Danteworlds

The University of Texas has a multimedia companion to The Divine Comedy up here, with art, animation and annotation of Dante's cosmological journey, describing the work as "a literal midlife crisis". If you've ever wondered what exactly is going on and who all these people are who are suffering and/or enjoying themselves in the afterlife, this will open it up for you.

Edgar at Home

Edgar Oliver HDR photo by alachance. I love the chair in chair idea in this picture.

Gem of the Day

[Photographer Dash Snow and his partner Jade Berreau] "have a 15 month old baby named Secret Aliester Ramirez Messenger Santa Creeper"

-Interview Magazine Dec/Jan 2008/9

p.171

Surely that is more than simply a name, it is a toy and a tool of conjuration.

Kandor

Mike Kelley recently displayed a series of sculptures of the Bottled City of Kandor at the Metro Gallery. Each city represents the instantiation of a version of the Kryptonian city as drawn by a different Superman artist. So, the sculptures themselves represent a history of a shared imaginary space, collated and reinterpreted in 3d by Kelley.

I'd referenced the bottled city of Kandor in writings as a symbol for alienation; it has a kind of Sylvia Plath-Bell Jar overtone to me. But I liked that it had the sci-fi element as well. I did a project in 1999 for a show in Bonn-a turn-of-the-century-theme show with a technological slant. So I decided to work with an out-of-date image of the "future." Kandor is a prototypical "city of the future." My idea was to link it to the technological "web space" of the Internet-and the failure of that "utopian" system to actually bring people together physically-where people can only connect virtually in a very alienated and disconnected manner. Some years later, I decided to go back and focus on Kandor as a physical object; in the Bonn show there were no bottled cities, only images of it lifted from Superman comic books and presented as collages, and a computer animation of various versions of the city morphing into each other. When I researched it, I discovered that Kandor had never been drawn the same way twice in the Superman comics. It was such an unimportant part of the Superman mythos that a fixed city plan was never developed. That interested me, because I was working on the Educational Complex sculpture-a model combining every school I had ever attended. I was interested in architecture as it relates to memory-how unfixed our memories of space are. I had been trying to draw architectural spaces from memory. My memories of floor plans were all wrong-big patches of space were missing. So I related that inability to remember such spaces to repressed memory syndrome. In the Jablonka exhibition I decided to downplay such references to focus on the beauty of the bottled cities as objects. I produced 20 different bottled cities based on images from the comics; they're all supposed to be the same city, but each one is unique. I thought that was an interesting paradox-that all of these different models were supposed to represent the same place. I only had time to finish 10 cities for that show; the remaining group will be presented at Gagosian Gallery in New York next year.

The Invention of Air.

Well, this Raises an Eyebrow

So to speak.



Meanwhile, Jessica demonstrates her fangs and split tongue.

A Place of One's Own

The world as Tyler Brule would have it: Finnish saunas, wardrobe and luggage made by fashion otaku in Tokyo, bespoke airlines, mid century postmodern furniture. The wonderful thing about the early Wallpaper* issues was that Tyler's idea of the beautiful was behind every page; a little skewed, but intensely personal. What's he been doing lately? Enjoying his real estate:

Ten years ago, against the rather sensible advice of my mother, I bought an island in the Swedish archipelago. I wasn’t really in the market for an escape from my primary base in London but a weekend with Stockholm-based friends, Christina and Claus, turned me on to the delights of endless summer evenings, chilly dips in the water, no air conditioning and simple, built-for-purpose houses.

...an architect friend alerted me to a house he’d heard about. But “it’s pretty much everything you don’t want,” my agent told me when I asked about it. “It’s on an island. It’s in the north archipelago. It draws brackish water from the sea.” Some days later I visited. Walking past the bald rocks, moss, rustling birches and the odd conifer, the house came into view. And, at first glance, it was perfect.

Yes, it needed work – an indoor bathroom and modern plumbing to replace the outhouse,­ a new kitchen, a new deck and some painting. But it was a modernist gem with the closest neighbours 300 metres away (on their own islands) yet still only a 45-minute drive and a seven-minute boat ride from Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. On the trip back to the mainland I made an offer and, eight weeks later, by the start of July, the house was ready to accept its first guests.

That same year my theory was put to the test again when I decided to buy an apartment in what might be the world’s most famous ski resort, St Moritz. ...what really sealed the deal was the idea of taking part in a perfectly formed world in miniature –­ the tiny hospital with the gleaming helicopter that landed on the roof, the hotels grand and petite, the butcher, the baker and, well, not so much a candlestick-maker but a shop selling a full range from scented candle manufacturer Diptyque. It was all my childhood play-days rolled into one finely tuned, rather pricey version of a giant train set. It was life-size Marklin/Hornby/Lego world.

und so weiter, und so weiter.

New Who

I quite like the twiddly-finger thing. Hope he keeps that for the character.

The Underwater Stonehenge of Michigan

Jeff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG has the details on an underwater expedition in Lake Michigan, which discovered a set of stones in a small bay that may be a neolithic site similar to Stonehenge:

In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan. If verified, the carvings would be roughly 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.

Nobody's sure what to make of the find. Is it all real, or are we having a partially apophenic vision? Either way, I'm with Jeff on this one: the pictures are cool enough on their own, and the data are interesting enough to look further.

OLC appointment

This is promising. Dawn Johnsen has her head on straight.

OLC appointment

This is promising. Dawn Johnsen has her head on straight.

