photography and its discontents

And on the seventh day, God said : “299,792,458 meters/second ought to be enough for anybody”.

We underestimate the changes technology is making in young minds. Analog classrooms cannot appeal to the digitally brained youth, especially boys, whose video game play fundamentally alters perceptions of time, activity and creativity. Every 9 seconds a kid drops out of school in the US, overwhelmingly male and minorities. How do we appeal to this newly conditioned young mind?

too too true. “Everything is cool in the beginning …”

how a web design goes straight to hell

from Carson Daly

Called the golden ratio or the Fibonacci series, this numerical ratio underlies the complexity of pattern in nature and art. This fantastic video by a Spanish studio explains why.

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

jetpacmagazine

download the pdf issue 01 –

and go see its author’s work. He did the Lost Karma Station posters. websitesarelovely.com

Scheduled for this Saturday, 5/22/10, at Vista Point overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ariel Goldberg, the Headlands

today … rain & fog will never end …

fogbank

fog, treeline

SFMOMA panel discussion “Is Photography Over?”

‘Photography’ for me,” [Trevor Paglen] wrote, “denotes a wide range of imaging practices … dialectically enmeshed with the construction of practical reality. … This includes everything from ‘art’ photography to iPhone snapshots, from MRI scans to the infrared eyes of CIA predator drones, and from surveillance cameras attached to facial-recognition software to minoritarian documentary practices from Rodney King to Abu Ghraib.”
Paglen is an artist, writer and an experimental geographer who says that “We can’t divorce imaging technologies from uses of power.” Reference is to Paul Virilio’s coinage of the term “sight machine” for the coalescence of imaging devices and their data that digital technology has permitted.

Secret OPs military patches, credit:NYT

Aspects of espionage and cyberwar can be hyped up, but at the end of the day I don’t know if it’s been hyped enough in the sense that I don’t think people understand how big of a problem it actually is . . .

I do everything online. And I do it on my phone too. I would feel more comfortable doing things on my phone than on my computer, for the most part. On a computer there is so much attack surface to be compromised. Yeah, the iPhone has vulnerabilities, but when you look at the sheer numbers, like the fact that I open up PDF documents all day for work, that’s a lot scarier than the idea that I’m on my phone. I’m also a Windows Mobile guy and a lot of people think it sucks so it’s like running a Mac desktop—nobody cares.

The thing I would never want to put online would be my Social Security number. That kind of identity theft can be a nightmare to clean up. Not even online, but at the gas station where card skimmers are becoming so commonplace. In those cases, it’s better to use a credit card and not your ATM and PIN combination where they can take money out of your account directly. The threat with online banking is that scammers will set up a bill pay account to themselves or do customer-to-customer or some other type of wire transfer. People should set it up with their bank so that their bill payees are locked and they can disable or freeze wire transfers or require a phone call from the bank before such transactions are done.

-from security expert Marc Maiffret (gizmodo)