Here’s a set of maps from the NY Times, showing Netflix rental habits in various US cities. Note the east-west divide in Washington DC, the popularity of Milk in San Francisco, and Mad Men in Manhattan. It’s an interesting way to look at cultural consumption in relation to social geography, and makes me wonder what else can be learned from mail-order shopping.

David Brookes:

Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” in The New Yorker generated a lot of discussion. It’s about the room where New York City schoolteachers who have been dismissed for incompetence sit for years on end and continue to collect their six-figure salaries for doing nothing. The word Dickensian doesn’t fully describe the madness of a system that cannot get rid of bad teachers.

Unless there was a huge number of teachers in a small, poorly heated ‘rubber room’, then the word Dickensian doesn’t even partly describe what he’s talking about. Or am I missing something?

So, since wowblog is repository for interesting maps, and other such informative pictures, here’s a link to a blog about Victorian infographics. Enjoy?

• Tequila Mockingbird
• A Rum of One’s Own
• In Cold Bloody Mary
• Raise High The Jim Beam, Carpenters
• For Whom the Bellini Tolls
• The Bourbon of Suburbia
• Crime and Pimmishment
• Beerwulf

And those were the best ones.

And does a podcast about it! And here are pictures of him, looking like one of the off-roaders from the Fast Show.

Unfortunately this visit was before the Large Hadron Collider opened and turned out to be rubbish, or else he would have been all ‘Peter, you’ve lost the boson’.

So, I went to IBC last week, and walked about the show floor looking at the various bits of technology, weaving between the suits talking about quarterly turnover and the like. The most notable trend that at the convention was the profusion of 3D related equipment, for the creation, editing, and display of that tricky third dimension. While 3D has been the new thing in movies for a few years, with films on a dual 2D/3D release taking more per screening in the 3D theatres (most of these movies are the animated features which are easily adapted to a 3D release). Studios thought that 3D would be the gimmick to lure people away from their TV and back to the cinema, while consumers thought it was another gimmick that would last as long as the previous 3D craze in the ’50s.

What is different this year is the move towards 3DTV, taking the experience to the home, and in many cases, live. 3D sports broadcasts work well, and seem to be the method of introducing 3D and the consequent equipment upgrades, and wallet-gougings, consumers will have to undergo. Several recent events were shot and broadcast in 3D, including last years Superbowl and some of Sky’s football coverage.

The boring engineering and cables stuff was naturally evolving the capacity to handle two simultaneous HD streams anyway (that is, 3Gbps - watch out for the advert and the heavy number content on the linked page). The problems of shooting 3D have largely been solved, although there are some glitches with jitter and field order in 3D video to be sorted out. And the various problems of creation have generally been solved.

What is an unknown is the rate of consumer adoption. And this will depend on the experience of viewing, and the available content. The viewing experience is still a little bit inconvenient, since glasses need to be worn, and the content is the superbowl, a film about dinosaurs, and a Three Stooges movie. The introduction of lenticular screens, for goggle-less viewing, while still in the early stages (as it suffers from low resolution and limited viewing angles) at just a few years old, will soon take care of the viewing problem.

The content problem lies in the fact that for true 3D all that is shown needs to be shot with that in mind, which discounts about a hundred-years-worth of film and television. Since lots of broadcasters rely on repeats to fill their schedules this is a major problem. If TV is 3D only some of the time, many will decide it’s not worth changing their TV or set-top box. I stumbled upon the stand of a research group from Canada showing a box that converts 2D  to 3D on the fly. They happened to be showing Spiderman, played on a normal DVD player and out through their machine, which showed as a very convincing 3D movie on their lenticular display.

The convergence of these different technologies makes 3D in the home a viable proposition, and increases the likelyhood of widespread adoption by consumers in the next five years or so (or whatever happens to be the standard TV recycling time).

He has plenty of people to shout down people like these lunatics who claim to believe he’s a psychotic commie-Nazi, but here ya go:

Print out a high-res version and and stick it up in your local creche, why dontcha.

- Completely awesome Steve Jones lecture on whether human evolution has stopped. The stuff on Francis Galton was new to me - apparently he constructed a ‘beauty map’ of Britain which concluded that Aberdeen had the most mingers with the loveliest people in the country being found just outside Harrods. The latter finding might still hold.
- Six-day cycle racing was invented down the road from me in Islington. Possibly the weirdest sport ever, though it did indirectly promote the art of reading a newspaper while on your bike.
- Epic, must-read rant about the strange world of academic journals.

