The view outside my window… precarious child-rearing.

I’ve been following the debates of Paul Hansen’s manipulated prize-winner (above) with particular interest, but not much understanding. While I can understand the caution in aesthetically overworking images of human suffering, the line between ethical and unethical manipulation lies for me with where you might traditionally achieve in a darkroom situation, using light exposure times and masks to effect tonal brights and color saturations. To my eye, this seems to be the case. The only areas that even approach questionable territory in my opinion are where these masks are drawn so tightly as to effect a perceptional change of the relationship between items, such as the light catching the child victim’s face in comparison with the cloth he is wrapped in.

…and the result is anything but reassuring. I find myself wandering the planet thinking “oh cool! Oh cool!” But the impressive eye-candy is all disappearing lakes, forests, nature… so, I felt compelled to make a sexy gif.

also: pay attention to the scale. On the amazon (linked above) you see deforestation as measured in hundreds of kilometers. Ouch.

I’m a fan of all those 3d printers that are being financed on kickstarter and other community funding projects, but they arouse a weird suspicion in me that we’re missing a greater opportunity. A normal printer. An ecologically sound, recyclable and longevity-driven printer. Like, one that spits ink on paper. I suspect the challenge is in the logistics of ink supply, and imagine something that allows people to refill cartridges themselves, or a retanking type method.
But there are certainly a huge amount of people who are fed up with the rigged things we have now, set to deconstruct according to some corporation’s idea of a product cycle and designed to avoid any sort of interaction with free market mechanics – like a ink cartridge standard.

Anyone know of one?

Excuse yet another diversion into the everyday… I can’t resist it when those things that you think are so self-evident of good, common sense – things like not inhaling carcinogens, not giving hedge fond owners blanko bailout checks or not designing public spaces so that people get run over by cars – also make good economic sense. Duh.

Heres a case study of the effect of (real*) bike lanes in various locations on public safety and local retail business. Thanks to boingboing.

*real as opposed to those bad excuses for lanes that are too narrow or magically appear only to get you out of a car owner’s way.

Vice has a wonderful open interview with Runescape gold miner Josh Miroslav.

I went from being someone who had never really wanted money … to someone who had been fully corrupted by this idea of hoarding gold and selling it. / People think gold farming is an awesome job – getting paid to play games – but in reality it’s nothing like that. You’re either stealing money off legitimate players or running massive bot farms, which completely ruin the game. At the end of the day, it’s just a free-for-all on who can make more money through illegitimate means.

Sounds like a trend.

Respecting nature is so often portrayed as being contrary to the interests of people that you’d think it’s an either/or proposition. The article above by Scientific American reports on research on people, and finds that the nature preserves protect them too. None too surprising, and long overdue.

P.S.
I know I’ve been scarce. I’ve been in the dungeons of learning software and developing concepts. Nothing exciting to share really. Unfortunately, I won’t have much to share the next two weeks, either as I’ll be on the road. Perhaps I’ll finally manage mobile media management, but haven’t had much success with that in the past. So, if not… I’ll be back soon…

… doesn’t know where to go.

Call me crazy, but I like Berlin. And one of the – okay, Heribert, you can stop calling me crazy now – and one of the things I most like about it is the diversity of museums and zoos. Seriously, there are museums everywhere, from bauhaus to Islamic Art to computer games and all sorts of history – and two zoos. There’s also a sort of fierceness about the role which culture plays in lending a city identity. So when I encountered this call for a new Berliner souvenir I had to play out the idea of creating something that pays this aspect of Berlin some respect. If we’re to feed into the consumer-craze of tourist tokenism, I’d rather take it up as an opportunity to point to this unique Berlin offering. Souvenir doesn’t mean character, but it includes character…

My take is a Giraffatitan in toon form called Boomboom. He loves Islamic patterns, Nefertiti’s nose and – while he appreciates an evening of fine opera – his acoustical culture of choice is dubstep … wouldn’t that be great to animate!?

There would be a realistic Giraffatitan outdoor life reconstruction in scale 1to1 at the Park at Nordbahnhof, adding a physical attraction between the Mauer Museum and the Museum of Natural History and tie-ins to the graphic character for printed beer krugs and back packs, stuffed figures, the whole 9 yards… and a percentage of profits going to the cultural institutes of the city.

