Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

Simon Pope, artist and expert walker, walked 26 miles to build a collective memory of the Olympics:

[He] walked 26 miles through the five east London boroughs that will play host to the 2012 Olympics. Along the way he talked to over 100 local residents about their memories of the Games, and from that made a new film, Memory Marathon…

He didn’t walk alone. Each of the 100 London residents walked with him:

Each resident walked a 400-metre section of the 26 mile route with Pope who asked them to talk candidly about a moment from Olympic history that had affected them personally. Each memory reveals not only feelings of hope, excitement and disappointment, but also the way in which our collective memories are so often held together through shared experiences of moving images.

My first thought was: a different take on a “memory palace.” Not only are residents remembering, but I’d argue the spatial relationships of each 400 meters becomes a map for each story, supporting viewers in remembering the collective whole. Yet, taken another way, it’s simply, and quite beautifully, a 26-mile-long interview.

Rob Holmes uncovers that for six months in 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered” while engineers surveyed the falls’ rock face for erosion. But it didn’t stand idle:

For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible and hostile landscape. …. A riverbed, in other words, became an ephemeral public park, though as by-product of a potentially colossal geo-re-engineering project. The authorities even installed temporary interpretative signage explaining the Fall’s geology to inquisitive visitors.

So:

Without consideration of the practicalities: lower the Hudson for a month, and hold a rock-climbing festival along new cliffs, the competitors scrambling up Hartland Schist in the mist of spray-emitters stabilizing the rocky banks.  Let loose the dammed power-lakes of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and hold Bonnaroo on the muddy bottom of Harrison Bay, temporarily un-flooded.

Instead of recognizing rivers as voids, we perceive them them as public park possibilities, rich with potential in another context. As Treib pointed out, disturbances allow us to see the value in what is there. The value of presence is sometimes in its absence.

70 workers are building a wooden display of time that mimics “digital” time in real time over 24 hours. From Mark Formanek:

Standard Time is a performance lasting exactly 24 hours and recorded on film. However, this film is much more than just the recording of an action, the recording of something that has taken place in the past; it is also a clock. A clock for use right now and in the future which, as each day goes by, extends further into the past, but is still up-to-date and punctual

”Since I don’t have a clock in my room yet I thought well how cool would it be to have your Standard Time project just on loop on a TFT.”

Now we can too.

[via]

[Image: Standard Time pictures]

Mickey Smith, photographer, and her process:

The act of hunting for and photographing bound periodicals and journals is fundamental to Mickey Smith [sic] process. She does not touch, light, or manipulate the books and words — preferring to document them as found in the stacks, created by the librarian, and positioned by the last unknown reader. Her work focuses on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, language-based, anthropological works.

The result, not unlike an anthropological hunt in the stacks.

If you haven’t been following along with Fred Wilson’s MBA Mondays, the day’s not over yet:

I’m making up the curriculum for MBA Mondays on the fly. The end game is to lay out how to look a businesses, value it, and invest in it. We started with the time value of money and interest rates, we then talked about the corporate entity. Now I want to talk about how to keep track of the money in a company.

Review for some, new to others. Useful.

Aaron Swartz on how to read more books:

I’ve read a hundred books a year for the past couple years. Last time I mentioned this, a couple people asked how I could read so many books. Do I read unusually quickly? Do I spend an unusual amount of time reading? I did a simple calculation: The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV. If the average reading rate is 250 words per minute and the average book is 180,000 words, then that’s 142 books a year. To my surprise, I wasn’t reading nearly enough books. So I’ve taken some steps to read more:

1. Block your favorite blogs.
2. Order lots of books at the library.
3. Alienate everyone close to you.
4. Keep the temperature low.

I’m an advocate for constraints in support of reading more (last summer, for instance, I tested out a book a day after learning Clinton read two a day while in office). None of mine have lasted, but I’ve yet to alienate everyone close to me. There may be hope yet.

All things that can be organized, will be:

At the shop where I work we just toss loose screws, bolts, nails and other bits and pieces of hardware from the workbenches and the floor into a bucket and, every couple of years when the bucket gets too full, somebody has to dump the whole mess out and sort everything back to where it belongs. When that job fell to me this Spring, I decided there had to be a better solution. So I designed a bin that would help to at least divide things by type to make the final sorting easier.

Because:

I wanted to make the openings as big a target as possible for those handfuls of hardware, so I made each wider at the top like a funnel. And I cut the shape of each as a visual reminder of what to put where. (This actually works really well — no thinking on the job required!)

Brilliant.

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Obama appoints Edward Tufte as part of a panel to track stimulus transparency. Tufte on the appointment:

I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds … I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something.

Maybe we’ll learn something too.

(thx, Jason)

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over Paul Graham’s use of the phrase “it turns out.” James Somers’ take:

It’s not that pg is a particularly heavy user of the phrase — I counted just 46 unique instances in a simple search of his site — but that he knows how to use it. He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don’t.

[I]t turns out that “it turns out” does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself. So to say that someone uses the phrase particularly well is really just an underhanded way of saying that they’re particularly good at being lazy.

Further, Somers believes readers are disarmed by it:

Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter — as though the situation simply unfolded that way. Which is precisely what the phrase “it turns out” accomplishes, and why it’s so useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y. In that sense it’s a kind of handy writerly shortcut.

Ethan Fast did a bit of analysis to find instances where this theory breaks down a bit:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it turns out that these claims of hacks and benign disingenuity amount to something so small that I would call it nothing (albeit, a very clever nothing).

I sat through a number of presentations recently. I couldn’t help noticing the phrase “it’s worth mentioning...” It marks a pivot point in conversation. Whenever it’s mentioned, I stand at attention, assuming everything that came before will pale in comparison to what’s about to be said. It turns out, some things are just worth mentioning.

(thx, Josh)

Researchers have found that darkness encourages unethical behavior:

In the same way that young kids think they are invisible when they cover their eyes, [the researchers] think the effect they observed occurs as an automatic response to the cover of darkness, even when the lack of light makes no difference to anonymity.

In tests in both dimly lit and brightly lit rooms, people with and without sunglasses, the results were the same: “Darkness appears to induce a false sense of concealment, leading people to feel that their identities are hidden,” researchers said.

Another reason to get outside into the light, especially when making weighty decisions.