Tales from the Meltdown 9: Perverse Incentives

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn on why the financial world is doomed to repeat its mistakes. Shorter version: compensation is based on pushing the limits of the envelope, taking more risk and higher leverage. The financial system will therefore blow up again, because nothing has changed.

They don't stop there, but recommend six important fixes, ranging from new capital requirements and CDS regulation to moving from firefighting mode to strategic thinking when considering regulation.

Walker Library at TED

Previously on bottlerocketscience: House Porn of the Walker Library

Putin's Problems

As predicted, the fall in oil & gas prices is causing Russia to come unglued. What's going to happen? Anatoly Chubais predicts a coin toss.

Military Force Structure Presentation 2009

The Big Picture features a strong presentation from the USMC that discusses the funding requirements and program/force changes required as a result of impending budgetary reprioritization. Whoever put this together deserves high marks for good strategic thinking (no surprise) for making three hard choices:

• Block reductions, instead of "salami slicing" (which they also refer to as the Colin Powell "share the pain" approach), maintaining "full capability with smaller capacity".
• Reductions targeted at expensive programs, leading to a more cost effective force with most of its capabilities preserved.
• Maintenance of unique capabilities (night carrier, shore assault, close force support)

I wish, though, that someone over there would read some Edware Tufte. The slide designs give me headaches. I also wonder what the big unspoken problem is--whose sacred cow didn't make it up onto the butcher's table?

They've also nailed the one big consideration: what exactly do we want our military to be able to do? We have no coherent strategy on this, despite huge outlays. This lack of a plan encourages bad uses of our resources (see also: Iraq), and we must get this fixed.

Tales from the Meltdown 8: The Fall of VaR

When the markets fell, the common wisdom was that no one saw it coming. Somebody did. In fact, a lot of somebodies did. So why didn't everyone? Joe Nocera at the New York Times Magazine goes hunting the Value at Risk model, which gives a confidence interval around downside losses for a security or total portfolio. Unfortunately, the VaR number may also be based on inaccurate assumptions, and may therefore lead to worse decision making than would be the case if no measure were used at all.

How then do we account for that story that made the rounds in the summer of 2007? It concerns Goldman Sachs, the one Wall Street firm that was not, at that time, taking a hit for billions of dollars of suddenly devalued mortgage-backed securities. Reporters wanted to understand how Goldman had somehow sidestepped the disaster that had befallen everyone else. What they discovered was that in December 2006, Goldman’s various indicators, including VaR and other risk models, began suggesting that something was wrong. Not hugely wrong, mind you, but wrong enough to warrant a closer look.

“We look at the P.& L. of our businesses every day,” said Goldman Sachs’ chief financial officer, David Viniar, when I went to see him recently to hear the story for myself. (P.& L. stands for profit and loss.) “We have lots of models here that are important, but none are more important than the P.& L., and we check every day to make sure our P.& L. is consistent with where our risk models say it should be. In December our mortgage business lost money for 10 days in a row. It wasn’t a lot of money, but by the 10th day we thought that we should sit down and talk about it.”

So Goldman called a meeting of about 15 people, including several risk managers and the senior people on the various trading desks. They examined a thick report that included every trading position the firm held. For the next three hours, they pored over everything. They examined their VaR numbers and their other risk models. They talked about how the mortgage-backed securities market “felt.” “Our guys said that it felt like it was going to get worse before it got better,” Viniar recalled. “So we made a decision: let’s get closer to home.”...

“The question is: how extreme is extreme?” Viniar said. “Things that we would have thought were so extreme have happened. We used to say, What will happen if every equity market in the world goes down by 30 percent at the same time? We used to think of that as an extreme event — except that now it has happened. Nothing ever happens until it happens for the first time.”

Which didn’t mean you couldn’t use risk models to sniff out risks. You just had to know that there were risks they didn’t sniff out — and be ever vigilant for the dragons. When Wall Street stopped looking for dragons, nothing was going to save it. Not even VaR.

State of the World

People with loose money still think we're the Hill. That's why all the loose change is moving into Treasury bonds. I mean, if you buy China, you're basically buying US Treasury Bonds anyway... Japan is old and gray and has no rate of return... Rich Europeans can't take Europe seriously. They're afraid it will turn into an actual empire instead of their toy trading bloc, so they're always parking their cash somewhere far outside their own legal jurisdiction...

So what does that leave you, if you've got a spare 50 billion? Brazil? Russia? India, for heaven's sake? What kind of rich person preserves his wealth in INDIA? You'd have to be crazy. Should you buy oil? Oil's got blood all over it and it's skyrocketing up and down.

So that leaves the Americans -- the global wealthy are clinging to 'em like a drunk to a lamppost. When Russia collapsed, every Russian with a shred of wealth shipped it to Cyprus and Switzerland. The Americans don't have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their LABOR, that's dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes, finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death.

--Bruce Sterling
Annual SotW Thread on the Well

Inchmale's Club

William Gibson is back on the job, and he's bringing Inchmale with him. Here's what looks like a snippet from the novel-in-progress.

12 for Evolution

Wired reports on Nature's roundup of interesting and elegant instances of evolution, including the discovery of calmodulin expression as the source of variation for the beak of the finch, the morphological trends in tooth formation, and frequency-dependent survival processes:

Since natural selection favors traits that increase fitness, it seems that populations should eventually become genetically homogeneous. But evolution isn't so one-dimensional: When researchers adjusted the color frequencies of wild guppy populations in Trinidad, they found that unusual variants — regardless of color — had higher survival rates. This is called frequency-dependent survival: selection favoring the rare and disfavoring the common, preventing a long-term homogeneity that — no matter how beneficial in the short term — might someday prove disastrous.

