All of the active three-letter airport codes organized in alphabetical order. Part of A series of Flight Postcards, a set of postcards curated by Leah Beeferman and published by Projectile Press. For more detail.
Seth Godin on the hill approach to career development:
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.
Career wisdom in hill format.
See also: the brick approach.
I’ve become very interested in making a whole object. And providing a window into a memory and a time or a place where I like to be.
That’s Eric Cahan, photographer of “equal parts flat color and limitless space.” Or, skies:
The photos were taken at either sunrise or sunset at bodies of water in California, Florida, and New York. The process of finding the right shades to bring out the sublime in nature is “very intuitive — the moment I see it, I feel the color that needs to be highlighted, that wants to emerge.”
See also:
Memories of Unknown Cities
Cahan’s most recently work has actually been influenced by James Turrell’s famous project over at the Crater, and as Turrell stated, Cahan also believes:
[L]ight is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.
[via]
[Image: Dune Road, Southampton, NY, Sunset 7:33pm]
[A]t 150 years old, this particular rendition of ‘Au clair de la lune’ — recorded on a phonautograph, a device created by Édouard-Léon Scott two decades before Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph — became the oldest known recorded sound.
Not only that, but super interestingly:
Feaster [a hunter of ancient sounds] has been lifting the veils off of still older “recordings,” if Scott’s phonautograms even deserve the name. The device Scott patented in 1857 uses a stylus to trace a line onto a soot-covered cylinder, producing a visual representation of the sound unplayable by any device, contemporary or modern. But Feaster and his sound-chasing co-hobbyists, who style themselves the First Sounds Collaborative, adapted software to reconstruct the path of the stylus by analyzing images of the sooty trace. As if pulling an earthquake out of the readout from a seismograph, Feaster educes whatever sound is represented by the path of the stylus, playing the trace like any sound wave.
While Feaster is a hunter of sounds stored in recordings, more interestingly, he is a capturist of new reactions:
“I like to think of these [recordings] as the very earliest examples of a new way to use media. Until the phonograph, there wasn’t any equipment out there that was designed to record a person speaking, acting, doing something, and then reproduce that somewhere else,” Feaster said. “Now we take that for granted with television, movies, radio — but they all came after the phonograph.”
Like those letters you wrote to your future self from camp or related apps and services, Feaster is an archivist of the expressions and interactions with tools and devices of future-facing tools. In the past. Unveiled in the present.
Jeremy Denk writing an account of editing during the making of a recording of the playing of the “Concord:”
[W]e find ourselves trying to cobble together a note-perfect devil. Part of me wants to keep the wildest one, with all its imperfections; as Thoreau said, “I love the wild not less than the good.” But Adam [the recording editor] is convinced that we can have the notes and the wild. There is the vanity of editing yourself to be a perfect version of yourself, but there’s the vanity of loving your imperfections, too. … I reflect with satisfaction that I have drawn him into my insanity.
Ultimately:
[E]diting turns out to be even more nerve-racking than recording. In the moment of playing, the logistics of just hitting the notes distract you from the continuos choices you are making. In the edit you have nothing but choices. And yet you feel helpless, since everything has already been played.
Read the piece in its entirety while listening to Denk’s performance of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze from 2010. Not a needless note.
Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things:
A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”
“Huh?” I cleverly replied.
“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Since, Glen has been playing this each time he meets someone from a different profession, which is how he gathered The Two Things about the Two Things:
1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.
2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.
Head over to see his collection of The Two Things from binary systems to piloting an airplane, or a talk that wraps up with them. As for me: 1) intrigued, 2) curious if it could be edited down to only one thing.
On this snowless winter in New York, I ran across an etymology of “no two snowflakes are alike.” It comes from a 1925 report that predicts, “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.” The author — Wilson Bentley:
In 1885, at the age of 20, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley.
Dubbed “America’s First Cloud Physicist,” Bentley’s obituary (note that he contracted pneumonia after walking home six miles through a slushy snowstorm) read:
Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.
Seems to me there is no greater goal and no greater compliment: Bentley not only devised a new way to see (transforming early physics of clouds and pioneering an understanding of snowflakes), but demomstrated the patience needed to fiercely look.
[Image: [Bentley] experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike …]
I have been inseparable from The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds after receiving it as a gift a few days ago. In it, I’ve just learned of “cloud streets:”
Low clouds can line up parallel to the wind to form Cumulus radiatus. Also known as ‘cloud streets’, they’re the Roman roads of the cloud road.
See also:
So irregular is their movement that when physicists came up with Chaos Theory in the 1970s, some had been inspired by gazing up at the clouds.
Emergent sky roads or our perception of such couldn’t help but remind me of another example of constellation thinking. These water droplet streets are our stories about structure such that we can make sense of their presence. Most clouds fall into 10 main types, although we typically know the Cumulus, not only because it’s one of the Low Clouds. It, together with the other nine types and varieties, comprises our daylit astronomy. To cloudgazing.
[NASA, Earth Observatory, January 24, 2011]
White noise is common. In fact, we seek it out, purchase it, manufacture it. But:
What surprises, and engages, in Phil Julian‘s “Recent Errors” is when, at around two minutes in, the track suddenly shifts states. It goes from grey drone to scintillate whine in a split second. And that subsequent section itself has reveals transformations as it progresses, dipping down in volume, sending out thin contrasting lines of sound (MP3). These aren’t the last shifts in the piece, by any means. It continues on to include industrial churn and 8bit cicada chirping, among other phases.
How much attention do we pay to white noise? If citizens are indeed being asked to begin to design urban noise — or at least take part in it — we should be paying more attention. To the presences and the absences. What is the ideal white noise state?
Danzico is part designer, part teacher, part editor. As an independent consultant, she traces the roots of her craft back to her parents. According to Liz, "Growing up at least a little information architect gave me an organizational advantage over my friends." More
