Counter Terra

Elsewhere Revisited




This is actually a follow-up to a post I made a couple of years ago here.

More on the video and Elsewhere (and a better quality video) here.

Something about this one captures happy D.

Dayvan Cowboy

Strange Titan Landing Music

Yes, it's been too long. There's a moderate backlog of things I've bookmarked for posting, but when I saw this I had to post it immediately. It is quintessentially counter terran.

The movie downloadable from NASA's site here is a beautiful combination of art, science, and design. I think it would hold its own in a gallery.

Now I want an interface like that for my car.

Nuke 'Em All

The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory helpfully explains some of the impracticalities of using nukes to destroy hurricanes here.

The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x10¹³ watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 10¹³ watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

The Poetics of Cartography

Here's a This American Life episode on mapping. Not one of the better episodes, but it has its moments.

Act 1: Maps of only the pools of light cast by streetlamps. Maps of neighborhood Halloween pumpkins. "It's almost like you're writing a novel, but with pure symbol, with maps."

Act 2: "I arrived in a new job at a new office. In those sorts of situations, you are always kind of hyper aware of everything. It was quite a cold week and the heater was just humming along very loudly to the point of distraction. I started paying attention to it. It was a very musical hum. And I found myself humming in the key which the heater was playing in, essentially." Beware the augmented fourth, diabolus in musica.

Act 5 (the piece de resistance): "Somehow, thinking of Mr. Coleslaw Burger, and thinking of the other restaurants I'd eaten at on Pico, I came up with the sort of half-baked, coleslaw-inspired idea to eat at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard and create sort of a map of the senses which would be able to get me from one end to the other."

"It occurred to me that what I was looking for in the Foreign Service--the sort of adventures I was hoping to have, with the sort of people I was hoping to meet--I was already having right there in my own hometown."

Too Many Cooks

News to me. The original painting of the death of Captain Cook was discovered in 2004. It is not so noble.

Nooks and Crannies

While I know it's received a fair amount of attention already, the Degree Confluence Project (compiled nicely in a world map here) is worth a look. People upload photos and sometimes a travelogue for the degree intersections of latitude and longitude around the world. At it's worst, it's like sitting through your neighbor's vacation slide show--a neighbor who's one of those GPS geeks who live to go geocaching on the weekends. At its best, it acheives an odd kind of verisimilitude; cow pastures in Brazil, the bends of a small river in Laos, episodes in a road trip from Germany to China, antipodean points.

Do Not Fail Your Species

"When you look up at the evening sky know that we have conquered 48.729% of the known Universe."

If semester projects go as planned, I'll post a few satellite images displaying nitrogen content in mesoscale eddies off Hawai'i.

Atom Feed

Not that I'm posting much, but here's the atom feed.

Dot Matrix

So I'm reading one of my favorite blogs (Mimi) and catch a link to a Dallas band that actually doesn't suck, Tree Wave. They make stuff with old, reprogrammed computer hardware. Without sucking. "Sleep" apparently incorporates an Epson dot matrix printer (which must be heard to be believed). One of the bandmembers also gets a shout out for being a UTD grad and hacking a Homestar Runner RPG for the Atari 2600.

Blogger Hosed the Comments

Sorry.

UPDATE: Seems ok. My mistake.

Slow Boat Veterans for Truth

If you're like me, you have a secret, aching desire to be a tugboat captain, a freighter captain, or any officer on a big, otherwise unimposing seagoing vessel that doesn't feature buffet nights in the ballroom. The next best thing might be travelling by freighter. The days of the banana boats and such are largely gone, but it seems even modern container ships have a romance of their own, including late nights of (duty-free) drinking and cards with Kiribatians, Estonians, and Deshis. This surprisingly deep geocities site has the details.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

rx do mashups of Sunday Bloody Sunday and Walk on the Wild Side with W. on the mic.

The U2 cover was in the mix on this week's particularly good Solid Steel set with Strictly Kev and DJ Qwerty. I don't think they archive their shows anymore, so drop me an email if you want this one.

World Subways and Chicago Snapshots

fake is the new real has some interesting bits:

Maps of the world subways at the same scale.

Snapshots of Chicago, taken at streetcorners at one mile intervals.

I miss Chicago. I miss Chicagoans.

Google Me a River

Google Local lets you search the net by lat/long. US only at the moment, but a global version would be pretty amazing. And they need point-and-click functionality for the map.