Nature's collection is in honor of the upcoming 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.

Author John Crowley talks about his childhood involvement with Alice in Wonderland syndrome, one of several strange medical conditions discussed by the WSJ.

I have been trying to describe this syndrome to people for years, and never once met anyone who recognized it from my description; I've assigned it to a couple of characters in my books, including the child Sam in the Aegypt series. In my experience it's more odd a feeling than this, and more ambivalent: I feel (or felt, as a child, almost never any more) as though my hands and feet are billions of miles distant from my head and heart, but at the same time I am enormously, infinitely large, and so those parts are in the same spatial relation to my self as ever, or even monstrously closer.

I wonder of Carroll (Dodgson, rather) had this syndrome.

Karl Lagerfeld Watch

NYTimes Magazine multimedia article on KL. Some decent house porn in there, too.

2009

Well, we made it.

2009 feels like waking up on a strange and endless beach after a shipwreck on a stormy night. We've got a full plate in front of us, people. Roll up yer sleeves and get to work.

DIYbio

The DIY bio trend goes one giant step beyond those home chemistry kits you got as a kid, even if you got them before they moved the "fun" chemicals out. Amateurs are running gel setups in their kitchens, splicing genes into e. coli, and custom designing yeast. There's the usual air of media panic about this whole thing (e.g., "what if they create ebola at home?") and overhype ("who is the next Bill Gates?"), but biohacking has enormous promise for doing interesting and valuable research, plus, it's fun.

Updated: DIYbio article in Seed magazine.

Tales from the Meltdown 7

The Postmortem

The Washington Post is running a mega-series of articles on What Went Wrong .

Shorter version: Belief in free money + general cluelessness + regulators asleep at the switch = how could things go wrong?

(via The Big Picture)

Michael Muhammed Knight

Michael Muhammed Knight wrote an originally samizdat novel called The Taquacores, which deals with a fictional Islamic punk band. He's also apparently quite a character himself, having converted to Islam at 16 after reading a biography of Malcolm X, gone on a roadtrip to visit the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters, and staged a professional wrestling match in which "the flag of Saudi Arabia was stapled to his arm" and he was beaten by a burqa-clad woman wielding a dildo wrapped in barbed wire.

Jeff Mahaffey's War

S.D. Liddick has a good profile of a young Marine sergeant on his first deployment in Iraq. This kid is what my Marine friends would call seriously squared away. He runs a rapid response force in a very rough part of town.

The QRF team is composed of 12 Marines and a medic. It is on call at all times. Its members don't shower and when they sleep, they sleep in their clothes. They are in continuous radio contact and when a call comes in, the goal is to be saddled up and ready to roll in less than three minutes. They are the firemen of the Marine Corps. Like firemen, when they roll it means the shit has hit the fan...

[Jeff] Mahaffey has been a Sergeant for a little more than a year. He carries himself with a cool and ageless confidence--one that suggests he was specially cut out for the type of work that men do in foreign lands. He's easy and well spoken in conversation, with a lively wit. He's also quick to laugh. His only regret stemming from the incident on the 21st is that his team didn't arrive a little bit sooner (the casualty was evacuated to Al Asad airbase and was only shot in the arm--he's expected to make a full recovery).

Sergeant Mahaffey is 22 years old.

Steve Zim's Workout Recommendations

Big Science

Discover Magazine released its list of the Top 100 science stories of 2008. My aunt wrote the respectably ranked #5 story: the territorial claims in the arctic, brought on by the melting of the ice cap.

All Are Saved

Americans overwhemingly believe that people of all faiths (and none) go to heaven. Theologically, therefore, there are a lot more Universalists than one would expect.

Elegy for the Polaroid

Polaroid film is going out of production at the end of next month, since everyone and their photographer cousin have basically moved to digital. Still, we'll miss the particular aesthetic: the square format, fade-in development and slightly off-kilter coloring that made for a unique user experience. The pictures felt more immediate than anything else, and we'll miss the gentle wave of encouragement that we used to perform (supposedly unnecessarily) to encourage proper development. The NYT has a good send-off here.

My father would check his watch, shaking the covered snapshot as if the photograph were a thermometer. Then at the right moment, with a surgeon’s delicate hands, he would separate the negative in a single motion and reveal — well, who knew what.
Because that was part of the beauty of the Polaroid.

Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one’s eyes, right before one’s eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film.

Tales from the Meltdown 6

The High Priests of Finance at my beloved alma mater are divided over the correct response to the economic problems. Will increased government involvement improve the situation in some measurable way, or would it have been better to allow the banks to collapse? While the Chicago guys have a long institutional allergy to goverment intervention, the arguments for allowing a widespread liquidation are unconvincing. Austan Goolsbee, a U of C professor and one of Barack Obama's economic advisors represents the new school of thought:

“If the president-elect were not a ‘University of Chicago Democrat,’ then the natural response would be to just try to turn back the clock to what was there before,” he says.

“Because Obama comes out of a framework where the market is not the enemy, there’s a possibility we can create new institutions to guard against excess without going back to what was wrong in the old regime.”

Goolsbee supports bigger capital requirements for banks and other institutions that can borrow from the Federal Reserve, and wants expanded monitoring of hedge fund firms and ratings companies. Derivatives may need to be traded through clearinghouses, like those used in Chicago wheat pits, which act as counterparties for each trade and can suspend traders with insufficient collateral.

