Matins

¶ An interesting piece about the improving the levees of New Orleans, not just as engineering necessities but as features of the landscape, throws light on a big shift in contemporary thinking, away from the Enlightenment project of triumphing over nature, from making environmental problems disappear to making them feel at home, for everyone. (Good)

Living in a city bisected by the Mississippi River and abutting Lake Ponchartrain, New Orleanians have a complicated relationship with water. Where other cities might take advantage of these shorelines for recreation and community activities, prizing a natural access to water in a sweltering urban center, New Orleans is, instead, walled in—its residents’ interactions with nature is mediated by 104.8 miles of levees and floodwalls. These structures are, of course, necessary for the safety of the city (even if they have been far from perfect), but they create a visually forceful divide between the city and its surrounding wetlands. With pumping stations behind walls, even the infrastructure hides itself. It’s as if there is no water at all.

With that in mind, GOOD asked a few of New Orleans’s finest designers to re-imagine, improve upon, or replace these floodwalls and levee spaces. What we got were ideas that are at once community-enhancing, dynamic, and effective—a testament to the power of thoughtful design and public art, especially in blighted areas.

Lauds

¶ Move over, Mad Men: Sherlock’s back in town. Or will be, presently: the BBC has exhumed and updated Anglophonia’s most famous sleuth, and engaged Benedict Cumberbatch to impersonate him. (Guardian; via MetaFilter)

Coming to BBC1 next Sunday, Sherlock is a re-imagining of the Conan Doyle stories, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role and Martin Freeman as his Watson. The three 90-minute episodes were commissioned on the strength of a pilot that was never shown and have already been sold around the world. Resembling a cross between Withnail and I and The Bourne Ultimatum, there is also a hint of Doctor Who about the drama; hardly surprising, since it has been written and created by Doctor Who writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat….

“What appealed to us about the idea of doing Sherlock in the present day is that the characters have become almost literally lost in the fog,” he said. “And while I am second to no one in my enjoyment of that sort of Victoriana, we wanted to get back to the characters and to why they became the most wonderful partnership in literature.”

Casting Cumberbatch as Holmes was a natural decision, but finding the right Watson was harder. “But as soon as they came together, it was obvious.” Freeman’s dependable, capable Watson unlocks this modern Holmes, a man who now describes himself as “a high-functioning sociopath”.

Prime

¶ At Private Sector Development Blog, Ryan Hahn compares microcredit to the ropes that lashed Odysseus to the mast of his ship when the Sirens sang. (He goes on to point out that Odysseus himself, like most men, would not resort to microcredit for self-help purposes.) (via  The Awl)

A recent paper by Jonathan Morduch of the Financial Access Initiative and coauthors Michal Bauer and Julie Chytilova takes a look at the behavioral underpinnings of microfinance. The authors find that women with hyperbolic discount preferences — i.e., individuals who have a tendency to give in to the temptation of consumption in the moment — turn to microfinance as a way to force themselves to save….

So would Ulysses have taken out a micofinance loan as a way to overcome the temptation of current consumption? Probably not. Morduch et al. find that men who are present-biased aren’t particularly likely to take out loans through self help groups but at the same time don’t have lower savings levels than men without this bias. Why this difference between men and women? In a sentence that cries out for further explanation, the authors note that “we didn’t find lower saving levels for present-biased men as we did for women, which suggests that, unlike women, they have access to other ways to cope with self-discipline problems.”

What might these ‘other ways’ be, and why don’t women have access to them? The paper doesn’t speculate on the answer. But this sounds like an avenue for future research that is screaming for attention.

Tierce

¶ At Wired, Kevin Kelly has a short interview with Fred Brooks, author of (most recently) The Design of Design, a book that we’ve enjoyed dipping into. via kottke.org) Some nuggets:

Wired: In your experience, what’s the best process for design?

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

Wired: How has your thinking about design changed over the past decades?

Brooks: When I first wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, I counseled programmers to “throw the first version away,” then build a second one. By the 20th-anniversary edition, I realized that constant incremental iteration is a far sounder approach. You build a quick prototype and get it in front of users to see what they do with it. You will always be surprised.

Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

Sext

¶ Nige takes a walk in the beautiful Leicestershire countryside, where the land still tells of a past that was by no means bucolic and charming. 

