1. The Photography of Chris Jordan.

   Chris Jordan takes very, very big numbers and represents them in photographs. Here’s one that he made with folded prison uniforms standing in for Americans in prison. More on his official site.

2. The 30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century.

   I found this page by accident several years ago. I end up going back to it when discussions about who’s the worst mass murdered in history come up. The section at the end with the pattern in per-capita killings? Chilling.

3. The Slow Rise of the Oceans.

   Apparently, even if all of the polar ice were to melt today, it would take up to 50 years for that water circulate throughout the world. The planet is so big, and the ocean currents are so powerful, that the water will remain trapped in a kind of slowly dispersing bulge of fluid.

4. The Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste.

   This is something that I want to come back to in some detail as a design problem. For now, take a look at this proposed monument to warn people away from the waste site (wherever it ends up). The waste is going to be dangerous for at least 10,000 years. This is the approximate length of recorded human history. How do you communicate a warning forward to people who will be at least as different from us as we are from the Babylonians?

5. That We’re Currently in an Ice Age.

   This is an interglacial period, a time of relative warmth in the midst of an ice age which is 2-3 million years old. During the past 400,000 years, warm periods like ours have tended to last 10,000 to 30,000 years. The cold has tended to last much longer. Our current (geologically brief) warm period has been happening for about 11,000 years – again, roughly the length of human history.

6. This Video.

   Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

((Pulled this article from the New York Times. Found it so striking that I’m going to take a page from Bruce Sterling’s blog and make comments in double parentheses.))

“Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

“Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?” ((Because they can and they are?))

“This would all sound familiar to filmmakers and musicians who fought similar battles — with varying degrees of success — over the last decade. But to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it’s new and frightening territory.” ((Oh, hello books, welcome to the Internet. The marginal cost of making copies of you just dropped to zero. Guess where your price is headed.))

“For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.” ((Again, that’s RapidShare, MediaFire, Scribd and Wattpad for all your pirated book needs.))

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates.” ((And everyone else!)) “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.” ((I wonder if anyone at corporate is taking the time to figure out what the ROI is on putting more bodies on the hunt.))

…

“It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole,” said Russell Davis, an author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade association that helps authors pursue digital pirates. “You knock one down and five more spring up.” ((I wonder if Mr Davis realizes that he’s just succinctly explained why it is that his strategy is doomed to fail. You are playing Whac-a-Mole but with the intention of keeping those moles DOWN FOR GOOD. That’s not how the game works. It might be time to find another game.))

“Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them. Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said it was his “gut feeling” ((They don’t keep detailed stats over there at Scribd?)) that unauthorized editions represented only a small fraction of the site’s content.

“Both sites say they immediately remove illegally posted books once notified of them. The companies have also installed filters to identify copyrighted work when it is uploaded. “We are working very hard to keep unauthorized content off the site,” Mr. Adler said. ((But, you know, Whac-a-mole))

“Several publishers declined to comment on the issue, fearing the attention might inspire more theft.” ((Those sites once again: RapidShare, MediaFire, Scribd or Wattpad – Huge variety, same low price!)) “For now, electronic piracy of books does not seem as widespread as what hit the music world, when file-sharing services like Napster threatened to take down the whole industry.”

…

“Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file.” ((And yet, if you care to look for it, there are scans of just about any comic book you could imagine available online. Also, have any of these guys been to Asia? Much as with DVDs it’s all pirated photocopies of books. I’d like to see an article about THAT kind of piracy.)) “What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version.”

“Now, with publishers producing more digital editions, it is potentially easier for hackers to copy files. And the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon or the Reader from Sony make it easier to read in digital form. Many of the unauthorized editions are uploaded as PDFs, which can be easily e-mailed to a Kindle or the Sony device.”

…

The full article is here: Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web

“The future”’s glamor, its sexiness. It’s never just one day. We don’t imagine May 20, 2050. The present is almost always the one given day.
Unless something starkly Ubertrending happens, and usually something bad. And that’s when the present feels like “the future”.
–William Gibson on twitter.

I feel like I live in the future ALL THE TIME.

My camera is a sleek flat rectangle just like in Transmetropolitan. Except that my camera is also a phone and a networked computer which contains a map of the world that knows where I am along with a growing portion all of the knowledge.

I have the Internet. Everyone has the Internet. We’re giving out laptops to children, except that this might not matter, because everyone wants a cellphone instead. What’s a cellphone? It’s the word we use to prevent our brains freaking from the fact that we all carry around personal radios, (with way more function than Star Trek communicators) that link us to a global satellite network. Like talking about wireless cable.

I just got back from 2 weeks in Thailand on business. I didn’t have working water every morning, but everyone had working miracle gizmos that we barely noticed. I got frustrated when network difficulties made it kind of choppy to talk to a teleconference of people all around the globe. For free!

The nation state is under pressure from without and within. Corruption is rampant and crushing. More and more corporations and individuals are becoming truly transnational.

Every day, people upload free video of new marvels and wonders. They’re commercializing Electric Cars!

Flying robots (ROBOTS!) are used to fight wars with shadowy terrorist organizations on the edge of law-bound civilization.

Need I mention that the world might be facing either an economic or environmental apocalypse (or both!).

We have a space station now, though it doesn’t really work very well. The Chinese have a space program. And possibly an army of hackers.

Did I mention, there were PIRATES? Not, like, fun swashbuckling pirates, but high tech, globally networked pirates.

This is not the bright gleaming future of certain kinds of science fiction, but it is the messy, complicated future of the science fiction I grew up with. It may be wrong on the details, but in tone, this is sometimes terrifyingly close to the 1980s worlds of Gibson and Sterling and that whole crowd. I think it’s telling that the crew I grew up reading are writing closer to the present these days (or even the past).

P.S. Nuclear Lighthouses.

photo credit: Midnight-digital

Two stories appeared in rapid succession today on Wired’s excellent Threat Level. In the first, Rep. Linda Sanchez defends her, possibly overbroad, anti-cyber-bullying law with the argument that it’s only aimed at hostile bloggers.

In the second, a court upholds a hacking conviction for a man who used his work computer to upload nudie shots. The hacking law was never intended to be used to turn work policy violations into crimes, but there it is.

Here’s hoping that U.S. Lawmakers are able to understand the relationship between these two stories.

photo credit: SliceofNYC