“Getting us out of the hole we’re in, promoting oversight and making investments so the economy can grow doesn’t make you anti- market,”

It's good to see so many of the brilliant people at the University quoted all together. The diversity of viewpoints and strong arguments is refreshing to see in print, but a matter of course for the institution.

The Coraline Boxes

Fifty bloggers have received mysterious boxes from the Coraline film company. So far, 26 have revealed the contents: photos, movie props, letters and keys. Neil Gaiman has more.

I am positively agog with envy at such wonderful craftsmanship. And what a great way to publicize an indie movie.

Merry Christmas

Happy 100th Birthday, Mr. Crisp

Wherever you are, I'm sure it's marvelously disreputable.

Dude. Seriously. Dude.

Christmas shopping is wretched. Nothing to want in the stores, people driving like stampeding buffalo to get to a parking space, discounted merchandise so cheap it's depressing.

The Modern Drunkard

I just love the name of this website.

They have a rollicking interview up with Gary Shteyngart, fueled by apparently massive amounts of vodka:

MDM: In the day of Gleason, Hemingway, Bogart and the Rat Pack, they were very upfront about their drinking and carousing. These days artists, especially actors, won’t admit to anything. Except for maybe Colin Farrell.

GS: Yeah, he’s good. I had my book party, it was sponsored by a rich Russian oligarch and Imperial Vodka. Everyone was smashed. The woman who threw the party got up and said, “I’m sick of this shit where we’re all kissing each others asses all the time. I want to start a literary brawl, Norman Mailer style. Steyngart is my
friend, but he writes immigrant porn. Let’s just kick his ass.”

MDM: Bravo. There used to be fantastic rivalries between writers in the old days. Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway and Faulkner. Capote and everyone.

GS: Yes! But now, nothing.
...

MDM: My Russian brother-in-law tells me some Russians like to spike their vodka ith a good jolt of hair spray. Is this true?

GS: Ah, yes, the old hairspray maneuver. You know who drinks like crazy? My favorite people, the Georgians. They drink from these big ram horns and each person has to toast every other person at the table. There’s the tamada, the toastmaker, he’s like the air traffic controller. A toast comes in, and he stops it and makes sure everyone is okay with it, then another comes in — it’s a fascinating job. A good tamada is like an MC, he gets hired to work parties and weddings. Their wine is like Thunderbird, really strong. It’s not for a connoisseur, it wouldn’t pass muster. When I was in the nation of Georgia, I met some guys in the government. Some mid-level ministers. We went to their dacha, this gigantic compound. They wanted me to get involved in a scheme to steal $600 million dollars from American charities.

MDM: Did they now?

GS: Yes. We drank about ten wine horns, in between vodka shots. And vodka and wine—not such a great combination.

MDM: Odd you would say that. Vodka and red wine, what we call a Brutal Hammer, is our staff cocktail.

GS: That doesn’t surprise me. Their toasts were so heartfelt. But in the back of my mind I kept thinking, they may be doing this because they think I can help them rip off $600 million from American charities. They were drinking to everything. They were drinking to my family. They asked for the names of everyone in my family and they would create these elaborate toasts to people they’d never met. They knew I was flying back through Austria, so they raised a toast to the Austrian pilot who would fly the plane. Such sweet people. And as the evening progressed I started thinking, maybe I can help them steal $600 million.

MDM: It started making sense?

GS: It started making great sense.

MDM: They’re quite ambitious.

GS: They don’t think small in Georgia.

Also, a perspectives on the value of prosthetics vis a vis peglegs, shampoo vs. hairspray as a drink additive, and the government program to encourage Russians to drink more beer. One of the most cheerful interviews I've read this year.
(via 3quarks)

Neil Gaiman's Hanukkah Christmas

I know any number of Jewish people who keep kosher, but will make an exception for bacon, because it is such a great food that, well, how could ha-Shem object? Likewise, Christmas trees are another case for a special exemption, as Neil Gaiman has known from a very young age:

It was trees all the way, properly decorated ones, with tinsel and glass balls and a star on the top. We lobbied and we lobbied hard, and we would not give up. My parents would not countenance it. They had not had Christmas trees when they were children; instead, they had parents who disapproved of Christmas trees. You couldn't, my mother told us, be Jewish and have a Christmas tree.

I was a precocious child, and I had read widely, and I struck. "But it's not Christian," I said.

"I think you'll find it is, dear," said my mother. "That's why they call them Christmas trees, after all."

"They are actually," I told her, proudly, and precociously, "a pagan relic. The trees. The thing of people bringing trees into houses at the winter solstice and decorating them has nothing at all to do with Christianity. It's from pagan times."

I'm not sure why it was better to be a pagan relic, but I hoped it was, and it seemed to shake my mother's certainty. Like my teacher, she knew better than to argue
theology with an eight-year-old.

Whether it was, as I thought at the time, my precocious argument or (more probably in retrospect), my sisters' huge, pleading eyes and trembling lower lips, I do not know, but my father went to the local market and picked out a Christmas tree for us and brought it home. We decorated 'it, and were content. Having won the Christmas tree battle, we had, somehow, won the Christmas war.

Expedition to Cappadocia

Curious Expeditions mounts an expedition to Cappadocia, Turkey. One of the most alien landscapes on earth, where residents have built underground cities for millenia.

Fail

The hard drive on my old laptop crashed a couple of days before I was planning to move everything over to the new laptop. As a consequence, I'm having to dig my music library out of my iPods and back onto the main drive, reassemble my contacts and meeting list from my phone, and generally recover all of my writing for the last several months from handwritten notes. I should have been smarter about it, since the poor thing was teetering on the edge for a long time, with a dodgy touchpad and an overloaded hard driv, but of course I thought it could last a few more days. Wrong again.

