Online package tracking has been around for so long (a whole decade!) that we take it for granted that it works.. I actually get annoyed now when someone on ebay sends me something via USPS and is too cheap to pay for parcel tracking. So I got a little surprise when I checked on my latest amazon order…
If they did deliver it to St. Louis 18 months ago then amazon’s technology is even scarier than I think it is.. forget cloud computing, time travel anyone?
After many Sunday afternoons tramping around Manhattan, three unsuccessful bidding wars, and guessing games with slightly sketchy selling brokers, we finally nailed one down and are In Contract. You would think a recession would take a bit of the pep out of a real estate market, and maybe it has - two of the places we lost out on only had one other bidder, maybe in better times there’d be 3 or 4, but all it takes is one shmuck with more money than you and bye-bye charming brownstone apartment.
It actually looks like this, no retouching…
Now the fun begins - the co-op board. Let’s see your finances. What about your health records? How are your teeth? Can you provide us a family tree? Five generations back will suffice, though we’d prefer 10. Any pets? They’ll have to submit to a psychological exam, to make sure they’re stable and won’t growl at the neighbors. Ahh the dream of home ownership…
So speaking of different perspectives, I stumbled across the famous (for some) 1977 Eames short “Powers of Ten” that starts with an idyllic picnic scene, and then zooms all the way out to the limits of the known universe, and then zooms back in all the way into the subatomic particles in one of the picnickers’ hands.
Part of this thought process feels very familiar to any engineer who has worked with computers or microchips, they’re inherently organized in hierarchies of small units that are grouped into bigger and bigger modules that perform more and more complex functions.. microscopic wires and silicon wells -> transistors -> logic gates -> arithmetic & memory modules -> chips -> circuit boards -> computers -> operating systems -> applications (i.e. final cut) -> digital films that get distributed on youTube.
My latest celeb sighting - Willem Dafoe, buying groceries at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon. It’s not often you run into an actor who’s done everything from playing Jesus to a soft-core sex scene with Asia Argento. I wish there was a way to sneak a photo without feeling like a celeb-stalking creep.
He looked good, skinny as ever, he was laughing and joking with the checkout clerk. He was buying a lot of green vegetables, very healthy-looking load of groceries. He looked exactly the same as he does on screen, which is rare for actors. I wonder if he’s a good cook.
I was browsing around the Harvard GSD site, looking at examples of student studio projects, when I came across one that was about canals to bring water back to the Dead Sea. It’s a big urban design thesis, all about layering transportation flows etc on top of the canals, but one of the many visuals was a comparison of different parts of Israel and the occupied territories to Western groupings of population centers of similar density.
Overlay of West Bank & Gaza on top of SF Bay map
Having actually driven through a good chunk of the West Bank, I already knew it’s not that big.. but seeing it compared to the Bay Area (which I’ve driven through many many times) really puts it into perspective. Amazing what a good graphic can to do your worldview.