I Am Still Alive

Tak’s newly founded design company. Congrats.

BuzaMoto is the collaborative technology design studio of Kyle Buza and Takashi Okamoto. As recent graduates of the MIT Media Lab — studying under Professor John Maeda in the Physical Language Workshop — we specialize in multidisciplinary intersections of visual design and technology powered by the Web.

I DO NOT HAVE ANY FUCKING INVITES TO FUCKING FFFFOUND!!!!! FUCK OFF!!!!

I am starting to wonder how many other folks without FFFFOUND invites are doing their own homebrewed image bookmarking.

Why would a company want employees diving into its trash bins? Because at Sasaki Associates, one of the country’s hottest landscape and urban-design firms that’s shaping the Olympic village in Beijing, life is all about salvaging good from bad.

Dr. James Hansen writes after his testimony before Congress – twenty years after his first testimony about global warming.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently added the Lower East Side to a list of “endangered places.” For local artists and arts organizations, there’s a sense they feel endangered too – but some have found strategies for survival. Brigid Bergin has this report.

They’ve got a wide selection of beer and wine making equipment at reasonable prices (compared to other online suppliers). We ordered the intermediate kit plus an extra 6.5 gallon carboy so we can brew two batches at a time.

Many places in Africa have gone straight to cell phones and they’re never going to wire. It’s really interesting. When I first started working on Continuous City, what I wanted to do initially was to go to some of these classic “megaslums,” which I’m using in quotes because it has a slightly derogatory feeling to it, but that’s what a lot of urban scholars call them. I wanted to see if there was a way to engage those populations in a project. And, we sort of halfway ended up doing that.

When you look at it today, though, it does begin to edge into nostalgia. That’s not something that I aimed at then, because although it looks like a very old-fashioned can now, in 1961 it did not. That’s the one thing I regret about any photograph: that eventually it becomes historical, nostalgic, out of date. It begins to look like the age it came from.

Hundreds of hipsters, creatives and neighborhood folk lined up one recent spring Saturday afternoon outside K&D Market in San Francisco’s Mission district where 16th meets Guerrero. They were there to test an idea: Could a swarm of targeted spending prod one local business into making concrete steps towards going green? Could activists work cooperatively with business to encourage intelligent upgrades, such as the switch to an Energy Star cooler, or the use of a skylight to reduce electricity dependence?...

Let a business know which proactive green steps to take, then reward their progressive actions with business—and lots of it.

via WorldChanging

I accidentally broke a CFL in the office a couple days back and nearly evacuated the building. It’s good to hear folks are investigating alternatives to the alternative.

More and more countries are banning incandescent light bulbs in favor of energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. But options to recycle the mercury-laden alternatives are often scarce.

Come hang out with me at Collect LES next Friday. There are quite a few great Lower East Side galleries participating—with Dispatch Bureau, jen bekman, Woodward Gallery and Envoy among them.

Collect LES is a private one-night art open house devoted to introducing new collectors to the Lower East Side’s burgeoning art community. Coordinated by Artlog in partnership with the LES Business Improvement District, Collect LES includes approximately 25 galleries and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

What is the 10% problem? Let’s look at the New York Time’s numbers.

• Online unique users (12 month average): 13,372,000
• Print circulation – weekday: 1,120,420
• Print circulation – Sunday: 1,627,062

NYT doesn’t report ad revenue for NYTimes.com broken out from its News Media Group (which includes mostly other local newspapers, but is likely dominated by NYT revenue)

• Total advertising revenue: $483,594,000
• Online advertising revenue: $51,000,000

Let’s assume that the NYTimes.com has roughly the same portion of ad revenue coming from online. What you find, with some modest rounding, is that print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue — the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be.

Tomorrow is the deadline for the first couple open calls posted to Artlog. If you are looking to get your work out there, submit some work.

Participate is a new initiative to organize and help find alternative exhibition venues for artists to show their work.

From Jonathan Schell’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke about the social climate leading up to WWII.

The pacifists were equally clear-eyed about strategic bombing, though they could exert very little direct pressure to halt the practice. They also bore witness to what even today is historically obscure—the impact of the blockade of Europe—and, again, acted as they could to counteract its effects. It is striking—and quite out of keeping with the mythology of the “good war”—to learn that former president Herbert Hoover, by no means a pacifist (though he was a Quaker), lobbied tirelessly to find loopholes in the British blockade in order to feed starving people in Poland and other German-invaded powers. “Is the Allied cause any further advanced today as a consequence of this starvation of children?” he demanded to know in October 1941. “Are Hitler’s armies any less victorious than if these children had been saved?” In 1940, the Quakers were feeding thirty thousand children, many of them in concentration camps, in France. It seems there was something about being against the war, whether that position was right or wrong in the larger scheme of things, that enabled these pacifists to see and foresee the suffering the war would bring more clearly than almost any other observers were able to. Baker’s engrossing, bravely contrarian book is dedicated to Pickett’s memory—and to that of his allies in the American and British pacifist cause.

Mark Bittman on the problem (personal and environmental) of Western diets (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking).

It’s not the ingredients in plants. It’s the plants. It’s not the beta-carotene in carrots. It’s the carrots.

In an effort to improve electronics recycling in the United States, the U.S. Postal Service is developing a free national collection program for small electronic items.

The program, now in a pilot stage, provides courtesy envelopes with pre-paid postage for patrons to deposit their unwanted digital cameras, printer cartridges, MP3 players, cell phones, and PDAs. International recycling company Clover Technologies Group processes the devices in its U.S. and Mexican facilities and then refurbishes and resells them if possible.

That’s a pretty cool initiative from the USPS.

Dana designed/built a nice portfolio for herself using the Artlog Portfolio system.

When we examine the physical environment, we find a set of patterns emerge of what works and what does not. Architect Christopher Alexander codified many of these patterns into a book in 1977 A Pattern Language so we can use it as a quick reference to anchor any attempt to design a physical environment.

In order to secure a relatively high-density environment where everything is within a ten-minute walk, housing needs to be close with shared walls between buildings. Yet people who grew up in detached housing (the quarter acre section) express concern. “Kiwi’s won’t like that” said a New Zealand developer. Why not? It turns out the problem is not proximity but an aversion to neighbour conflict. The closer two neighbours are, the more they get on each other’s nerves. It turns out that it has to do with the physics of noise through air. The quarter acre section gives enough distance that the decibels of the noisy neighbour drop enough to be comfortable. The alternative is to use design so neighbours do not make irritating noise that travels. For a start, place the outdoor activities somewhere else: on the plaza or in the greenbelt rather than next to the house. Do not have a back lawn that needs mowing with an 85 dBa mower. Do not have a back yard where people curse each other. Build the row houses wide rather than deep and make the common wall soundproof. The developer listened, considered and replied “Yup, that should do it… you’re right. I had never considered why.”

Function truly is also to elicit emotions.