It literally hurts to lose the electronic lobe of your brain. It gave me a massive tension headache and a sleepless night last night.

If I've lost contact with you, drop me a line again. Things will be returning to normal presently.

Steampunk Item Lust

Deliciously designed items for your Jules Verne-inspired life.

1. The aptly named Studley tool chest, designed and built by a 19th century organ repairman of the same name. Currently part of the Smithsonian collection.

2. Absinthe delivery apparatus, including this lovely spoon.






3. MAKE magazine's Christmas for Steampunks guide, featuring these inexpensive but elegant looking brass instruments.

WSJ blows Net Neutrality story, various luminaries take them to task in a non-preferentially delivered way.

"At Some Point, We Were All That Shoe"

File this under "cathartic" in the dictionary.



Thanks for the post title, AmericaBlog!

RIP Carleton Gajdusek

Carleton Gajdusek died at the age of 85. One of the smartest people I've ever met (Nobel Laureate, spoke >14 languages, could teach you more about science in one afternoon than most people learn in five years), and who used that intelligence to save a lot of lives and investigate a lot of very strange diseases. He was also a notoriously difficult person with unacceptable sexual practices.

This combination of facts about his life present you with a moral truth: great good does not erase great harm, nor do our mistakes in life cancel out our virtues. It's an unexpected finding, this ambivalence; we would hope that good or evil deeds might take root and bear further fruit, that the people we meet in this life could be easily sorted, that we ourselves could wake to find our consciences as clean as we found them, that the meaning of actions does not change in memory. This is not the case. We are all of us, many people within.

Who do you meet, in the 1,000,000+ words of Gajdusek's journals? Who do you meet on the street every day? How do you know?

The Pink Panthers Strike Again?

A jewel heist story. We like jewel heists because they remind us of old movies, yes?

The robbers may not have been as suave as celluloid jewels thieves with the charm of David Niven — a.k.a. the debonair phantom bandit, Sir Charles Litton — but the meticulous planning, swift execution and creative style raised suspicion that the Harry Winston heist was the handiwork of a loose global network of battle-hardened, ex-soldiers and their relatives from the former Yugoslavia.

Investigators, marveling at the gang’s ingenuity, have dubbed this unlikely network the Pink Panthers. The parallels between film and reality are perhaps best summed up in zee accent and words of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, himself from the original 1963 “The Pink Panther.”

“In a strange way,” he said of his nemesis, the phantom bandit, “I admire him for he has a unique flair for the dramatic.”

Behind the Failure of the Auto Bailout

Here's a hint. When all of the Republican talking heads say the same damn thing, it's because they've got some stupid talking points memo pointing the way. You can therefore cross that course of action off the list because it will lead to disaster.

Take, for example, the current plan to blow up the American auto industry as a way to punish unions.

Simenon: The Escape Artist

Profile of highly prolific writer Georges Simenon in the LA Weekly by John Banville:

As one contemplates the life and work of Georges Simenon, the question inevitably arises: Was he human? In his energies, creative and erotic, he was certainly extraordinary. He wrote some 400 novels, under a variety of pseudonyms, as well as countless short stories and film scripts, and toward the end of his life, having supposedly given up writing, he dictated thousands of pages of memoirs. He could knock off a novel in a week or 10 days of manic typing — he never revised, as the work sometimes shows — and in Paris in the 1920s he is said to have broken off an affair with Josephine Baker, the expatriate American chanteuse and star of La Revue Nègre, because in the year he was with her, he was so distracted by his passion for her that he had managed to write only three or four books.
He put himself in the way of many such distractions. In 1976, when he was in his 70s, he told his friend Federico Fellini in an interview in L’Express that over the course of his life he had slept with 10,000 women. True, he was an early starter. He lost his virginity at the age of 12 to a girl three years his senior, who got him to change schools so that they could continue to see each other and then promptly threw him over for another sweetheart. Young Georges had received his first lesson in the school of hard knocks.

(via 3quarksdaily)

Tales from the Meltdown 5

Moody's and the other rating agencies, previously discussed here in one of the Tales from the Meltdown editions, get taken apart in nested fashion by Gretchen Morgenson at the NYT and by Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture.

Until the causes of the meltdown are fixed, anything done to repair the damage is no better than pissing in the wind. The successor management teams at each of the big financial firms needs to live in dire and holy fear of a perp walk into federal custody. Anything less isn't going to provide an adequate counterbalance to the forces of unbridled greed that rule the street.

Twiends

This is why we love the Internet.

Tales from the Meltdown 4

Another installment of What rich people do when they find out they're really poor(ish) from Teh Vanity Fair.

Examples: Fire the help, downgrade to first class, sell their extra houses for half price, find out "where coupons come from"

Others, perhaps better grounded, look at the upside:

“I may be the only one who’s thrilled by this recession,” says the wife of one London private-equity manager who took his lumps this fall. “It just means we’ll have to get possibly another job. But the bottom line is that it is just money. When you realize that you have enough—your health and a roof and good food and your family—you have to just feel lucky.”

