Month: April 2009

 

Lee Gainer is mapping the wedding industrial complex:

American artist Lee Gainer is based in Washington, DC and creates images that question culturally accepted perceptions. Her series ‘two months salary’ is focused on the engagement ring industry. Through the series, Gainer investigates the evolution of the engagement ring from luxury item to must-have item. She discovered the popular convention of spending two-months salary on a ring was originally invented by DeBeers in 1947….Gainer calculated the average US salaries for a number of occupations and found a selection of ring’s based on the two-month rule. She assembled these into a series of twenty prints each featuring nine rings and the occupation name.

Rob Horning worries:

…if books become a digitized commodity, the money won’t be there to produce high-quality ones (and authors all become de facto volunteers). So then we’ll have pseudo-books instead—a cordoned-off collection of curated blog posts masquerading as timely books, distributed online to hand-held reading devices along the lines of Kindle or a netbook. You could already compile one of commentary on the financial crisis. Alongside the collaboratively compiled, rapidly published texts from the publishing industry of the future will be micropublishing, feeding those publishers, things along the lines of blogs and Facebook updates and the like. So maybe it would be more accurate to say authorship will be everywhere and nowhere.

Shafer says no dice:

The insistence on coupling newspapering to democracy irritates me not just because it overstates the quality and urgency of most of the work done by newspapers but because it inflates the capacity of newspapers to make us better citizens, wiser voters, and more enlightened taxpayers. I love news on newsprint, believe me, I do. But I hate seeing newspapers reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy.

Sandra Magnus blogged from space a few weeks ago:

…right before dawn there is total black and as you look out the window it is as if neither the Earth nor the heavens are there. You just exist, floating in an endless sea of black with one bright light, the sun, illuminating the way. Nothing beyond the light exists. It only lasts a moment, though, as the sun rises higher over the nearing horizon. The Earth starts to pick up some of the rays at last and reappears out of the darkness awash in a faint gray color. Drawing closer you can notice that any high clouds in the atmosphere glow orange or red as they too find the morning sun. It is possible to see the terminator as you cross it. The grey of dawn gives way to the bright blues and whites of day that are so distinctive of our water planet. Looking back in the direction from whence you came, the darkness of night is still noticeable. Only looking forward does the day shine clearly. Soon the night is gone as the Space Station continues on its never-ending trek across the planet. The heavens are now just a dark velvety curtain against the brilliant colors of Earth. No stars are visible. They are there, though, waiting for the night which will come in another 45 minutes or so, to show themselves again.

Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center: ISS007-E-10807

A tribute on a special day.

William Brafford found Robert Wright's article on globalized Christianity unpalatable:

Christianity, when it’s at its best, offers conversion as an invitation into a new way of living rather than a command, but I’d be a fool to deny that the Church has been just as guilty of coercion as any aggressive modern state or corporation, and guilty over a much longer period of time. The globalization that Wright describes seems to be purely benign in its tendency to gently bring people into the big economic game, but surely this is an idealized globalization, far removed from the messiness of what happens out there in the world. Suffice it to say, I’m far less optimistic about our proximity to this ideal than Wright is.

Many of us have worried that the heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces might spill over at some point into violence in the hands of individuals prone to lashing out. We now have what seems to be a clear instance of that and three dead police officers. One wonders whether Fox News or the Second Amendment fanatics will chill it out a little. And then one realizes who we're talking about.

Scientific American weighs its value:

One benefit of a cheerful character is resilience, a psychic robustness that emotionally buffers people against crises and enables them to see silver linings in major disappointments such as the dissolution of a marriage or the loss of a job. “Humor strengthens the psyche,” Ruch says. In a study published in 1999, he and his colleagues assigned 72 students, all of whom took the STCI, to one of three rooms: a “cheerful” room with large windows, yellow walls, funny posters and colored drapes; a “depressing” room painted black and lit only by a small frosted bulb; and a small “serious” room filled with scientific equipment, books, manuals and presentation posters. The participants performed tasks such as drawing and filling out questionnaires in each of the rooms, as an excuse for spending time in the separate environments. As expected, the ambience of the rooms had a much larger effect on the less cheerful individuals: the depressing and serious rooms put the more humorless students in a worse mood but did not alter the mind-set of the sunnier participants, as measured by a mood test.

Roger Scruton wants the old humanism back:

The new humanism spends little time exalting man as an ideal. It says nothing, or next to nothing, about faith, hope, and charity; is scathing about patriotism; and is dismissive of those rearguard actions in defense of the family, public spirit, and sexual restraint that animated my parents. Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness. My parents too thought belief in God to be a weakness. But they were reluctant to deprive other human beings of a moral prop that they seemed to need.

A new blog features simple coming out stories from gay men and women and teens. One simple story:

We were just children on the playground. I was a tall and chunky girl, and you were even taller and so much more graceful. What grade were we in? I swear it was the third grade; it couldn’t have been anything more. I was on the swings as you pushed me, and as the bell was called and I dug my feet into the ground to walk inside with the rest of the class. I heard you walk up behind me, and you said my name. I turned. You asked me to come to your house for the weekend, to spend the night.

That Saturday, I went to your house. I remember all so clearly. I sat on the floor, and you brushed my hair. “Can I tell you a secret?” you asked, and I looked up, and nodded. It didn’t take you long to kneel beside me on the ground and bend over, cupping your hand around my ear: “I think I like girls like I should like boys.”