I think I mentioned this when I was back: Prince Charles intervened to block what he saw as an insufficiently traditionalist design for the Chelsea Barracks site in London, so Building magazine asked a few architects to re-imagine some London landmarks along modernist lines in response. George Saumarez Smith didn’t quite play along and instead offered a redesign of Richard Rogers’ Heathrow Terminal 5 as Charles might have preferred it:

There’s something wonderful about that multi-level neo-classical car-park, and as Smith says it would provide ‘a huge boost to the stonemasonry industry’, so personally I’m all for it.

This video of the Germany v Algeria group match from the 1982 World Cup is prompted by the Guardian’s inclusion of Algeria’s right-back Chaabane Merzekane as one of the great unsung heroes of football. His two 70-yard runs up the pitch are pretty good, but the match as a whole is brilliant, and Algeria’s second goal, a sucker-punch straight after Rumenigge’s equaliser, is amazing, 20 seconds of dream pass-and-move and a team goal up there with Carlos Alberto’s in the 1970 final. Algeria looked like a superb team but went out at the end of the group stage following a fit-up by Germany and Austria somewhat reminiscent of the Ireland / Holland go-slow in the 1990 finals.

So, here is the opening sequence of ‘Soylent Green’, using the Ken Burns effect fully 17 years before ‘The Civil War’. So, it should be called the Soylent effect. It’s a great opening, effective, prescient, and delightfully simple - far better than the film that follows it.

For more interesting credit sequences, though not all the ones I would choose to be in a list of the best, go to Creative Review.

This seems like a wowblog kind of thing, and it’s about time I posted about a graph.

The Dutch generally have a reputation for pragmatic moderation in architecture and planning, so I was taken aback to learn of the new development of Haverleij, which consists of nine separate but related housing developments in the form of self-contained ‘castles’, moats and all, on the outskirts of ’s-Hertogenbosch.

They’re pretty astonishing to look at, from above (photo from the promotional site)

or from ground level (photo by Michiel van Raaij)

The architect, Sjoerd Soeters, has very deliberately sought to create self-contained areas with distinct identities and which leave the surrounding landscape open. Top marks for ambition and execution I suppose, but I can’t help wondering how it’s going to turn out. There’s something a bit J.G. Ballard about these utopian mini-experiments in urban form, architectural petri-dishes scattered around a golf course. What will they be like to live in, and to grow up in? Will each one develop its own insular identity, with the kids sallying forth at regular intervals to do battle in the surrounding greenery? I wouldn’t be surprised if the residents decided there’s such a thing as too much green space. To me most of the ‘castles’ look too small to develop distinct identities and too separate to develop a joint one. But even if they end up windswept and empty they’d still make for some great ruins.

This Time story from 1937 describes a court case concerning the sale of a sort of early forerunner of the Big Issue:

It is a peach and saffron tabloid full of hand-me-down line drawings and photographs of celebrated sundowners, sentimental verse, advertisements of rabbits’ feet and “surprise novelties.” personalities and good advice. Founded last winter as a quarterly, the Hobo News was soon converted to a monthly. It is distributed in Manhattan by its editors, elsewhere by itinerants at 5¢ a copy— 10¢ “if we can get it.” Current edition: 50,000 copies.

Price of subway fares around the world, as calculated by Treehugger:

Maybe Dublin’s going to sneak in from nowhere and steal our crown but we’ve probably got some whopping fare increases lined up just in case.

Good stuff from Bad British Architecture:

THIS BUILDING IS THE DEVIL, IT IS THE ENEMY, IT IS SO UNREMITTINGLY FUCKING GRIM THAT IT’S HARD TO EVEN LOOK AT THE PICTURE WITHOUT IT DAMAGING YOU.
IT’S A COMBINATION OF BOTCHED CURTAIN WALLING, WINDOWS THAT DON’T FIT THE HOLES THEY’RE IN, ALL TOPPED OFF WITH A HAT THAT LOOKS LIKE AN ARMY SENTRY POST IN WEST BELFAST. JUST NEEDS A BIG FUCKING GUN TURRET ON TOP AND IT WOULD FIT RIGHT IN.
SMALL OBSERVATION - I CAN HONESTLY SAY THAT I’VE NEVER SEEN EFFLORESCENCE ON THE MORTAR BETWEEN TERRACOTTA BOLLOCKING TILES.