NNT on Charlie Rose

A new interview on the meltdown. Predictions: massive deleveraging, banks as utilities, big equity sell-off, downturn will be "worse than Roubini thinks". You can hear Rose's head thump the table when that line drops. It's an exciting day when someone is more negative on the economy than Roubini.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, cool"

OFFFestival'08 - Joshua Davis from we-make-egos-grow-not-art on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Bruce.
Joshua Davis once gave the coolest design lecture I ever attended. He talked about putting red food coloring in his eyes (result: cool looking eyes, mild discomfort, tears that looked bloody and a red tint to his vision for a few hours) and the process of doing his art (experiment a lot, use math, make interesting failures, build on what works). Then, he invited us to play, too. Play is the opposite of poverty.

Tough Economy

it's even worse then we thought. People in mink coats are throwing themselves in the road in front of me in the early, early nighttime.

Jupiter, Venus and the moon are still v. close together.

Joe the Austrian Economist

Brad DeLong deconstructs Joe the Plumber's rather odd reading list, which apparently includes a bunch of plumbing related books, plus Ludwig von Mises's book The Theory of Money and Credit, which Tyler Cowen apparently traces to the Ron Paul crowd's influence.

Brad sez:

My view is that Money and Credit is very readable--compulsively readable, in fact: I have just spent two and a half hours telling myself "it's OK; I will just read one more page...". But it is only readable in a rhetorical-excess-train-wreck mode, for it is also totally bats--- insane.

I recommend starting at page 416: read through the defenses of the gold standard as the only monetary system consistent with representative government, the attacks on Keynes, the attacks on the New Deal, the attacks on the United Nations, the blaming of all unemployment on labor unions--or on governments--the attacks on private-sector fractional-reserve banking, and stop with the attacks on all other believers in the gold standard not named "von Mises", not dedicated to the root-and-branch elimination of all forms of private fractional-reserve banking, and infected by the errors of the nineteenth-century British Banking School:

Ludwig von Mises, Money and Credit: p. 416 ff: [T]he gold standard appears as an indispensible element of the body of constitutional guarantees that make the system of representative government function.... What the foes of the gold standard are asking for is... to intensify very considerably the already-prevailing upward trend of prices and wages.... Such a policy of radical inflationism is, of course, extremely popular.... How pale is the art of sorcerers, witches, and conjurors when compared with that of the government's treasury department! The government, professors tell us, 'can raise all the money it needs by printing it'[1]. Taxes for revenue, announced a chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, are 'obsolete'[2]. How wonderful!... eventually... the cleverly-concocted plans of inflation collapse. Whatever compliant government economists may have said, inflationism is not a monetary policy that can be considered as an alternative to a sound-money policy....

...and so on and so forth. It's a hoot.

The New Truth about Venture Capital

Here are the simple facts of the post-meltdown world:

1. Capital, especially debt capital is more scarce due to both increased risk awareness/decreased bank capacity and a desire to delever in general
   
2. Near term "bad times", resulting in premiums for assets that pay out now. Asset return expectations will continue to increase (asset spot prices will continue to fall) until a new equilibrium is established
   
3. Widespread cost reduction efforts will inhibit sales growth through the medium term. New projects will be postponed, scaled back or abandoned.
   

This article makes the very good point that VC firms should expect this general trend to impact their investments and portfolio companies in the following ways:

1. Longer times to exits. Right now, the M&A, IPO and debt windows are firmly shut.
   
2. Slower portfolio company growth, due to the aforementioned cost reduction efforts, and due to a general flight to companies with strong track records.
   
3. Higher reserve requirements, as new investors decide to conserve their own existing portfolios, and higher proportions of follow-on investing rounds fall to existing investors.
   
4. Flat valuations for follow-on rounds, at best, due to exit delays, development/sales slowdowns and capital scarcity.
   

What does all of this mean? It means that capital efficiency is extremely important, and that a move to profitability needs to be achieved as early as possible. From the investor perspective, the VC's aren't going to be able to save all of the firms currently in their portfolios, so it's important that they don't advocate anything stupid, like putting the entire salesforce on 100% commission, or cutting future development dollars (because that downstream development contains all of the exit value for years 6-10).

Another article on VC trends.

108 links for Richard Serra.

(via Design Observer)

Quote of the Day

Terrorism is only as important as you let it be. The people who do it, whatever their goals, are by definition few, weak and marginal. If they were many, strong and central, then they would be a major political movement or a government, and they wouldn't feel the need to resort to terrorism. Since they are not, the wisest course is to treat them as common criminals.

-Gwynn Dyer

(via Siege)

Lewis Lapham on the Republican Propaganda Mill

During an argument discussion on the motivations of the vocal wing of the GOP, a friend pointed me to this article by Lewis Lapham in Harper's that dissected the core of the noise machine. In it, he explains why, in the absence of any other conservative weirdness (anti-science, anti-rights, etc.) the collective mind and voice of the Rebublican party turn to increasing the disparity between rich and poor.

In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on federal housing, an essay on the payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or the wonder of the U.S. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale—money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak.

Thaler & Sunstein Look at the Meltdown

The authors of Nudge examine the causes and fixes of the economic meltdown.

Regulators therefore need to help people manage complexity and resist temptation. A potential response to complexity would be to require simplicity - for example, by allowing only the standard 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. This would be a big mistake. Eliminating complexity would stifle innovation. A TiVo is a more complicated product than a VCR, but it is also better.

A superior approach is to improve disclosure. One reason a TiVo is better than a VCR is that it is easier to use. Regulators can reduce the chances of a future meltdown by making it easier to understand financial products. Agg­ressive steps should be taken to imp­rove disclosure - for example, with mortgages, fine-print disclosure should be supplemented by machine-readable files enabling third-party websites to translate hidden details of the terms. Mandatory transparency for investment banks and hedge funds would also help.

Piano in the Woods

Just like it says on the wrapper.

