“ The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.”
“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it. To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything” – Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison
(Via felixsalmon)
(via felixsalmon)
“ We have fewer things you can click, and they’re bigger.”
James Fallows explains the significance of this seemingly mundane picture, which was taken by a Chinese engineer visiting Florida on a business trip:
To the Chinese engineer, what was fascinating and significant about the picture was its orderliness. The yellow school bus stopped, turned on its “do not pass” flashers, and extended its Stop signs. And — the amazing part — all surrounding traffic actually obeyed. Even those who are fans of the excitement and passion of Chinese life will agree that such a scene is hard to imagine in a Chinese city. You’d have motorbikes cutting past on the sidewalk, cars veering into the opposite-direction lane to get around the obstacle, a cacophony of horns complaining about any vehicle that did slow down, and in general the creative-chaos that extends from many other parts of Chinese life to its roadways. (Where it can seem festive, but also dangerous: China’s traffic-death rate per active motorist and per mile driven is several times higher than in North America or Europe.)
To local authorities in Florida, what was notable about the situation was:
- a foreigner
- stopping to take pictures
- of a bus
- containing children.
If you see something, say something. So they detained the man for questioning.
Our world powers in a nutshell. (Via The Atlantic)
“ Local news outlets get less than one half of one percent of all pageviews in a typical market”
“”It may not be out of place to note here the difference between gray as spelt with an a, and grey as spelt with an e, the two names being occasionally confounded.
GRAY is a semi-neutral, and denotes a class of cool cinereous colours, faint of hue; whence we have blue grays, olive grays, green grays, purple grays, and grays of all hues in which blue predominates; but no yellow or red grays, the predominance of such hues carrying the compounds into a the classes of brown and marone [maroon], of which gray is the natural opposite.
GREY is neutral, and composed of or can be resolved into black and white alone, from a mixture of which two colours it springs in an infinite series.
Field’s Chromatography (1856) is blowing my mind.
The fine language and discussion of color in this book is almost magical. It’s like a spell book for wielding hues and tints; something that must have been a magical talent in the mid 19th century. Field’s evokes a way of seeing the world and its color in a time before omnipresent photography, digital displays, and ink-jet printing. To communicate color you needed both spellings of grey and evokative words like “cinereous” (an ashy gray, similar Latin root to ‘cinders’).
At times Field’s discusses pigments like they’re new technology (which they essentially are at that time). Something that holds yellow in a fixed way allows new subjects to be communicated. Subjects which paintings could never previously present. Passages like these, for someone whom never imagines a hue out of reach, are spellbinding.
Pinterest, circa 1600.
Lévi-Strauss writes, as quoted by John Berger:
For Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. The pictures in a Florentine palace represented a kind of microcosm in which the proprietor, thanks to his artists, had recreated within easy reach and in as real a form as possible, all those features of the world to which he was attached.
Oil Painting, as a genre, used extreme realism to communicate wealth and possession. Today, such extreme realism is accessible by anyone with an internet connection or a cheap digital camera. There’s no need to to hire expensive painters; anyone can associate with any thing.
Instead of showing off possession, sites like Pinterest allows you to show off taste.
While more egalitarian, it’s still just people posing with their associated stuff. If Berger’s argument applies to this age as well, every Like and Pin will be largely forgotten.
More nerds would be DJs if they knew that assembling a crate of records is just like building a Magic deck.
(Via Flowing Data)