Back to Chernobyl

"The most exciting thing about rides in Ghosttown is to hit a red line on my bike's tacho and break this silence with roar of a wounded dinosaur and then to close throttle and listen how all those ghosts cursing 1100cc kawasaki engin."

Joyriding in a nuclear wasteland on a jap bike.

Archipelagoes in Our Minds

Ursula K. Le Guin interviewed here.

Q: What effects have Ishi and his story had on your writing?

UKL: Nothing directly that I know of. I knew nothing about Ishi and his story until my mother began writing the biography, long after I was grown and writing and publishing. That a lot of my protagonists are alone of their kind among people of another kind - this is Ishi's situation; also the situation of a field anthropologist; also the situation (or so it seems to me) of most adolescents, most intellectuals, most artists . . . "I, a stranger and afraid/ In a world I never made."

Counter Counter Terra

Terra Nova is an excellent blog dedicated to virtual worlds. Hopefully the * Terra * theme won't become overused.

UPDATE: NYT has an article on Ludology here.

Truly Counter Terra Revisited

There.com, one of the big players in the virtual world market (?), has been contracted by the US Army to build a "second Earth."

"...the Army needs a high-level training, mission-rehearsal and analytic capability for long-duration, asymmetric operations such as we're in the middle of today in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places. A capability that focuses on human interaction more than armor, artillery and helicopters. And most importantly, a capability that enables the Army to train in a virtual environment with the other services, with other governmental agencies and with our coalition partners. That's what we're working on with the Army, and it's a challenging and important goal."

More here and (particularly) here. The aforementioned Terra Nova has some interesting discussion regarding this too.

I suspect such things will be most useful in the near term really only for training/simulating bureacratic procedures and anything beyond that is gravy. And perhaps a kind of spatial orienteering. Near term.

The Underwhelming Theorist and Other Morsels

Alex Golub has provided a nice evening of reading. Here are some jumping off points...

Rage Against the Academe:

The point is not that the underwhelming theorist is a bad person. He's a nice guy who's a good teacher and - as I mentioned above - a jaw-droppingly detailed ethnographer. Nor is the point that jaw-droppingly detailed ethnography is a bad thing. On the contrary - it's a fantastic thing. The point is that the guy is doing something he's lousy at and he's producing stuff that is of no use to anyone (instead of more of the stuff we all want from him - detailed ethnography). He'll never realize it and no one will ever tell him. About the only people who get really worked up about it are young Turk graduate students hell-bent on a mission to tell the world about their dissertation topic and enraged at the mishandling of the theoretical issues of concern to them (i.e. me). But we can't say anything because it means not getting to be in his edited volumes or funded through his workshops. And if we say 'fuck it' and don't pull our punches, we end up looking like rabid assholes: "Why are these young hotshot bigheaded kids being such assholes to Mr. Established and Friendly If Slightly Mislead About His Own Level Of Theoretical Importance? They must be a bunch of cocksuckers." Which, again, is not to say we're not rabid assholes, merely to say that in addition to this personal characteristic we have the additional quality of being correct. To us, Practice Theory looks like Bourdieu's application to anthropology of Heidegger's critique of intentional consciousness as developed in the first division of Being and Time, and given the fact that both Heidegger and Bakhtin were reacting against the neo-Kantianism of the Southwest German School, we could develop a very effective theoretical rapprochement between Bourdieu and Bakhtin through the analytic lens of a critique of subjectivity which could in turn really get us far towards a re-analysis of the literature on Melanesian selfhood developed by Marilyn Strathern which reaches for alternatives to individualism by reifying Melanesian 'dividualism' instead of unearthing alternative streams of thought within our own philosophy of subjectivity and then relating these to indigenous notions of person and group. So fuck you and your practice theory basket weaving.

On a personal note, the above speaks to me profoundly, the difference between ethnographer and anthropologist being a topic of some recent argument.

And, "My country is being run like The Minority Report, except without the Precogs."

And, "The most appropriate way to understand the enormous aethetic potential of video games, and in particular first person shooters, is through the lens of theoretical frameworks provided by Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas."

He also gets a bit of a dig at Valeri, which I found a little funny.

And his AAA piece is interesting: "It is ironic to note that now, a century and a half after Frazer, American proponents of strict intellectual property and copyright laws appear to operate on principles that are almost eerily similar to those described in the Golden Bough."

Wow, it's late.