Auriea's Notebooks

Book 8 (26 Sept 1990 - 19 Dec 1990) from womanonfire on Vimeo.


Book 21.2 (july 1994 - winter 1994) from womanonfire on Vimeo.

Michael Beirut's Notebooks

Over 26 years, designer Michael Beirut has filled 85 notebooks with professional material. Two are lost, one was recovered from the roof of a taxi that had traveled 10 blocks.

I use them in order. Tibor Kalman once asked me why I didn't have a different notebook for every project. I have to admit, this would be more useful. But I don't. I fill each one up and then move to the next one, the projects all jumbled together. Starting with the third one, every one of them is numbered. Except for two at the very beginning that used gridded paper, they have blank, unlined pages. I hate gridded paper (but not as much as lined paper.) There have been times when it's been really difficult to get unlined composition books, which I gather are oddly unpopular. One time I found a supplier who would only sell them in bulk and I bought a whole boxful. I thought these would last the rest of my life, but I gave a lot away, which I regret. Now they're gone.

Kahneman & Taleb at DLD

Blizzard conditions. Trees coated in ice thick enough to bend even large branches. Snowblowered the driveway. Cleared half an inch of ice off the car--initially very tough, but eventually big slabs can be removed by punching them, Superman style. Lots of kids out sledding at the river and the golf courses, for what seems like the first time this year.

Glowing Cities Under a Night Time Sky

Link
(via kottke)

NSA Spying Revelations Continue

Russell Tice continues to blow the whistle, this time with Wired:

The big reason why they would put the San Francisco operation at such a high classification level is to hide the fact that they're breaking the law and to hide the fact that they're breaking the NSA's own policy. It should be [the sort of project] that any NSA analyst should be able to walk in and have access to. But to cloister it away where only a few people know about it means that it's something they don't want anyone to know about. ...

Say we're doing that same sort of deal overseas against a foreigner. ... More than likely anyone in NSA could potentially have access to that information. It wouldn't be compartmentalized. So if we set up that same scenario, even covertly in some frame room in Bucharest or something, anyone at NSA with a TS/SCI clearance could potentially look at intelligence reports from information garnered from that particular collection point. So all of a sudden that same thing is being used here in the states and it's being put into a special SAP program -- Special Access Program. ... They're extremely closely held programs that are super-duper clearance nonsense. It's what I specialized for the last eleven years or whatever.

Q: So you're saying that San Francisco and this other room [in Bridgeton] reek of "super-duper" secrecy?

Tice: Yes, it reeks of SAP. Potentially. For NSA to do what they did ... it means that they knew that it was illegal and the reason they put this super high clearance on it was because they were protecting their own hides to keep anyone within NSA from finding out that it was going on. ...

Let me tell you, the biggest sweat that happened at NSA happened when John Kerry almost got elected president [in 2004], because they were concerned they were all going to be thrown in jail. They were all wiping sweat off their forehead when he lost. That's the scuttlebutt.

Delightfully Creepy

Fever Ray: If I had a heart

(from Jonno's twitter stream)

Vancouver in the Clouds

Astonishing shot of Vancouver from Jackal. Click to embiggen.

John Maynard Keynes

A short history of JMK in TNR, which nicely lays out his views as represented by the General Theory and other works.

I'm reading the Robert Skidelski biography, which does a very good job of situating JMK in the late Victorian/Edwardian era. It's interesting that economists are always creatures of their times. Cannadine's Mellon, for example, was more interesting as a view of late 19th/early 20th century economic and industrial/scientific history than it was as a biography of Andrew Mellon himself. Keynes appears to have been much more of a character than Mellon was, however, and was surrounded by similarly colorful characters.

Gynandromorphic Cardinal

This cardinal is a bilateral gynandromorph, "meaning that the left side of the bird is male and the right side is female...a red/brown split right down the middle." This is the result of an asymmetric separation of the sex chromosomes during early stage development.

(via kottke)

Quote of the Day

When I was 11, my father, a businessman who, in his day, took a dubious risk or two, gave me a key lesson in finance and life which I knew was meaningful without understanding it. “You’re not bankrupt,” he said, “until people know you’re bankrupt.”

-Michael Wolff

The Ultimate Bubble

The question being asked is: which of the PE firms is going to blow up, and when. The place it's being asked is at a luncheon in Monaco, where it's business as usual until the music stops.

Feltron Report 2008 is out.

Props

The Selby tours M. Farman's aviation-themed store in Paris.

We're All Gonna Die

A "one hundred meter long photo" (at one level of magnification), consisting of 20 days worth of photos of pedestrians on a bridge in Berlin, taken by Simon Hoegsberg.

Click link to view the full image.

(via Kottke)

The Future Is Now Vol. LXIX: Stem Cell Clinical Trials Begin

Geron, one of the most ambitious biotechs out there, is launching a clinical trial for oligodendrocyte precursors as a treatment for spinal cord injury. This is being touted as the first stem cell clinical trial in the world. I'm not sure whether that's accurate on several technical points, but it's certainly a big step forward. I'm fascinated to see how this turns out.

Way back in the 90's when we were messing around with glial injections for SCI, it was pretty clear that 1) it would take more than dumping fresh cells into an injury to get good results, and 2) you could get animal models to show some recovery far more easily than you could with humans; the dominance and sophistication of the corticospinal pathways, coupled with human CNS chemistry makes for a difficult path to recovery.

For your inner James Bond villain

(via Jon Taplin)

Moon Money

Red Richman designed Lunar banknotes.

Only slightly more imaginary than Earth currency.

(via English Russia)

Best. Puppet Show. Ever.

Coldplay's Life in Technicolor




(via Jonathan)

An Impossible Project

Shortly after Polaroid announced that it would be discontinuing production of its line of instant films, I started thinking that this would be a really, really good opportunity for someone to build a successful middle market business. You've got a fairly intricate (but known) manufacturing process, passionate customers, multiple specialty uses for the product and the ability to update composition, manufacturing and distribution in line with the smaller scale of product demand.

Florian Kaps of the Lomographic Society and Andre Bosman of Polaroid, together with a team of process engineers, have acquired Polaroid's Netherlands plant and equipment with the aim of creating a new line of integral films. They call their company The Impossible Project:

'We've talked several times with Polaroid to ask them if there was any chance to keep instant film alive,' he tells [the British Journal of Photography]. 'They told us that there was no way to do it. They had run studies showing that it was very difficult to produce some of the components needed, and that nobody could do it now.' And then, by chance, at the Dutch factory's closing ceremony, Kaps was approached by a few former Polaroid employees. 'They told me that there were new ways to produce the components needed, and that there was a chance to rent the factory.

'Having secured the financing for one year of operations, Kaps went to Polaroid to purchase the machines that had been used to produce instant films. 'We looked at purchasing the machines, but we had to sign a contract with Polaroid that acknowledged the fact that we wouldn't be able to reproduce existing Polaroid films. We signed a contract that said we would be developing a new kind of instant film.'

The Beauty of Urban Decay

Smashing Magazine curates this flickr set of gritty urban images, including a bunch of nice HDR work.

(via grinding.be)