuber, SoC is simple enough to be fun for first-timers and complex enough to be enjoyed after playing it every day for weeks, something I may have done in college. Faced with very little fear of punishment on the part of its enemies, conglomerated music is doing what it does best, complaining. Filing more than 150,000 complaints to universities this year alone, it’s not a surprise that some of their complaints have fallen on deaf ears. The biggest culprits in ignoring the RIAA’s rants are the universities: Ohio, Purdue, Nebraska-Lincoln, U of Tennessee and the University of South Carolina. Good job pirate schools! Science fiction counts on certain facts, one of those is wearable technology. Clothes that change color to match the wearer’s surroundings, external health monitors à la Starship Troopers, and even full body computers like the ones sported by gargoyles in Snow Crash. All of these presume that we can in fact wear technology. Well, today we mortals are one step closer to that reality as scientists at the University of Illinois have invented a fabric made up of 500 micron wide chain-mail links capable of transmitting electrical signals across its surface. Brilliant! Not that there was any chance of it being voted off. With the “Pirate Party”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party and “Billie the Vision and the Dancers”:http://duenos.net/article/26/billie-the-vision-and-the-dancers Stockholm is still my favorite city-I’ve-not-been-to, but here’s another reason why, the subway. In most cities, the underground transportation network is a necessary evil, a utilitarian piece of infrastructure used to get around and not much more. But in Sweden’s capital city, the subway is so much more. It’s a work of art. Here’s a “link”:http://archibase.net/archinews/14172.html to a gallery of gorgeous pictures from Archibase.net showing polished Scandinavian escalators running along rough cave walls and painted murals that could almost make you cry with envy. And it’s all so clean too… Below are links to some of the coolest photography sites I found this week. The first two are along the same vein with the artists (Li Wei and Denis Darzacq) placing people in improbable or impossible positions within the urban landscape: Check out this brilliant video about net neutrality from the directors of ‘Four Eyed Monsters.’ Their website is a bit confusing so I couldn’t figure out exactly who ‘they’ are except that their names are Arin and Susan and they host one of the best videos I’ve seen on the subject of net neutrality and the future of the internet. Please see this clip (it’s a little over 10 minutes long) and show it to others. This is a very important issue and it’s critical that we educate ourselves about what’s going on. Let’s exercise some democracy!!
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Chalk art by Julian Beever
This picture of Julian jumping off a wooden diving board into a pool at the base of a staircase-waterfall is my favorite.
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For more of his art, check out his “website”:http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm
Chimps seen hunting with spears
Settlers of Catan to be ported to XBOX
The seemingly infinite variety and enjoyability of the game comes from a dynamic hexagonal board that is literally different every time you play and its heavy reliance on player interaction. That’s why it will be perfect for XBOX Live Arcade, playing on a simple user interface and leaning on the ability to play ranked competition. This makes me want an XBOX 360 bad.
There’s an interview with the creative director of Big Huge games, the developer of Settlers of Catan for the Arcade. Find it “here”:http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/22/off-the-grid-interviews-brian-reynolds-of-big-huge-games/ (thanks Mike)
"Pirate schools" given healthy tongue-lashings
I saw this article via “the Inquirer”:http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37780 and then read the full article in the Indianapolis Star. The interesting thing is that I then read the discussion forum on the Star’s website and noticed that almost without exception the commenters were pro-piracy. If readers in Indiana can be anti-establishment, what hope do the powers-that-be really have?
“the AP article”:http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070221/LOCAL/702210482 printed in the Indy Star, and the “forum page”:http://www.topix.net/forum/source/indianapolis-star/T17R2HQ22B3SJMVQI
Miniature chain mail invented by University of Illinois scientists
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A link to the “University of Illinois homepage”:http://www.uiuc.edu and “another”:http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11220-microscopic-chainmail-could-link-wearable-gadgets.html to a New Scientist article about the discovery.
Swedish subway keeps Stockholm in "my favorite cities" list
This week in photography
“Li Wei”:http://www.liweiart.com/ ??Li Wei Falls to the Hong Kong??
“Denis Darzacq”:http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/la_chute/
The next photo set is truly world class. They are the winners of the annual World Press Photo competition and though they were released last week, I thought there could be some people out there who hadn’t seen them. This photo is of a man in Nigeria rinsing his face just after an oil pipeline explosiong. Brilliant work.
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“World Press Photo competition winners”:http://www.worldpressphoto.com/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=blogsection&id=17&Itemid=146&bandwidth=high
The fate of the internet
http://foureyedmonsters.com/neutrality/!
Save the Internet | Rock the Vote
Thanks for the link “Jeff”:http://jag85.com
