nearly the night sky

Somewhere near
Golden, CO

seeing

Astronomical seeing refers to the blurring and twinkling of astronomical objects such as stars caused by turbulent mixing in the Earth's atmosphere varying the optical refractive index. The astronomical seeing conditions on a given night at a given location describe how much the Earth's atmosphere perturbs the images of stars as seen through a telescope.

Thank you, Wikipedia.

For more of the Atacama Desert see Nostalgia de la Luz at BIFF'd »

used books

Sleepy Sunday
Boulder, CO

outbound to Dallas

DIA

creating a kind of scaffolding

Worth the watch.

super massive blue hole

Debbi Georgatos from Dallas doesn't speak for me and yet, I can't look away.

Salon calls this clip a "remarkable avant-garde short film ("ad" doesn't do it justice)" »

Georgatos recently lost to former Cedar Hill Council member Wade Emmert in her bid to be chair of the Dallas County Republican Party.

Harry Weese Project A&B

Touring Harry Weese & IM Pei's urban
renewal project. Residential housing.

Hyde Park, Chicago

(you're beautiful, baby)

Passing by the Inland Steel in the fog & the rain.

Chicago, IL

kami-no-michi

At present, older generations still consider the space of information as something one logs-in to and logs-out from. Our view of the world (our metaphysics) is still modern or Newtonian: it is made of 'dead' cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive, and incapable of communicating, learning, or memorizing. But in advanced information societies, what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and more responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processess, the works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time.

Such a world will first gently invite us to understand it as something 'a-live' (artificially live). This animation of the world will then, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures, which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces.

Luciano Floridi in Information: a Very Short Introduction, part of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series.

neighbors

The view from my kitchen window, right around breakfast.
Boulder, CO

a three hour tour

I knew broadcasters would not be happy. My favorite response was from the Hollywood producer Sherwood Schwartz, who named the sinking ship in Gilligan’s Island after me.

Newton N. Minow writing in the Atlantic Monthly of his inaugural public address as President Kennedy’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission fifty years ago, in which he declared -- to the National Association of Broadcasters -- that television programming in the U.S. was a "vast wasteland".

imminent eminence

Rome is a love letter to the lush, swinging sound of a vanished era of Italian film history. Ennio Morricone is the best-known composer to emerge from it but there were numerous others too, such as Piero Umiliani and Piero Piccioni, who serviced the needs of Italy’s thriving popular cinema, churning out scores to romantic melodramas, horror films, spaghetti westerns, erotica and the pulpy crime fantasies known as gialli.

From Roman Holiday, a write up of the upcoming release of Rome by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, in the weekend edition of the Financial Times.

come away with me

Hotel Plaza, Venice/Mestra (113mm x 91mm)
Originally uploaded by davidgeorgepearson

A collection of hotel luggage labels curated by the inimitable David Pearson, mentioned here before, whom AbeBooks recently hailed as a "design genius". (Their statement of fact saves me the trouble.)

we make them inside us

These lists are journalistic catnip. Fun to read and look at the pictures but I find the liveable cities lists intellectually on a par with People magazine's 'sexiest people' lists.

Academic Joel Garreau in Liveable v. Loveable: The world's most 'liveable' cities are beautiful, clean and efficient. So why does no one want to live in them? in today's Financial Times.

The title of this post is taken from the last couple lines of Edwin Heathcote's article: "Our cities are our own -- we make them inside us. No city means the same to two people so how on earth can we measure them?"

Amen.

isolated in a web of one

Obama 'watched Bin Laden raid in real-time'

P050111PS-0522
Originally uploaded by The White House

BBC headline, 2 May 2011 »

the sound of silence

via Karissa Lang

Too often the sounds people make are just waste products of their activity, discarded like trash with no regard for the environment.

Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton in a September 2010 interview in Sun Magazine.