For some reason the LA Times has categorized this story under "Science & Medicine." Curiouser and curiouser.

branding, charity, copyright, cultural worlds, entertainment, film, gold, idols, money

Nate

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And the Oscar for best Hollywood courtroom drama goes to . . . the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The golden statuette was awarded Monday by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury, which ruled that if Mary Pickford’s heirs want to sell it, they have to offer it to academy officials for $10 instead of auctioning it off for as much as $800,000. Academy leaders took a Rancho Mirage woman, her daughter and a cousin to court after the women announced plans to sell the Oscar presented in 1930 to the silent-movie star known as “America’s sweetheart” and donate the proceeds to charity.

Here's an innovative approach to creating lifesaving medical equipment that can work well (and be repaired) in conditions often found in the developing world. The article, I suppose in New York Times fashion, complicates the issue with quotes from doubtful experts who have their own, largely behavioral programs for reducing infant mortality. It's heartbreaking that it's presented as a one-or-the-other sort of choice.

cars, cultural worlds, design, horizons of the possible, medicine, poverty, technology and change

Nate

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In truth, experts say, the developing world doesn’t need more incubators. It needs incubators that work. Over the years, thousands have been donated from rich nations, only to end up in “incubator graveyards” — most broken, some never opened. According to a 2007 study from Duke University, 96 percent of foreign-donated medical equipment fails within five years of donation — mostly because of electrical problems, like voltage surges or brownouts or broken knobs, or because of training problems, like neglecting to send user manuals along with the devices.

To compensate for this philanthropic shortsightedness, medical staffs either crank up the temperature in “incubator rooms” to 100 degrees or more, or swaddle babies in plastic to hold in body heat. Such makeshift solutions led the Boston team to ask: How can we make an incubator for the developing world that will get fixed? . . .

In his discussions with doctors who practice in impoverished settings, Dr. Rosen learned that no matter how remote the locale, there always seemed to be a Toyota 4Runner in working order. It was his “Aha!” moment, he recalled later: Why not make the incubator out of new or used car parts, and teach local auto mechanics to be medical technologists?

So: what exactly are the cultural meanings and implications of the collective internet effort to paraphrase the entire Bible in the language of LOLCats? Bad taste bordering on sacrilege? A mockery of the care and exceeding effort of the many people working to make the Bible available to every person in their mother tongue? Or something that in its way might actually border on the reverent? Certainly we see the collective efforts of lots of people contemplating the meaning of verse after verse, even if only at first to look for hilarious potential misspellings and mysterious cheezburger refrains.

community, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, internet, language, memes

Nate

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Mary sed “Ceiling Cat is laik a big deal, Mai I is happy about Ceiling Cat… bcz he kepted me in maind an now evribodi knowz i can haz cheezburgr. Thank u Ceiling Cat, u iz cool. U iz niec to evribodi. Xcept peeplz who doant dizrv it LOL. U haz pwned teh r00lrz whiel stil bein niec to teh n00bz. U givd cookies to teh hungri whiel u tolded teh rich “Niec trai.” U wuz niec to Israel an to all Abraham’s famili liek u promist.”

I blogged earlier about the Tower of Babel associations in this museum exhibition; here, though, I was drawn to the tactile, portabile nature of all those stylus-embossed notes and epics and receipts—in the case of this image, a record of a gold delivery by the chief eunuch of Nebuchadnezzar II.

alphabets, babylon, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, museums, technology and change, writing

Nate

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Held in the hand, a typical cuneiform tablet is about the same weight and shape as an early mobile phone. Hold it as though you were going to text someone and you hold it the way the scribe did; a proverb had it that ‘a good scribe follows the mouth.’ Motions of the stylus made the tiny triangular indentations of cuneiform characters in the clay. The actions would have been much quicker and more precise, but otherwise rather like the pecks you make at a phone keypad.

