c - r ə g

Nov 18 2011 ∞

“ I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.

— Retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, working as a legal observer after the raids on Zucotti Park this Tuesday, via Paramilitary Policing of Occupy Wall Street: Excessive Use of Force amidst the New Military Urbanism (via seriouslyamerica)

(via felixsalmon)

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Nov 14 2011 ∞

“ Because it’s so easy to measure things like impressions and click-through rates, the online ad industry has missed the real power that advertising can have, and its practitioners tend to sneer at old-media ad money as being largely wasted, in contrast to the carefully quantified campaigns one sees online

—

The future of online advertising | Felix Salmon

Must read post from Felix Salmon. So much great stuff in here.

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(via Sunken Pedestrian Bridge in Netherlands Parts Moat Waters Like Moses! | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World)

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“ David Temkin, the head of mobile for AOL, told paidContent that mobile ads running on AOL’s 30 free apps and 20 mobile web sites do not yet pay the way for these mobile content forays. But mobile is still profitable anyway, because of AOL has a number of deals with carriers in the U.S., signed years ago, to link up its AIM instant messenger service with the carriers’ text messaging services.

—

I’d be curious to see exactly what percentage of AOL’s revenue is legacy based - SMS contracts, dial-up subscribers, etc…

AOL Has A Profitable Mobile Business, But It’s Not Because Of Apps Or Ads | paidContent

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Nov 11 2011 ∞

Interesting to overlay this with other maps. Check out the solid line through Nevada and Utah - aligns exactly with Route 15. Same wiht Rt 80 and 90. Also aligns spot on with population density. Kind of another way of showing how ubiquitous McDonalds is.

(via copyranter: Here’s a map of every McDonald’s in America.)

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Nov 08 2011 ∞

Explosive breach of the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington.

Reminded of this article from the New Yorker - Farewell to the Nineteenth Century - which begins with the following pullout quote from another 1971 New Yorker piece:

In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something - as conservation problems go - that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people - and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. The implications of the dam exceed its true level in the scale of environmental catastrophes. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam. The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers. Humiliating nature, a dam is evil - placed and solid.

Nov 03 2011 ∞

1936 NY Times Letter to the Editor from “Old Timer”

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Amazing memorial in Dresden:

“Touched echo” is an art installation, which takes people right back to that fateful day. It is located at the Brühlsche Terrasse, a 500-meter terrace also known as the Balcony of Europe, which overlooks the Elbe river and the old town on the opposite river bank.

Not visible from the outside and identifiable only by four small plaques, it is a place of silent contemplation rather than a monumental memorial. By leaning onto the railing of the terrace with the elbows placed on the railing and the hands covering the ears, visitors are able to hear sounds, transported from the railing via bone conduction.

The emanating sounds enable visitors to hear the noises of howling airplanes and detonating bombs. Without standing in this exact position, it is not possible to hear the sounds. The position, which is necessary to hear the noises, resemble people covering their ears to protect them from the deafening noises of the dropped bombs as many did during the actual bombing.

More at Atlas Obscura

Oct 25 2011 ∞

“

There’s a great joke, made duly famous by David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, that goes like this: Two young fish meet an older fish swimming the other way. “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” he says. And one of the young fish turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

In media, advertising is water. It’s the thing for-profit journalism needs to survive. More than that, for both consumers and producers of media, it’s the thing that’s all around us, which we’re intuitively processing without fully contemplating. Thousands of companies and entire multi-billion-dollar industries would not exist unless other companies were desperate to print their names in front of their audiences in exchange for money. If mobile apps are the future of technology, then the future of technology depends in no small part on the future of advertising.

— The Atlantic - Advertising is Water

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Forbes Endorses Perry for President, Misses the point

“People love the idea of radical simplicity of this horrific tax code,” Forbes said, [completely obvious to what that actually meant].

Oct 21 2011 ∞

Village Voice:

In his 1981 book on the mob called Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace, the late Jonathan Kwitny detailed how Al Capone — who owned a string of dairy farms near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin — forced New York pizzerias to use his rubbery mob cheese, so different from the real mozzarella produced here in New York City since the first immigrants from Naples arrived in Brooklyn around 1900.

As the story goes, the only places permitted to use good mozzarella made locally were the old-fashioned pizza parlors like Lombardi’s, Patsy’s, and John’s, which could continue doing so only if they promised to never serve slices. According to Kwitny, this is why John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street still has the warning “No Slices” on its awning today. Apparently, neighborhood pizzerias that served slices and refused to use Capone’s cheese would be firebombed. Even today, the cheese used in neighborhood pizza parlors remains distinctly inferior.

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Oct 19 2011 ∞

kateoplis:

Obama Has More Cash ~~From Wall Street Donors~~ Than GOP Field Combined

Obama even out-raised his rivals at Bain Capital, the Boston-based firm founded by Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney. The president raised $76,600 from the firm while Romney managed to extract only $34,000 from his former employees.

Fixed that for you.

50 notes

Oct 18 2011 ∞

Saw this article today in the Times (“No TV for Children Under 2, Doctors’ Group Urges”) and immediately linked the two. Babies are mostly tactile; from the above, all it took was a little bit of time with an iPad to adjust her expectations.

(via 1-Year-Old Plays With Magazine Like It’s an iPad [VIDEO])

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Oct 17 2011 ∞