tiny gigantic

You’ve probably seen his work before, but Ron Mueck’s hyper-real sculpture freaks me out.
Found here.

You can make equal cases for optimism or pessimism. Because, mostly, it comes down to your temperament and whether you’re more disposed to hope or fear. And then you make a semi- conscious decision to live a life under the belief that everything will turn out okay or not. Here’s what Dr. Larry Brilliant, from Google.org, has to say about it:

So I just read two books that are blowing my mind. They are by Margaret Wheatley, a systems theorist and organizational development expert. Her specialty is to learn from super complex natural systems (like the universe, and life), and to suggest how these lessons might be applied in our organizations and in our approaches to living. I’m still processing the stuff, so I won’t try to summarize it here or anything. But seriously, if you like to wonder, pick up one of these books:

Leadership and the New Science

A Simpler Way

And if anyone’s got some more of this kind of material, send it my way, please.

So my father has been working on a project called Seeing Peace: Artists Collaborate with the United Nations. The premise is this: if we cannot first envision what peace actually looks like, we will never make it so. So he’s asked artists from United Nations member nations to make art works that show what peace might actually look like, from their unique cultural perspective. Think about that for a second and ask yourself: what would peace actually look like? It’s easy to visualize war. But peace, it surprisingly tough.

A small part of the project, Peace Billboards, will be running in San Francisco from May 26th to June 22nd. 10 artists from 10 countries will be displaying their visions of peace on 10 billboards all over town. So we made a website to help spread the word. Monster thanks to the vega project for the killer flash design!

Go check it out and spread the word.

Seriously, this video is the dope! From three legged leg, of course. Check the video here.

And just in case yer new around here: Jim Coudal runs the brilliant and playful Chicago design studio known as Coudal Partners.

On the very very slight chance you don’t already know about the torture—I mean, “interrogation”—technique called waterboarding. Launched by Amnesty International. Created by a firm called Drugstore. Wow.

This is the “preliminary traverse map of the primary landing site.” Er, I mean, this is the path Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took on their very first walk on the moon, overlaid on a soccer field. If you wanna see which path Buzz walked vs which path Neil took, all the details can be found on NASA’s website. Pretty cool, eh?

Found at the super awesome Strange Maps.

From the Daily Mail article:

“…the ‘Temples of Damanhur’ are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

The first time the police came it was over alleged tax evasion and still the temples lay undiscovered. But a year later the police swooped on the community demanding: “Show us these temples or we will dynamite the entire hillside.”

Stunned by what they had found, the authorities decided to seize the temples on behalf of the government.”

Link.

via boingboing.

Check out this minimalist cabin built from off-the-shelf parts. It’s 140 square feet, and features a cleverly re-purposed garage door.Link.

Found on notcot.org

The Free Rice project is so fucking smart that I can’t help but want to copy it, or build on it, or evolve it, or something. I’m jealous. And also very grateful.

HumanKindMedia describes it nicely:

Head straight to Free Rice, play a vocab game, and for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. Don’t click if you don’t have a few minutes though — it’ll snare you! While you play this insanely addictive game, the advertisers at the bottom are sending bits of that excess American capital known as advertising revenue to countries that need food. If you can pull yourself away from the game for a second, take a look at their stats. They’ve gone from hundreds of grains of rice a day donated to millions a day in only a month. Isn’t it amazing what you can do to end poverty … in just a few clicks?

Link.

Nichelle Narcisi just busted out with ExceptYou, a bad-ass execution of reverse-psychology designed to get the young’uns to vote. Here’s the blurb:

I don’t care what you think of my writing or my message. You’re not included in what is going on here. Your opinion is worthless and everyone here knows it. Everyone else has something worthwhile to contribute, except you.

You’re the outcast. Everyone else has this figured out, except you. Everyone fits in, except you. Everyone, except you. Except you.

Exclusion is uncomfortable, isn’t it? So it’s surprising that so many of us 18-24 year olds have chosen to exclude ourselves by not voting.

If we’ve learned anything from MySpace and Facebook, it’s that my generation values being a part of the group and having a say. We’re mavericks of social networking, communication and internal organization. We become passionate about anything the peer consensus agrees to rally around, including skateboarding dogs. So why not focus that social muscle on something that really matters? Something like going to war. Or global warming. It’s obvious that we care about those things. Getting us to act is the hard part.

One reason we shy away from involvement may be that we’re actually too media savvy. We’ve spent our entire lives being bombarded by targeted advertising and we’re fully aware of it. We’ve become jaded and suspicious toward anyone who may try to persuade us, especially if it’s for our own good.

At the same time, all that marketing attention has fostered a feeling of entitlement. We want the messages we receive to be polished, entertaining and immediate, otherwise we can’t be bothered. The only thing we’re willing to invest time in is our social scene and the warm inclusive blankie that comes with having amassed a small army of MySpace friends.

So, how do you motivate us to vote? First you’ll have to jolt us out of that complacency. We want to be taken seriously, we hate being talked down to, and more than anything else, we’re afraid of being excluded. So make us feel awkward and uncomfortable. Make us the outsider and point your finger while you do it.

Thanks Shawn!

As you know, we’re, like, nanomoments from finishing our book for written on the city. And today, our friend Richard Oliver of Purposive Drift sent us a timely note, sharing his experiences in the final sessions of finishing his book Understanding Hypermedia 2.0 for print.

Enjoy:

Just thought I’d share an experience with you. My last published book, “Understanding Hypermedia 2.0″ was a bit of a nightmare. My co-author, Bob Cotton fell ill at a crucial point in the process. I was having conversations with Malcolm Garrett, the designer, at 4.00 in the morning, where we were swearing we would never do an illustrated book again. I was doing lots of processes that should have been sequential like writing main text, captions, choosing illustrations, and so on, in parallel. We had what was beginning to look like an impossible deadline. And so on. I guess you get the picture.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I was having a final meeting with our editor where there were a few tiny bits to tidy up before the book was sent off to the printers. Everything we needed to deal with could have been done in about ten minutes. After half an hour I realised that I was dragging the meeting on because I was reluctant to let go of our baby and let it go out into the world - very weird.

In the end, despite all the pain, I think it is my favourite of all our books.

Thanks, Richard. Wish us luck!

Seriously. Just go to Red Nose Studio and watch the moving pictures. Then oggle the illustrations. Then sigh in awe and wonder, hoping that one day you’ll be this good.

…in real life, I often experience genuine acts of Good Samaritanism as obstacles.

Bill Shannon has the remnants of Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease, a bilateral leg deformity. It forces him to use crutches when he walks. It has also taught him to become more adept at moving through a city than any us. Wow. Fucking wow.

Um, watch this.