Some tablets are of course larger. Gilgamesh, thousands of words long, is an epic in 12 tablets more than a foot high, and inscriptions carved in rock are more expansive still. But it is the small tablets with tiny writing that are the most tantalising objects in Babylon, Myth and Reality (at the British Museum until 15 March). Can one, through them, get beyond archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys?

Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the equivalent of office files – letters, legal documents, contracts, mortgages, lists of goods – but there are also messages addressed to the gods, some of them expressing indignance that good behaviour has not been rewarded. Astronomical observations are detailed and medical texts full of diagnostic descriptions. There are records of refurbishments: the kings, who had responsibility not just for religious ceremonies but for the maintenance of temple structures, celebrated their building works.

One of my favorite passages from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Bend Sinister, about the near impossibility of translating metaphor and experience across languages, cultures, and time—and the mindboggling wonder that it sometimes can be done.

cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, language, translation

Nate

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It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator’s inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a show exactly similar to that of Individual T—the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of sun rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day.

Kevin Kelly explores the new visual literacy, noting how the new people of the screen are creators, not just consumers, of visual content. (I can't decide whether I'm pleased or disappointed that he didn't use the word I coined a few years ago, visualcy.) I am not sure he has fully wrestled, however, with one key difference between words and moving images: moving images by their very nature take time. No matter how skilled the editor, assembling a compelling sequence of shots requires an order of magnitude more time than is required for a skilled writer to call up a compelling sequence of words. So I am not persuaded that we will ever reach the holy grail of visual availability that Kelly envisions . . . and that may be a good thing.

film, kevin kelly, mashups, photography, technology and change, video, visualcy

Andy

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The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.

This is not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention — but it is also very rare. In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below — YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-sync mashups — and not just the tiny apex of tigers. The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.

I hadn't thought about it as such before, but in any English Bible translation, by far the majority of references to hypocrisy and hypocrites are made by Jesus himself, which strikes me as denouncing hypocrisy "from above" rather than—as is generally the case now, "from below."

authority, failure, horizons of the possible, hypocrisy, leadership

Nate

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One surprising truth about hypocrisy is its irrelevance: the fact that someone is a hypocrite does not mean that his or her position on an issue is false. Environmentalists who litter do not by doing so disprove the claims of environmentalism. Politicians who publicly oppose illegal immigration but privately employ illegal immigrants do not thereby prove that contesting illegal immigration is wrong. Even if every animal-rights activist is exposed as a covert meat eater, it still might be wrong to eat meat.

More generally, just because a person does not have the fortitude to live up to his or her own standards does not mean that such standards are not laudable and worth trying to meet. It therefore seems that charges of hypocrisy prove nothing about a topic. Why, then, are they so potent?

The answer is that such allegations summon emotional, and often unconscious, reactions to the argument that undermine it. Such indictments usually serve as attacks on the authority of their targets. Once the clout of an advocate is weakened, the stage is set for dismissal of the proponent’s position.

Though he's now more known for his earnest interpretations of old-school political posters, designer Shepard Fairey first, of course, gained noteriety with his ironic/absurdist interpretations of authoritarian propaganda, with his Obey Giant viral campaign. Ironic and cool, in a particularly American sense that I both find attractive and uncomfortable, kind of the way I feel about ironic t-shirts after travelling in Africa and seeing them everywhere, courtesy bales of donated and resold used American clothing (shirt on a kid begging from me at the bus depot in Vilankulos, Mozambique: "There's only one thing to make for dinner: Reservations!"). The more I learn, the more I wonder about the effort we put into being connoisseurs of manufactured irony. There's real stuff out there that's so much more amazing.

africa, art, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, irony, mozambique, nigeria, posters, propaganda, wonder

Nate

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Side 1
Alowo Majaiye
Aiye Laba Ohun Gbogbo
Rora
Gba Mi Lowo Ota
Ma Di Oni Kanra
Ile Baba MI

Side 2
Miliki
Pepeiye Bimo
Maje Nyo Aiye Wa
Baiye Nsata