Now that we have arranged the music, I can get down to practicing my parts. I also have to start naming the tunes…
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Upside Down – The Sacred Car
Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the giant metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory – and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet?

“I saw a cigarette ad in a magazine with the required public health warning: ‘Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide.’ But the same magazine has several car ads and not one of them warned that car exhaust, nearly always invisible, contains much more carbon monoxide. People can’t smoke. Cars can.”
(Via Copenhagenize.com – The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog)

I love that idea, to add carbonmonoxide warnings on every car-ad!
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Nick Knight, art-directed by Alexander McQueen, legless dancer David Toole, shot for a fashion story celebrating beauty and grace with disabled models, ‘Access-able’, Dazed and Confused, 1998
(via Constant Siege)

Great pose (((and great strength!!))), great photograph, great art-direction.
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LCDs or eReaders, Which Are Worse for Your Eyes? – eReaders – Gizmodo
The NYT published an interesting piece on display technologies, allowing doctors and professors to attack the age old question, are LCDs worse for your eyes than eReaders. The answer? It depends.

As Michael Bove, director of the Consumer Electronics Laboratory at the MIT Media Lab, puts it:

“It depends on the viewing circumstances, including the software and typography on the screen…Right now E Ink is great in sunlight, but in certain situations, a piece of paper can be a better display than E Ink, and in dim light, an LCD display can be better than all of these technologies.”

Apparently, the high refresh rates of modern LCDs make it as easy on the eyes as any e-paper/e-ink technology, when ignoring environmental factors like light and ergonomics. Problems seem to arise from eye fatigue, which is more a product of the lighting situation and the user’s practice of taking proper breaks (let your eyes rest every 20 minutes).

I have no problem reading from the iPhone’s LCD screen and have read dozens of books so far.
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From a photographer commenting on this Kottke post:

CONSTANT SIEGE – Kottke: Why is flying hard?

“When I got older, I realized that what made it so effortless was that my dad was taking care of the hard part, the 95% of flying that doesn’t involve moving any of the controls. What made it look so effortless for him, even when things got tough, was the 10,000+ hours in the cockpit of a plane, flying.”

Yes. This is also the difference between a professional photographer and an amateur working for cheap (or, shudder, free). Why is my fee so much? You’re not paying me for the photograph I’m making, you’re paying me for the hundreds of thousands I’ve made in order to be able to make that photograph you need, perfectly, and on demand.

See also, the famous Picasso vignette:

“Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

“It’s you—Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”
So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

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Yeah, once they thought that blood-letting would cure diseases… and now some people think that the cold Winter is proof that Climate Change isn’t happening.

Climate change causes more severe weather
Fact: Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms
Record snowstorms need two things: temperatures below freezing, and very high humidity. On a planet warmer by a few degrees on average, the Northeast US will still have plenty of days below freezing; the big difference will be warmer seas producing higher levels of moisture in the air — and therefore more severe cold-season storms.

Fact: We can expect more extreme weather.
Scientists tell us that climate change has already led to more extreme weather in the United States and we can expect stronger hurricanes, more wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, to name a few.

Fact: The world is warming at a quickening pace
Weather in one region over days or months should not be confused with climate or the patterns of weather over decades and centuries. And the science is clear here: the last decade was the hottest on record. And to put this year’s weather in perspective, January was warmer than average for the continental United States.

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Take Note | Tricycle Magazine
The members of the Nyingma Monlam Chenmo International, representing more than 300 Nyingma monasteries in Tibet, India, and Bhutan, unanimously nominated E. Gene Smith to receive a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the preservation of the buddhadharma.

Smith recently stepped down as Executive Director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), which he founded in 1999, so that he can devote his time and energies to the critical scholarly work of TBRC. The center so far has scanned and digitally archived more than four million pages of Tibetan texts in order to make them available throughout the world.

Smith is best known for his work with the Library of Congress. In 1968, he joined the New Delhi Field Office and initiated a campaign to reprint every Tibetan text he could find. Many of the texts were brought to him by Tibetan-speaking exiles from Sikkim, Bhutan, India, and Nepal. For the next twoand- a-half decades, he led a tireless effort to seek out every available text in existence and in the process rescued numerous traditions from extinction. In 1985, he was transferred to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he continued his work in text preservation. In 1994, he was assigned to the Middle Eastern Office in Cairo. In 1997, he took early retirement from the U.S. Library of Congress.

“It is not an exaggeration at all to say it is because of Gene’s hard work and efforts that we have access to many of the precious texts we are using today,” said Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, whose foundation helps to support TBRC. “With Gene’s digital library, no future disaster will destroy these precious Buddhist texts again.”

I met Gene Smith in December and wrote about that day here.