Villages were deserted for various reasons – epidemic disease reducing population below viable levels, marginal sites proving unsustainable, loss of crops causing famine – life was hard, and people more mobile than we commonly think – but Ingarsby is a classic case of 15th-century enclosure driving the population off the land. Those sheep pastures, so peaceful and picturesque today, represented the end of village life for the inhabitants of Ingarsby and many another village, at a time when, in Thomas More’s phrase, sheep ate men. While the sheep barons grew fat in their big houses (and indeed abbeys – it was Leicester Abbey that enclosed this land), those who had once lived off the land around were evicted and thrown on their own meagre resources, many becoming beggars, many dying of disease and want. To walk amid the remnants of their village life – which survive only because the heavy land has remained as unploughed pasture – is a poignant reminder of a historical experience that resonated for centuries, continuing in different forms (read John Clare!) and still feeds into the unique English relationship with the countryside, into that faint unease behind our enjoyment of it, a sense of brutal disruption, shameful appropriation, of something lost beyond recall.

Nones

¶ Burma — land of the future? The “military junta” that controls Myanmar’s wealth is nothing but a retro-patriarchal plutocracy. That it should flourish in the Twenty-First Century is shocking — until we consider growing income disparties around the world. Hannah Beech at Time. (via Real Clear World)

The red sign blocking the main entrance to the half-built Yadanabon Cybercity looks innocuous enough to someone who doesn’t read the local language, a swirl of curved Burmese letters and numbers. But the people of Burma have been conditioned to fear this sign: “This area is under military order 144,” it says. “Shoot to capture.” It’s a measure of Burma’s peculiar mix of isolationist paranoia and technological ambition that its future Silicon Valley has been declared a military zone inaccessible to normal civilians. Inside the 4,050-hectare construction site, I drive along empty stretches of tarmac, past plots of land that will soon boast offices for Burma’s biggest crony companies: Htoo Trading, Tay Za’s conglomerate; IGE, headed by the son of Burma’s Minister of Industry General Aung Thaung, who is barred by the European Union; Redlink Communications, owned by the sons of the junta No. 3, General Thura Shwe Mann, one of whom is on the U.S. visa blacklist. Thai, Malaysian, Russian and Chinese firms have staked their ground too. Burma’s state media reports that foreign companies have so far invested $22 million in the first phase of Yadanabon.

Ever since images of protesting monks escaped from Burma during the crushed demonstrations of 2007, the regime has been scrambling to centralize control over the Internet. Thousands of websites have been blocked, cyberdissidents jailed and debilitating strikes launched against exile-media websites. Yadanabon will be the nerve center of Burma’s Internet operations. But it’s not all computer cubicles and high-tech wizardry. On a point overlooking the famous hills of Shan State, $200,000 vacation villas are being built. One model drawing shows a BMW SUV in a garage, and the half-finished houses already feature Tudor trimmings and spacious verandas. Nearby, a farmer toils on a sliver of land that has belonged to her family for at least three generations. Soon the Cybercity will eat up this tiny plot too. The woman doesn’t expect any compensation since she received nothing when the rest of her fields were confiscated a year ago. “We are little people, so we cannot complain,” she says. “All we can do is concentrate on feeding ourselves.”

History suggests that the junta class will disintegrate from within over time. But that is only a suggestion.

Vespers

¶ At Critical Mass, Mark Athitakis talks to David Pritchard, founder of the literary Web site Critical Flame.

Reviews for the site have no specific word-count limits (the guidelines require only that “an article’s length never exceed its coherence”). Still, the Critical Flame strongly embraces long-form essays. What has your work on the site taught you about how willing online audiences are to read such articles?  

As an editor, I never cut for the sake of length. Maybe this section is redundant, or that one needs to be re-written for clarity — but no, word count is no longer a controlling force. Not for internet reviews. I’m also not sure that a book worth reviewing at all can be dealt with in 300 words anyhow, not with the depth that we aim for. I think our shortest essays are 800-1000 words, and they do feel a bit short to me.

 

But, we’ve found no problem with readership in regards to length, nor correlation between length and readers at all. There is — well, I am suspicious of questions regarding length and online audiences. For really good content, people will read until their eyes peel (which takes longer and longer as technology gets better) but they won’t read 300 words of crap, or 600 words of mediocrity, on paper or on the internet. Treat readers as if they deserve to be involved in the conversation, as equals, with enthusiasm and insight, discussing a book that is worth consideration: length will never be an issue.

Compline

¶ “Our T-shirt will read: I just don’t know.” Ron Rosenbaum is lucid about agnosticism, which ever way it faces.

Huxley originally defined his agnosticism against the claims of religion, but it also applies to the claims of science in its know-it-all mode. I should point out that I accept all that science has proven with evidence and falsifiable hypotheses but don’t believe there is evidence or falsifiable certitude that science can prove or disprove everything. Agnosticism doesn’t contend there are no certainties; it simply resists unwarranted untested or untestable certainties.

Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being.

Have a Look

¶ New York art critic Jerry Saltz’s favorite NYC paintings. (via The Morning News)

¶ There goes the garden! What happens to a (dying) washing machine when you toss a brick into its spin cycle. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Nice Muscles. (Café Muscato)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 am.