Great Things About Old Movies

The Siren selects ten wonderful things about movies from the 20's, 30's and 40's that you just don't see anymore. The comments list about a zillion more, including:

• Women undressing behind screens
• Ocean liners
• Characters named Vane, Vail, Vance
• Marcel waves
• "Ecstatic amorality without comeuppance ('Jewel Robbery')"
• Older character actors
• Actors with voices
• Dry wit

(via James Wolcott)

Omphalos

Why doesn't this woman have a belly button?

Apparently, there are a lot of potential reasons.

Tales from the Meltdown 3

An insightful interview with Bill Janeway on the theoretical underpinnings that enabled the meltdown:

It took two generations of the best and the brightest who were mathematically quick and decided to address themselves to the issues of capital markets. They made it possible to create the greatest mountain of leverage that the world has ever seen. In my own way, I do track it back to the construction of the architecture of modern finance theory, all the way back to Harry Markowitz writing a thesis at the University of Chicago which Milton Friedman didn’t think was economics. He was later convinced to allow Markowitz to get his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1950. Then we go on through the evolution of modern finance and the work that led to the Nobel prizes, Miller, Modigliani, Scholes and Merton. The core of this grand project was to reconstruct financial economics as a branch of physics. If we could treat the agents, the atoms of the markets, people buying and selling, as if they were molecules, we could apply the same differential equations to finance that describe the behavior of molecules. What that entails is to take as the raw material, time series data, prices and returns, and look at them as the observables generated by processes which are stationary. By this I mean that the distribution of observables, the distribution of prices, is stable over time. So you can look at the statistical attributes like volatility and correlation amongst them, above all liquidity, as stable and mathematically describable. So consequently, you could construct ways to hedge any position by means of a “replicating portfolio” whose statistics would offset the securities you started with. There is a really important book written by a professor at the University of Edinburgh named Donald MacKenzie. He is a sociologist of economics and he went into the field, onto the floor in Chicago and the trading rooms, to do his research. He interviewed everybody and wrote a great book called An Engine Not a Camera. It is an analytical history of the evolution of modern finance theory. Where the title comes from is that modern finance theory was not a camera to capture how the markets worked, but rather an engine to transform them.

The Latest on NNT

Nassim Taleb is really pessimistic. Unfortunately, he has a track record of being really insightful about recent events, so he may (or may not) be correct in his pessimism. In this clip, he and Benoit Mandelbrot discuss the turbulent nature of the financial system:



And here, in a low volume clip, he talks about his hedge fund, Universa, which has had a very good year:

RIP Viridian Design Movement 1999-2008

Pope-Emperor Bruce Sterling declares the movement dead, four years ahead of schedule. The online movement was launched by the online/email publication of the Viridian Design Manifesto, a document incribed with the movement's own incept date of 2012. It was intended as a counterbalance to the austerity-driven green movement then popular, and substituted an esthetic of sexy, high design green. As Cory Doctorow puts it, the Manifesto held:

That the world was under serious threat due to anthropogenic global warming, andThat the answer wasn't to live simply, but rather to use better technology to help us make better choices and conduct our lives in a better way

These two ideas are incredibly inspiring, and have served as a powerful antidote against the Three Stupidities of Global Warming:

There is no global warming, or if there is, it's natural

The only answer to global warming is to live in log cabins, unplug your fridge and never get on another airplane

Global warming is inevitable, so let's go buy some more Hummers and pass the
spotted owl omelette, wouldya?

The Stupidities are, at root, counsels of despair. They rely on denialism, or hold humanity to an impossible standard (witness the goofball commenters to my post about entertaining your children with a single bucket of water on a hot day who immediately leapt in to characterize this as a sin against the very planet, since water is precious and shouldn't be wasted by splashing around in the summer), or throw up their hands and give up.

The Last Viridian Email offers up both a summation of the movement and a suggestion for prioritizing one's stuff into four important categories:

1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
4. Everything else.

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year -- this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe -- along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space.

Also, get a multitool, so as to be as useful and personally effective as possible.

Full text:

The Last Viridian Note
By Bruce Sterling

Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

As I explained in the first Viridian speech, any design movement – social movements of any kind, really – should be designed with an explicit expiration date. The year 2012 would have been the extreme to which Viridian could have persisted. Since the course of history has grown quite jittery, this longer term was spared us.

Some Viridian principles can be lightly re-phrased, buffed-up and likely made of practical use in days to come. Others are period notions to be gently tossed into the cultural compost. I could try to describe which are which – but that's a proper job for someone younger.

I'm following current events with keen interest. There's never been a better time for major political and financial interventions in the green space. However, Viridian List is about design interventions, it was not about politics or finance, so a decent reticence is in order at this juncture.

I would like to cordially thank Viridian readers and contributors and advisors for their patience and their generous help over nine years. I hope you feel you derived some benefit from it. I did my best with the effort, I learned a lot by it, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I can't say what Viridian may have done for you; that's up to you to judge. Since this is last Viridian note, however, I'd like to describe what Viridian did for me.

Since the halcyon days of 1999 my life has changed radically.

Rather than "thinking globally and acting locally," as in the old futurist theme, I now live and think glocally. I once had a stable, settled life within a single city, state and nation. Nowadays, I divide my time between three different polities: the United States, the European Union and the Balkans. With various junkets elsewhere.

