May 2013 – Page 32

Marble In Motion

Adrian Paci documented a group of Chinese craftsmen as they sculpted a classical Western column from a solid piece of marble, all while aboard a cargo ship traveling from China to France. Paci describes his inspiration for the resulting short film:

The Column came out of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a restorer, who needed a new marble sculpture for a castle he was restoring. Somebody told him that it could be done in China, because they have good marble, good craftsmen, cheap labour, and they can be quick because they can actually do the work while the marble is being transported by boat. I found it terrific. It sounded so weird, simultaneously sick and fabulous, something mythological and at the same time in keeping with the capitalistic logic of profit—merging the time of production with the time of transport.

The full film can be seen here.

(Hat tip: Gizmodo)

The World’s Big Ticket Items

A brilliant visualization.

Listservs With Strangers

Claire Evans welcomes a daily email from a stranger, brought to her inbox via a peculiar community:

The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you’re joining a massive e-mail list. Every day, one person from the list is randomly selected to write one e-mail to everyone else. That’s it. As of this writing, the Listserve has 21,399 subscribers. There has been one email per day since April 16th, 2012. Run by a group of Masters Candidates in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the Listserve emerged from a class exploring new ways of creating conversational spaces online. There were other ideas: chain letters, or a message board for only 100 people at a time. But eventually email’s directness and ease-of-use won out. An email flies straight, circumventing the myriad distractions of other online gatherings, where some voices pack disproportionate clout (or, er, Klout).

She goes on to differentiate the list from other forms of modern social media:

Where Facebook has devalued the word “friend” to the point of worthlessness, Listserve takes the opposite tack: it has imbued “stranger,” with its associations of danger and otherness, with an immediacy much more akin to real friendship. Listservers don’t spam you with vacation photos or cheap pleas for attention. Instead, they share long, personal stories of adversity and dole out big-picture life advice. “With the lottery mechanism slowing down interaction,” says [Listserve co-founder Greg] Dorsainville, “the emails have a pleasant tone: people talk about their own lives, and how they have battled against hardship or achieved success in their life. People share slices of their own identities and what have shaped them.”

Blueprints In Bloom

Japanese artist Macoto Murayama creates diagrams of flowers for his series “Inorganic flora”:

He buys his specimens… from flower stands or collects them from the roadside. Murayama carefully dissects each flower, removing its petals, anther, stigma and ovaries with a scalpel. He studies the separate parts of the flower under a magnifying glass and then sketches and photographs them.

Using 3D computer graphics software, the artist then creates models of the full blossom as well as of the stigma, sepals and other parts of the bloom. He cleans up his composition in Photoshop and adds measurements and annotations in Illustrator, so that in the end, he has created nothing short of a botanical blueprint. …

Murayama chose flowers as his subject because they have interesting shapes and, unlike traditional architectural structures, they are organic. But, as he has said in an interview, “When I looked closer into a plant that I thought was organic, I found in its form and inner structure hidden mechanical and inorganic elements.” After dissecting it, he added, “My perception of a flower was completely changed.”

Gallery here.

(Image: A side view of Lathyrus odoratus L. 2009-2012, by Macoto Murayama. Courtesy of Frantic Gallery.)

Time To Retire The Senior Citizen Discount?

Alex Mayyasi thinks millennials are more deserving of a discount:

The United States only began measuring poverty in the 1960s, so we lack standard figures dating farther back than that. But it’s recognized that the trend of decreasing poverty among seniors dates back to the thirties and forties. 2011 Census figures place poverty among Americans aged 65 and older at 8.7%, well below the national average of 15%.

Today it is the Millennials, the youngest generation, that finds itself poor, vulnerable, and screwed by financial storms caused by another generation. Unemployment among 18-29 year olds is 11.1% and has been over 10% for 53 months. The rate for people age 16-24 is16.1%. Poverty is highest among teens and children – 27%.

Dylan Matthews, on the other hand, argues that seniors are poorer than those statistics would lead you to believe.

The World’s New Tallest Building

It will be constructed in a matter of months:

Brian Merchant contrasts this project with other skyscrapers:

So, should we cheer or jeer the prospect of mass-produced biggest-ever skyscrapers? And also: why mass-produce ginormous skyscrapers in the first place?

Well, if the specs [that Broad Sustainable Construction] provides are to be believed, mass-manufacturing prefab skyscrapers is much more efficient than our more traditional towers. It’s five times more energy efficient, can be built at half the cost, and packs a lot more people into a smaller space. BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen.

And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city.

The Female Breadwinner, Ctd

Derek Thompson pores over new research on the rise of women who out-earn their husbands:

In a cool new paper, Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica pose a theory that some people might find controversial but others might find intuitive: What if there’s a deficit of marriages where the wife is the top earner because — to put things bluntly — husbands hate being out-earned by their wives, and wives hate living with husbands who resent them?

If this were true, we would expect to see at least [four] other things to be true. First, we’d expect marriages with female breadwinners to be surprisingly rare. Second, we’d expect them to produce unhappier marriages. Third, we might expect these women to cut back on hours, do more household, or make other gestures to make their husbands feel better. Fourth, we’d expect these marriages to end more in divorce. Lo and behold (as you no doubt guessed), the economists found all of those assumptions borne out by the evidence.

Regardless, Derek expects we’re nearing the end of male-breadwinner dominance:

Women are going to be the primary breadwinners in more and more families for so many reasons — (1) the shift from brawn economy to service economy; (2) women’s growing share of college degrees; and (3) sexism softening among male-dominated industries as women establish themselves in more positions of power. A national aversion to successful wives is a really bad recipe for economic growth and family formation. Get over it, guys. It’s a woman’s world, now.

Previous Dish on female breadwinners here, here and here.

Your Tuesday Cry

[Re-posted from earlier today]

A survivor of the Oklahoma tornado gets a surprise:

I totally lost it with that video. First off: what a great human being. No bullshit, no mawkishness: “I know exactly what happened.” Then the little dog – her second prayer. Sometimes it takes just one tangible story to fully grasp from a distance what these people have just experienced. And to see the hidden values – of love and life rather than property – that redeem us even after that horror.

The human death toll from the tornado now stands at 24, with hundreds more injured. Alan Taylor is up with a striking gallery of the destruction and rescue efforts.

(Hat tip for the video: Dashiell Bennett)

Face Of The Day

John Mirch, left, and Michael Camacho, right, participate in a Rally Against Hate, organized by members of New York’s Lesbian-Gay-Transgender-Bisexual community, on May 20, 2013 in New York City. The rally was organized in response to a recent spate of hate crimes, most notably the murder of Mark Carson, a gay man who was shot in New York’s West Village neighborhood in the early hours of May 18. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

The Crack Baby Epidemic That Wasn’t

Retro Report re-reports old stories, “connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.” The site’s latest video focuses on the alleged crack baby epidemic in the 1980s:

Clay Dillow summarizes key points:

How did science get it so wrong? The primary study behind the “crack baby” epidemic scare involved just 23 infants–a sample set too small to be meaningful. It also included only infants rather than adults who had been exposed to crack as infants. Later studies conducted on adults who had been prenatally exposed to crack often showed very small changes in their brains rather than the sweeping deficiencies predicted by the science of the time. It’s a lesson in what happens when a misreading of the data leads to a publicly accepted narrative, especially one that feeds on society’s collective fears about the future.

TNC adds:

It is hard to ignore the effects of racism here. There is a time-honored American tradition of turning minorities into the vessel for all the country’s vices — as if adultery, murder, idleness and all other manner of sin would disappear with us. This is especially true in the realm of drugs.