Category Archives: art

Map of Where Tourists Take Pictures

Posted on by

Eric Fischer is doing work on comparing locals and tourists and where they photograph based on big Flickr data. It’s fascinating to try to identify cities from the thumbnails in his “Locals and Tourists” set. (I admit, I got very few right, either from “one at a time” or by looking for cities I know.)

Seattle Photographers

This reminds me a lot of Steve Coast’s work on Open Street Map, which I blogged about in “Map of London.” It’s fascinating to watch the implicit maps and the differences emerge from the location data in photos.

Via Data Mining blog and

Bureaucracy in inaction

Posted on by

Back in September, a group of Czech artists called EPOS 257 camouflaged themselves as city-workers, went to the Palackeho square in Prague and installed a fence. The fence was left on the square with no apparent intent or explanation.

At first, the city council didn’t know about it, and when there were told, they didn’t know how to deal with it – what if somebody put it there for a reason?

The fence stayed for 54 days before being removed.

It’s amazing how encrusted our nominally public spaces have become, and sad to see that it’s not just the US that suffers from this.

Fence in a square

Epos 257 via Guerrilla Innovation

Ambrose Bierce Punks Richard Feynman

Posted on by

Via Boing Boing, where Maggie Koerth-Baker gave a delightful pointer to this film of Feynman explaining for seven-and-a-half minutes why he can’t really explain why magnets repel each other. Or attract, either.

And trumping him in time and space, Bierce gave us this in 1906:

MAGNET, n.
Something acted upon by magnetism.

MAGNETISM, n.
Something acting upon a magnet.

The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

Because Money Is Liberty Coined

Posted on by

I really love these redesigns of the US Dollar:

5_reverse_final.jpg

There’s a contest, and I like these designs by Michael Tyznik the most. On a graphical level, they look like money. He’s integrated micro-printing, aligned printing (that $5 in the upper left corner, it’s really hard to print so it works when you look at light) and moire patterns to make copying and printing difficult.

But I like them the most because money is liberty coined. As everyone who doesn’t have it knows, without money, you have far less freedom. As the government takes more and more of our money and decides what to give us, our ability to make choices to pursue our own happiness diminish. As we make fewer choices, we lose the habits and lessons of liberty.

Further, as you have more money, you have more choices. You have more ability to take control of your life and make more choices. As you get away from having just enough to get by, you have money to play with. You have the ability to make decisions and implement them. Money empowers you to enjoy liberty and pursue happiness in more ways.

And with the bill of rights on the back of each one, it’s a beautiful way to tie together the money that we use with the liberty that it enables and represents.