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Alle sombere berichten ten spijt, de wereld is ook in 2008 niet vergaan. Ditmaal naar verluid vanwege elektronische problemen. (BigPicture)

Gespeeld en genoten in 2008:
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Carlos Maps, Ground Zero: “This mapplet shows the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion. Search for a place, pick a suitable weapon and press “Nuke It!”

BLDG Blog, Nuclear Urbanism:

“An amazing Google Maps mash-up by Sydney-based design firm CarlosLabs has us looking at what nuclear explosions would do to cities all over the world. “

“We’ve all heard about dumbing down. But there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is also true. Is this, in fact, the age of mass intelligence?”

More Intelligent Life, The Age of Mass Intelligence:

“From opera in cinemas to audio books for judo-players: the expanding market for intelligence is certainly unexpected. But what does it really amount to? Is it a profound cultural change or a mild shift upmarket? Here are three tentative conclusions. First, the growth of a market for intelligence may not imply anything about the quality of art being produced. Artists and patrons do separate, if related, things. Accusations of dumbing down are legion. On the other hand, the LA Times’s view that this is a golden age for serious television might be applied more widely. It is hard to believe that those who accuse arts institutions of dumbing down would want audiences to be smaller.”

Lifehacker, Livestation Brings Streaming TV to All Platforms:

“Livestation, the previously invite-only streaming television player, has released its free desktop client for all platforms. The app cites an available 1,275 channels, but the majority are—how should we say—not essential viewing. Still, there’s live CNN, BBC, NBC News, Bloomberg, and a smattering of local stations. The full-screen “carousel” view is pretty slick, as is reducing the player to a corner and having it always stay on top. After creating your account, you can also watch live streams from Livestation’s web site, and send twitters marking what you’re watching. All in all, a pretty decent solution to quickly pulling up news and information while you’re at your desktop. Livestation is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems; requires a free sign-up to use.”

Livestation

Jazzanova - I Can See (feat. Ben Westbeech)

Website: Jazzanova.de. Amazon: Jazzanova - Of All The Things

Hervé This - Art et Science (photo: Wired)

Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set, Palate or Palette? The like problems behind molecular gastronomy and modern artmaking.:

“Contemporary art has an uneasy relationship to form. Sure, art is all about form. But what materials are we forming, and what are the models and traditions by which we are forming them? The sculptor Richard Serra, for instance, is fascinated by the properties of iron and steel. He recognizes that industrial materials are as much a part of our “natural” world as anything else. Serra loves to experiment with such materials, to find out what they can do and how they make us feel. He accepts the fact that we do not live primarily among plants and earth. We live in a world that has been manufactured, and Serra wants to manipulate the formal properties of that manufactured world. He hurled balls of molten lead at gallery walls and, more recently, twisted sheets of steel into elegant spirals. He was using the matter and the technologies available to persons of our time. He is not trying to represent the natural world — he is trying to create new forms in a post-natural environment in which artifice and nature are inextricably intertwined.

Likewise, Molecular Gastronomy has opened up an immense realm of formal experimentation. These experiments are not limited by the traditional boundaries as to what constitutes food and what you can do to it. Here is Hervé This:

In 2002, I introduced a formalism to describe, in a non-periodical manner, the organization of food space or different foodstuffs. All foods are complex disperse systems, also called “soft matter.” The simplest of these systems — formerly called colloidal — are well known: emulsions, foams, gels and so forth…But food needs more than interfaces to describe it; even a simple sauce such as a béarnaise consists of three phases: solid matter (microscopic egg-yolk aggregate) and a hydrophobic liquid (oil droplets) dispersed in a hydrophilic liquid (water).

(…)”

“French lawyer Jacques Vergès is famed for defending some of the worst mass murderers in recent history. He says “everyone, no matter what he may have done, has a right to a fair trial.”"

Der Spiegel, Interview with notorious lawyer Jacques Vergès. ‘There Is No Such Thing as Absolute Evil’:

“He has met Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Che Guevara. He defended ‘Carlos the Jackal’ and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Jacques Vergès, 83, is probably the world’s most notorious attorney. His latest client is Khieu Samphan, the former head of state of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, who is on trial for war crimes.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Vergès, are you attracted to evil?

Jacques Vergès: Nature is wild, unpredictable and senselessly gruesome. What distinguishes human beings from animals is the ability to speak on behalf of evil. Crime is a symbol of our freedom.

SPIEGEL: That’s a cynical worldview.

Vergès: A realistic one.”

Paratroopers of the British 1st Airborne landing in fields of Arnhem during the opening hours of Operation Market Garden. Location: Holland. Date taken: September 17, 1944. Size: 1280 x 1158 pixels (17.8 x 16.1 inches)

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google:

“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
(…)
Search tip
Add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive. (…)”

New York Magazine, Geek Pop Star. Why Malcolm Gladwell Thinks We Have Little Control Over Our Own Succes:

“Outliers is at once Gladwell’s least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counterintuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn’t even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that “success is exclusively a matter of individual merit,” which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don’t have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.”

