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Cities By Rail

After being overwhelmed by the tight weave of the Paris Metro system, I dug in a little and found this great comparison of major world city’s rail systems mapped to the same scale.

Here are Chicago and Paris mapped in a way that makes me feel a little better. Living in Chicago I’ve gotten used to fewer lines covering a wider area, where the Paris system is complex, it’s more dense.

In just a few days now I’ll take the RER to Chatelet les Halles, transfer to the 11 (Brown) and take it to the Pyrenees stop. Which is not so bad! After all, I know my way around the Brown line already.

The Fort Builders Handbook

My roommate Bannack and I have been throwing a sheet over his little table and chairs to make forts in the early morning. He likes being inside the tiny space we make and I like that I get to lay down for a few minutes more, even if it’s on the floor.  So I was delighted to read my friend Marissa’s fort-centric how-to post on her new blog.

Critical Thinking for Amateur Fort Builders

…Finally, you will want to photograph your fort when complete. If you’re feeling real-estatey, create a walk-thru video of your own, OR hire a third party production company that can create a  360 virtual tour of your fort. This is all good to share using social media. Your friends and family will enjoy seeing something you built, but scaled to fit a small person. You will get comments like, “ummm, that’s amazing and beautiful/luxurious!” and “Nice moat!.” These are all great things to hear, but you know that once you’ve finished this fort, it must be destroyed and replaced by a better one.

The subject immediately reminded me of the delightful architectural criticism parody: Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis Part One and Part Two

At first glance the composition appears unintentional and the construction shoddy. But further investigation reveals a clear delineation between indoor/outdoor space with a design focus on protection through the use of barrier. Planes are shifted off the orthogonal to accommodate function; as a side effect it relieves inhabitants from a harsh Euclidian geometry. Grade B

If you’d like to know more, here is a very expensive book: Ottoman Forts

La Blogotheque

Chris’ brother Mike told us about this great series of music videos produced by a French music blog called La Blogotheque. They produce wonderfully casual videos like this one of Andrew Bird walking through Montmartre.

You might have to sit through a 15 second long commercial to see the embedded video. Here’s a link if you don’t want to wait.


Is Land Is Lost

Artists Sarah Cockings and Laurence Symonds created this whimsical balloon they call Is Land. They presented it at a UK art and music festival and had intended to show it off at this year’s Burning Man, but some dudes had another idea for it.

Witnesses saw a small group of malicious festival goers, two in a dingy, cut all five tether ropes holding the helium structure at 3am on the Sunday morning of the Secret Garden festival allowing it to float away. The daring £9000, six month project by RCA graduates Sarah Cockings and Laurence Symonds simply floated off into the atmosphere, leaving them completely deflated.”

The good news is, a replacement balloon has been sponsored, but I can’t help but wish that that one gets let go as well. But maybe version two will have a GPS beacon?

On a related note we’re still running out of  helium.

Emotional Body

 

Maybe you’ve seen this before. It looks like it’s from 2006. But the images below are made up of 500 responses from a survey that asked people to draw where an how they experienced five broad emotions. From left to right, anger, joy, fear, sadness and love. A beautiful kind of map is formed when all the images are superimposed. Check out more of the project here.

Can people describe their visceral feelings of emotion visually, and if so, would any patterns arise? In order to answer this, I had to develop some way of asking people to reflect on and describe their private feelings in a simple, repeatable manner, the results of which could be correlated visually and demographically.