Have you seen "Manufactured Landscapes"?

This exhibition surveys a decade of photographic imagery exploring the subject of oil by Edward Burtynsky. In addition to revealing the rarely-seen mechanics of its manufacture, Burtynksy photographs the effects of oil on our lives, depicting landscapes altered by its extraction from the earth and by the cities and suburban sprawl generated around its use. He also addresses the coming "end of oil," as we confront its rising cost and dwindling availability.

Burtynsky's photographs, printed at large scale, render his subjects with transfixing clarity of detail. His extensive exploration is organized thematically: aerial views of oil fields, the architecture of massive refineries, highway interchanges ribboning across the landscape, and motorculture aficionados at automotive events.

Consisting of approximately 55 color landscapes, Edward Burtynsky: Oil will encompass a kind of modern-day "lifecycle" of the energy source that has shaped the modern world.

Nate Silver:

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

Ed Burtynsky:

I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?

TED:

Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation.

Nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

Stewart Brand:

Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

Burtynsky: Oil | Corcoran Gallery of Art

Frank Schirrmacher:

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, it's just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.

Decius:

The fundamental ideological fallacy in our society is the idea that maximizing property rights makes people in general more wealthy. In fact, a society can achieve its greatest wealth potential by maximizing innovation, which is a different value than property rights and the two are not always aligned.

Cory Doctorow:

The Dude is the easiest way to share stuff with your friends and other contacts, and it's also a great way to meet people who think like you.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

David Clark, on "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age":

If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine. Victor Mayer-Schoenberger catalogs the range of social concerns that are arising as technology favors remembering over forgetting, and offers some approaches that might give forgetting a respected place in the digital world. Read this book. Don't forget about forgetting.

The Age of the Informavore

David Pozen:

In the vast literature on government secrecy, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles.

Attending to the depth of state secrets can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal. It sheds light on how secrecy is employed and experienced, which types are likely to do the most damage, and where to focus reform efforts. And it gives more rigorous content to criticisms of Bush administration practices. Elaborating these claims, this Article also mines new constitutional territory - providing an original account of the role of state secrecy generally, as well as deep secrecy specifically, in our constitutional order.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Abaddon:

Something needs to be said for keeping such knowledge secret.

Peter Galison and Robb Moss:

Depending on whom you ask, government secrecy is either the key to victory in our struggle against terrorism, or our Achilles heel. But is so much secrecy a bad thing?

On John Young's Cryptome:

It's like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn't want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.

Deep Secrecy

Clay Shirky:

One of the things up for grabs in the current news environment is the nature of authority.

It's impossible to be right all the time, but it's much better to be wrong on good authority than otherwise, because if you're wrong on good authority, it's not your fault.

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying "Trust this because you trust me."

Jeffrey Rosen:

In "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," Woody Allen shows up at Mia Farrow's window on a flying bicycle and urges her to hop on. "Andrew, we'll get killed," she protests. "Trust me," he replies, "it's me, Andrew." She looks skeptical, and he tries again. "Trust me anyhow."

Algorithmic Authority

Giles Turnbull:

Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building. Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces.

And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words?

Hence, a survey.

David Nye:

We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making.

Brian Silverman:

The Mindstorms kits, and most other Lego kits, are configured largely to allow customers to build the specific models shown on the boxes. PicoCricket, on the other hand, is about giving kids a chance to build objects out of their imaginations, then program them with interesting behaviors.

Cynthia Rettig:

The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite among a generation or more of programmers who grew up with those construction toys. Unfortunately, however, software does not work as Legos do.

Vile:

Techies love stupid nomenclature.

Dan Schneider:

Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Steven Pinker's book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true.

A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families

From Amazon's Best of 2009, here's Publishers Weekly on David Grann's new book:

In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission. Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann's vigorous research mirrors Fawcett's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale.

Here's John Grisham on "Z":

The great mystery of what happened to Fawcett has never been solved, perhaps until now. In 2004, author David Grann discovered the story while researching another one. Soon, like hundreds before him, he became obsessed with the legend of the colorful adventurer and his baffling disappearance. Grann, a lifelong New Yorker with an admitted aversion to camping and mountain climbing, a lousy sense of direction, and an affinity for take-out food and air conditioning, soon found himself in the jungles of the Amazon. What he found there, some 80 years after Fawcett’s disappearance, is a startling conclusion to this absorbing narrative.

The Lost City of Z is a riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

In 2007, Andrew Zuckerman published Creature, "300 pages of arrestingly detailed photographs of wild animals."

Zuckerman's new book is Bird:

Turning his camera to the world of birds, Andrew Zuckerman has a created a new body of work showcasing more than 200 stunning photographs of nearly 75 different species. These winged creatures from exotic parrots to everyday sparrows, and endangered penguins to woody owls are captured with Zuckerman's painstaking perspective against a stark white background to reveal the vivid colors, textures, and personalities of each subject in extraordinary and exquisite detail. The ultimate art book for ornithologists and nature enthusiasts alike, Bird is a volume of sublime beauty.

See also Bird Videos on Vimeo.

Andrew Zuckerman: Bird

Kevin Lewis:

It seems that the act of approaching someone else gives people more confidence and warmth than being approached.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Roz Chast:

Wendy doesn't care what you're doing now or ever, so please keep it "under your hat."

The pleasure of pursuing

Roz Chast:

Wendy doesn't care what you're doing now or ever, so please keep it "under your hat."

Jonathan Franzen:

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

David Lazarus:

For many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Crankster, the Anti-Social Site for Networking

James Bridle:

Today I'm going to talk about the idea of the miraculous, or at least the appearance of the miraculous. Humans have a strange relationship to the miraculous, but the prime emotion it seems to stimulate is awe, and awesomeness is pretty much what we're all striving for.

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles