communication drove civilization
Symbolic innovation and special forms of communication apparently spurred the earliest, enduring gatherings of large groups of humans. The city at Tell Brak (Nagar) in northern Mesopotamia grew starting about 7,000 years ago to a resident population of about 10,000 persons 5,600 years ago. Tell Brak grew mainly through the communicative process of population agglomeration, [...]
Tagged: evolution
Systematic Landscapes transforms public space
With Systematic Landscapes, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through July 12, 2009, Maya Lin brings landscapes into an art gallery. This one, generative, earthly reality is an unsought gift to every human being. Systematic Landscapes presents works that make visible within the Corcoran Gallery unseeable forms of this gift. The works build upon familiar [...]
Tagged: review
COB-35: challenges of bureaucratic work
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for Artists, captures well the challenges of bureaucratic work. In the midst of the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Public Works of Art Project. It was a pioneering project that enabled artists to become part of an important national bureaucracy. Paul [...]
idiot
I’m a loser. I’m an amazing and mysterious being. You idiot. God loves me. I forget wonderfully.
the peculiar business of voice communication
Second Life‘s users, who now average about 62,000 concurrent logins, now consume more than a billion minutes of voice communication per month. Amidst some controversy over the merits and demerits of voice in virtual worlds, Second Life implemented voice communication in August, 2007. Vivox provides Second Life’s voice communication using VoIP. Judging by its use, [...]
Tagged: telcos
home enclosure and eviction
For at least the past five years, a few men have made their home under a bridge behind the FCC headquarters building in Washington, DC. They made bed platforms using packing crates and stacked newspapers. One of the guys organized his stuff neatly and made his bed tight, military-style. On a record-cold winter day, with [...]
game
duck mates angling after each other, descending coyly chest fluffed, slowly stream
Carnegie library stimulus program
More than half the libraries existing in the U.S. in 1919 had received construction grant money from Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-born U.S. industrialist who acquired massive wealth. He believed in self-improvement through hard work, and he considered public libraries to serve this purpose by making knowledge available to everyone. Hence Carnegie set [...]
Tagged: libraries