I’m really interested in feedback, particularly from anyone familiar with Berlin. I’m not sure if I’ll enter, as this would need a good deal of work to make it presentation-ready and I don’t think this really has a chance. The souvenir competition is all designy… and I don’t read the call as the beBerlin folk looking for cultural plugs. It could propagate some awareness for what I consider to be Berlin’s true stars, though. And my only other idea for a fitting Berlin character is a cute little devil character that barfs when you squeeze him.

From the wet collection at the Berlin Museum for Natural History.

This has got to be the most bad-ass worm I’ve ever seen. Here a bobbit worm lies in wait, ambushing a scorpion fish that had been attracted to the filmer’s lights. The bobbit worm deserves a monster-movie all its own. Get a better look at this bad-ass invertebrate over at the Echinoblog.

I love software that arises from the desire to interact with the phenomena we encounter in nature. HaloSim allows you to playfully encounter halos, or light that is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. And in the rare case that earthenly halos aren’t enough for you, you can create “octahedral ammonia crystals as might exist in the cold high level clouds of Jupiter and Saturn. The 42° circular halo has four associated sundogs.” Got that? Halos and sundogs. What are you waiting for!?
(image from here)

I knew it! Iggy’s ‘the passenger’ is inspired by the Berlin S-Bahn. I ride and I ride and I ride!

The only way this incredibly cool photo of night-time Berlin could be more telling is if each Kiez (city section) was lit with its own color. Thank you to André Kuipers, ESA and the ISS.

For $3,299 and what I would expect to be a load of customs hassle. They also have a rebate on the resin, down from $149 per liter. Anyone getting one of these, please let me know! Would love to hear about your experience. Below a link to the video: Check the video out at the site linked to above.

Petting the kitty awe-inspiring jaguar above will zap you over to chasingsabretooths and two incredible videos of hunting jaguars – including intense moments of submerged suspense as hunter and prey disappear beneath the water surface. Almost as fascinating as these incredible hunts is the reaction of the amateur filmers… there’s some deep humor when the maker of the first film says  “I feel like a bad person”.  In contrast, the group witnesses of the second attack seem to celebrate the jaguar’s prowess. Fantastic!

Happened across this gem of a film and just have to plug it here, despite its absolute lack of extinct animals or computer graphics. It’s just a brutally captivating film that makes you wince because it features people and the idiotic things people do. It also leaves you thrilled that the protagonists prove themselves capable of rising above their situations and mutually establishing a beachhead of humanity. If you get a chance, you heard it from me.

Some German terms are too good for translation, including Nabelschau. Literally interpretable as navel-gazing, it has an unhurried, introspective tone to it that the English fails to deliver. Navel-gazing calls up a vision of someone staring privately yet fanatically into his or her own bellybutton, whereas – to me at least – Nabelschau is a public dissertation of the brutally analyzed results. Today we engage in Nabelschau, with a look into drip.de’s statistics …

According to the wordpress statistics plugin CyStats, drip.de yesterday received 546 unique visits and 2315 hits. That’s a spike in hits, but an overall steady course in visits. What I find interesting is the discrepancy between statistics, as every source I use reliably profers different results. My server statistics cite 1353 visits and 3552 hits for yesterday, and only a small percentage of that is targeted at my woefully neglected other sites – like my (coughcough) business site. So, I assume that Dave Hone’s appearance triggered some search engine bots. I’m not very well versed on interpreting stats, however, so if anyone has more insight, please leave a comment. Also, if you visit here regularly or have stumbled across, let me know. I’m curious who’s reading these bits and pieces and planning to post more of my own content in the future so it would help me to know who is interested in palaeontography, NPR, Germany, etc.

Very cool is how many visits I’m getting from Japan. 43%!!! Wow.

Took this on a flight to a work contract last week. Below me, everything was a soupy, all-encompassing gray. Later we would rise up through the second cloud layer towards a brightly shining sun. Around me were about two hundred people, all busy looking at their laps… click to embiggen.