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn't approve of my lifestyle, although it's increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It's stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I've got broadband, I'm perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet's surface is arbitrary. It's the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it's freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

I know that, by the cultural standards of the 20th century, my newfangled glocal lifestyle ought to bother me. I ought to feel deracinated, and I should suffer from culture shock, and I should stoically endure the mournful silence and exile of a writer torn from the kindly matrix of his national culture. A traditional story.

However, I've been at this life for years now; I really tried; the traditional regret is just not happening. Clearly the existence of the net has obliterated many former operational difficulties.
Furthermore, my sensibility no longer operates in that 20th-century framework. That's become an archaic way to feel, and I just can't get there from here.

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It's got its practical drawbacks, but I'm much more perturbed about contemporary indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone roaming. This is what's troublesome. The rest of it, I'm rather at ease about. Unless I'm physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don't think I'm going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is "sustainability?" Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It's not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.
Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it is "what is going on."

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it's the opposite of the legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed – (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it.

Sell – even give away– anything you never use. Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos, beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited. Sell that stuff. Take the money, get a real bed. Get radically improved everyday things.

The same goes for a working chair. Notice it. Take action. Bad chairs can seriously injure you from repetitive stresses. Get a decent ergonomic chair. Someone may accuse you of "indulging yourself" because you possess a chair that functions properly. This guy is a reactionary. He is useless to futurity. Listen carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite. You will benefit greatly.

Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who can afford couture. Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget this consumer theatricality. You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.
Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority. Shoes are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear. You really need to work on selecting these – yes, on "shopping for shoes." You should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you're in a car during pretty much every waking moment. In which case, God help you.
I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear unless you are Stewart Brand. Furthermore, unless you are a professional emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic "bug-out bags" and omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations. Do not stock the fort with tiresome, life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your area. If that's the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or several friends to help you.
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.


1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
4. Everything else

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Beautiful things are important. If they're truly beautiful, they should be so beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.

They're not really that beautiful? Then they're not really beautiful. Take a picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.

Emotionally important things. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can't bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a panicky sense of potential loss – they don't help us to establish who we are, or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.

Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself better?

Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then – yes – away with it.

You are not "losing things" by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where they matter – in the everyday.

Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine. In the every day. For sustainability, it is every day that matters. Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots, green New Years' resolutions, or wild scifi speculations. Those are for dabblers and amateurs. The sustainable is about the every day.
Now for category three, tools and appliances. They're not beautiful and you are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical standards.

Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays. Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished spasms of denial.

You will be told that you should "make do" with broken or semi-broken tools, devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.

This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest: the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking, partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.

Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory. They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

If you're becoming a techie magpie packrat who never leaves your couch – that's not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.

So. This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I'm not urging you to do any of this right away. Do not jump up from the screen right now and go reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because it's not sustainable.

Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted.

That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they happen. Moments like these are part of the human condition. Suddenly you will find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution.

But – you may well ask – what if I backslide into the ancien regime? Well, there is a form of hygiene workable here as well. Every time you move some new object into your time and space – buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it, whatever – remove some equivalent object.
That discipline is not as hard as it sounds. As the design of your immediate surroundings improves, it'll become obvious to you that more and more of these time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards. They're ugly, or they're broken, or they're obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty, uncivilized material processes.

Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something better for you – and for the changed world you want to live to see.

So: that summarizes it. Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive sermon; it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won't be troubled henceforth.

Now. If you've read this far, you're a diehard. So you may be interested in my next, post-Viridian, project. And yes, of course I have one. It's not so direct, confrontational and strident as the Viridian Movement; instead, it suits a guy of my increasingly scholastic and professorial temperament.

Viridian "imaginary products" were always a major theme of ours, and, since I'm both a science fiction writer and a design critic, I want to do some innovative work in this space – yes, the realm of imaginary products. Conceptual designs; imaginary designs; critical designs; fantastic and impossible designs.

This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture, use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination. However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."

My first step in composing this new book is to methodically survey the space of all possible imaginary gadgets. It's rather like the exploratory work of "Dead Media Project."

I'm not yet sure what form this new research effort will take. There will likely be a mailing list. I may be turning my Wired blog into something of a gadget site. There might be a wiki or a social network, depending on who wants to help me, and what they want out of that effort. Still: "design fiction," "critical design," "futurist scenario design," and the personal, individual, pocket-and-purse sized approach to postindustriality: this is something I need to know a lot more about.

If you want to play, send email.

Bruce Sterling bruces [at] well.com

Originally distributed to the Viridian email list and at the Viridian Design web site.

God Says Yes to Me

God Says Yes to Me
by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Super Powers

"I'm Batman."

Your Personal Moon

(via Siege)

The Semiotics of Olivia Newton John and the Lat Pulldown

Slavoj Zizek hits the gym.

Eric Baker's Arresting Images

Every week, Eric Baker accumulates striking images from around the web, emails them to friends and posts them to Design Observer, thereby delivering most excellent eye kicks to all and sundry.

Previous editions:
11.08.08
11.01.08

10.25.08
10.18.08
10.11.08
10.03.08

Update: 11.15.08

Holy Sh*t

Meanwhile, at the Holy Sepulchre, peace and brotherhood reign, as always.




Or not.

Yes He Did

Barack Obama Wins.

The Return of Water-Based Shipping

The US could realize substantial savings in shipping costs if it maximized its use of domestic water shipping. The reason: fuel efficiency per ton.

One gallon of diesel pulls one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train and 514 miles by canal barge, Ms. Mantello said. A single barge can carry 3,000 tons, enough to replace 100 trucks.

One More Day

One more day until change begins.

Vote.

The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello

An elegant steampunk animation: