The curator and the mathematician discuss fractals, architecture, and the death of Euclid.

Seed: Paola Antonelli and Benoit Mandelbrot

using the process of organic information design to visualize the changing structure of a web site, juxtaposed with usage information

movie | anemone | ben fry

The policy debate over using U.S. reconnaissance satellites to obtain imagery of targets in the United States dates back to the earliest days of spy satellites, according to an updated collection of declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).

Obtained and edited by Archive senior fellow Dr. Jeffrey Richelson, the documents add significant historical context to current Congressional concerns (Document 46 and Document 50) about privacy and civil liberties guidelines for the new National Applications Office (Document 41 and Document 48).

Additional historical documents include the charter for the Civil Applications Committee, the statement of authority for National Reconnaissance Program activities over the United States, as well as documents that focus on the question of "proper use" of the satellites and the risk to senior officials should the space assets be used inappropriately.

Documents concerning current plans to establish a National Applications Office and associated Congressional concerns include the letter from the Secretary of Homeland Security to the Director of National Intelligence (reporting his interest in establishing a domestic applications office), expressions of Congressional concern, and the proposed charter (from February 2008).

U.S. Reconnaissance Satellites: Domestic Targets

Corporations rely on specialisation, outsourcing and tacitness. Specialisation is here to manage complexity, outsourcing here to evacuate complexity and tacitness here to hide complexity. It is not perfect. Specialisation impeaches getting the big picture. Outsourcing concretely relocates knowledge out of the organisation. Tacitness prevents management as "you can't manage what you can't measure" and favours egocentric "political" games. Besides those defaults, it offers managers a simple life (and very similar to the one of a Museum keeper).

Specialisation is a natural result of complexity. In organisations, the diversity and recurrence of tasks call for dedicated people to limited actions. The bigger the organisation, the more specialised employees are.

The Museum and the Zoo

DURING Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia, Barack Obama once more tried to explain what he meant when he suggested earlier this month that small-town people of modest means “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” out of frustration with their place in a changing American economy. Mr. Obama acknowledged that his wording offended some voters, but he also reiterated his impression that “wedge issues take prominence” when voters are frustrated by “difficult times.”

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Who’s Bitter Now?

AT a time of economic belt-tightening, might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?

How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the US

Every woman knows what it's like to be patronized by a guy who won't let facts get in the way.

Men who explain things

NOW added to the endangered species list in New York City, along with independent booksellers and shoe repair: the neighborhood record store.

As Problems Mount, Record Stores Find It Increasingly Hard to Stay Open

A growing revolution in imaging is making it possible for biologists to watch small-scale events as they unfold in living cells and tissues.

New technologies—more sophisticated imaging techniques, fluorescent molecules that act as beacons of light in the cell, and the computing power to gather and stitch together multiple images and create videos from high-powered microscopes—make it possible to harness one of light’s key advantages: gentleness. Unlike higher-resolution techniques, light microscopes can image biological structures without killing them or chemically fixing them. At Harvard, the resurgence of light microscopy is making it possible to see structures and events that have never before been seen in the context of living cells and organisms. New discoveries are emerging at many scales of life, from the activation of a single gene in DNA to the development of disease in an organ.

Shedding Light on Life

Airports are essentially machines for processing people, airplanes, automobiles, cargo, and luggage—all of which move in different ways, and which need to be connected at certain points and separated by rigid security at others. Just getting all the parts to work together seems overwhelming—indeed, it did overwhelm British Airways last month at Heathrow, outside London, when Terminal 5, an eight-billion-dollar structure that was supposed to transform Heathrow from a congested tangle into a place that would thrill passengers with the joy of air travel, all but shut down on its opening day, when a computerized baggage system malfunctioned.

Airports, in short, are a logistical nightmare, and this is surely the reason that most of them today are such depersonalized wastelands. With all those moving parts to organize, the last thing that cash-starved airlines and airport authorities want to think about is aesthetic appeal. Most airports built in the last generation, at least in the United States, have followed a simple, established pattern, along the lines of the huge ones in Atlanta and Denver. Gates, arranged in long, boxy concourses set way out in the field, are linked to central terminals by underground trains. Driverless trains enhance the sense that the whole thing is less a piece of architecture than one big machine. Within the concourse, you walk, sometimes as much as a half mile, or ten city blocks, between gates. It is an efficient layout for airport operations, as long as you don’t consider passenger pleasure to be a part of airport operations.

Situation Terminal: The Sky Line