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, The Uses of Adversity. Can underprivileged outsiders have an advantage?

Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon).

‘The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.’

Michael Lewis in Portfolio, The End:

“To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.”

‘Everything is going to be allright’, 2007. 16mm film to HD video, 10’10”. Golf of Bothnia, Finland. Image by Ben Geraerts.

Metropolis M, Een gesprek met Guido van der Werve. De charme van een poëtische onliner:

“(…) Ik houd van simpele ideeën omdat ze altijd erg open zijn. Als je iets tot de kern terug kunt brengen, kunnen meer mensen zich ertoe verhouden. Terwijl veel kunstenaars juist bezig zijn met het omgekeerde, ze nemen een eenvoudig idee en maken het vervolgens complex. Uiteindelijk krijg je een soort kluwen waaruit niemand meer een uitweg weet. Van dit soort mystificatie in kunst houd ik niet. Je hebt veel mensen die goede dingen doen, gewoon op gevoel, maar vervolgens denken alles uit te moeten gaan leggen. Ik denk dat mijn werk iets meer benaderbaar is. Is nat het tegenovergestelde van droog?”

Kristof Magnusson, “Inflation will pay!”:

“How did it come to this? The proverbial buck has already been passed round the ministerial departments and political parties - to varying degrees of amusement or dismay among the Icelandic population. But if you look deeper into Icelandic culture and history for reasons behind the current misery, you will find something that is familiar to all Europeans: the desire to be modern, to be one of the winners in the globalised world – paired with the inability to shed traditional behavioural patterns.”

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Top-40, Steve Reich Piano Phase:

“(…) But on the October 2006, Peter Aidu performed this composition with an absolutely unique technique. While playing on two pianos, with a left hand on one instrument and the right hand playing separately on the second piano, he was recreating the sounding of two performers! (…)”

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‘I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn’t have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I’ve encountered. Nov. 7, 2007.’ (link)

The Digital Journalist, Travels With Barack

“Four years ago Time photographer Callie Shell met Barack Obama backstage when she was covering presidential candidate John Kerry. She sent her editor more photographs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, “I do not know. I just have a feeling about him. I think he will be important down the road.” Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since.”

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Franz Schubert - Symfonie no. 8 ‘Unvollendete’ - Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest o.l.v. Nikolaus Hamoncourt (opname uit 1997).

Gratis downloads van 10 symfonieën uitgevoerd door het KCO.:

• Franz Schubert - Symfonie no. 8 ‘Unvollendete’
• Ludwig van Beethoven - Symfonie no. 2
• Felix Mendelssohn - Symfonie no. 4 ‘Italiaanse’
• César Franck - Symfonie in d
• Gustav Mahler - Symfonie no. 1
• Antonin Dvorák - Symfonie no. 8
• Camille Saint-Saëns - Symfonie no. 3 ‘Orgelsymfonie’
• Jean Sibelius - Symfonie no. 2
• Anton Bruckner - Symfonie no. 8
• Johannes Brahms - Symfonie no. 2

‘Sport, Olympische Spelen Amsterdam, 1928. Wielrenner tijdens de wegwedstrijd in het Hollandse landschap, gadegeslagen door een politieagent te paard.’

Nationaal Archief op Flickr. (via)

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair: America the Banana Republic:

“Another feature of a banana republic is the tendency for tribal and cultish elements to flourish at the expense of reason and good order. Did it not seem quite bizarre, as the first vote on the rescue of private greed by public money was being taken, that Congress should adjourn for a religious holiday—Rosh Hashanah—in a country where the majority of Jews are secular? What does this say, incidentally, about the separation of religion and government? And am I the only one who finds it distinctly weird to reflect that the last head of the Federal Reserve and the current head of the Treasury, Alan Greenspan and Hank “The Hammer” Paulson, should be respectively the votaries of the cults of Ayn Rand and Mary Baker Eddy, two of the battiest females ever to have infested the American scene? That Paulson should have gone down on one knee to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as if prayer and beseechment might get the job done, strikes me as further evidence that sheer superstition and incantation have played their part in all this. Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.”

Willem Buiter, Iceland’s bank defaults: lessons of a death foretold:

“Early in 2008, Anne Sibert and I were asked by the Icelandic bank Landsbanki (now in receivership) to write a paper on the causes of the financial problems faced by Iceland and its banks, and on the available policy options. We sent the paper to the bank towards the end of April 2008. On July 11, 2008, we presented a slightly updated version of the paper in Reykjavik in front of an audience of economists from the central bank, the ministry of finance the private sector the academic community. A link to that paper can be found here.

Because our Icelandic interlocutors considered the paper to be too market sensitive, we agreed not to put it in the public domain. Now that all three formerly internationally active Icelandic banks - Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing - have gone into receivership, there is no reason not to circulate the paper more widely, as some of its lessons have wider relevance.”