And I really like Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest too. Hurling vicious invective is something that anonymous online malcontents seem particularly suited for, and when the targets actually richly deserve it that’s all the better.

NY Times today:

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of girls younger than 18 who were allegedly invited to a villa by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Mr. Berlusconi is alleged to have invited about 40 women to the villa, but only some of them were allegedly younger than 18 at the time, not all of them.

I’ve lost touch with the ‘bikes for billboards’ story over the last year so it was good to be updated by the comments to this post over at Copenhagenize about the rather miffed anti-JCDecaux stickers that have been appearing about the place of late.

So it’s all going to start in July, and there’s a map of the (potential, it says) stations here - clearly the council has taken the wise decision not to build any in West Dublin until you lot prove you can be trusted not to do wheelies into canals and so forth.

It’s going to be a grand total of 450 bikes, just enough to make it look like DCC are making some token effort towards increasing cycling but not really enough to make much of a difference to the overall modal share and probably not to contribute towards ’safety in numbers’ (but probably enough for taxi drivers to complain about). All that said, Jay and I tried the same system out in Paris last weekend and found the bikes endearingly clunky, more or less forcing you to slow down, which might not be a bad thing in terms of changing the image of cycling from one of an activity of interest only to hyper aggressive blokes in lycra, though that may be more of an issue here in London.

Right, that’s enough rambling. Any thoughts from actual Dubliners? Oh and lastly, this thread on boards.ie reveals the very Nordic fact that “In Oslo if you’re taking the bike after midnight you had to first solve a simple maths equation on the swipe card machine before the bike is released” in order to forestall drink driving, as if anyone can actually afford to get drunk in Oslo.

Last time I noticed David Feherty, which must have been at least ten years ago, he was known for being a decent golfer from Northern Ireland and a bit of a wit, for a golfer anyway.

He seems to have spent the intervening years turning into a charmless PJ O’Rourke wannabe, and is now attracting attention for this epically bad piece about the Bushes moving to Texas in which he fantasises about how every American soldier would like to kill prominent Democrat politicians. Oddly, some actual US soldiers are less than impressed at being depicted as mindless homicidal wingnuts.

Amusingly enough though, Feherty’s decline into Texas’s favourite dipshit golf waffler has been pretty well mirrored by a bizarre change in appearance from Daniel O’Donnell lookalike to some sort of sports-casual hellspawn.

Awesome. Yersinia Pestis has photographed all the old WW2 bomb damage maps from the London County Council archives, transferred them to flickr, and made this nifty Google map marking some but not all of the strike sites. It’s like Web 2.0 but useful.

View V2 rockets on London in a larger map

Apart from telling a story of great human tragedy, the pattern of these bomb strikes persists in London’s idiosyncratic urban mix to this day, in that the sites were very frequently used for the construction of social housing estates in the post-war decades. Some of these estates have suffered from poor design, construction or management ever since, and social housing in general has become more ‘residualised’ as access has been rationed to the most needy cases. Combine that with the fact that the bombers generally tried to target the kind of areas of heavy manufacturing that have also suffered the worst job losses since the war, and you have a lot of places that stand out as pockets of lasting deprivation, more than 60 years after the bombs hit.

Update: Coincidentally, a new edition of Phyllis Pearsal’s original London A to Z from 1936 has just been published, and there’s an accompanying online map viewer which enables you to see some of the areas that suffered during the war, such as the stretch between Moorgate and Long Lane now occupied by the Barbican centre.

At the weekend there was a rugby match, apparently. The great and good turned out to see Munster buried under the burning rubble of Croke park after a conflict so colossal it made the Hiroshima bomb look like a fart in the bath. It was a war to end all rugby. Leinster, victorious, each will receive a thousand virgins in paradise. Munster, vanquished, will have their souls consumed by the terrifying Limerick hell-beast. Lions glory does not await Paul O’Connell, for only his vacant zombified body will be roaming the pitches of South Africa feasting on the brains of unlucky touch judges.

Hyperbole aside, it was a good match. However, what caught my eye was the coverage in The Independent the following day, a paper that rarely arrives in our house. On page five, Willie O’Dea proclaims ‘We May Lose, but We Never Surrender’ in an article utterly devoid of purpose. I imagine the scene, wherein O’Dea asks to write it, to jump on the bandwagon and get some publicity, and the editor who just thinks that it’ll fill up a few column inches and doesn’t care what goes in it. WOD goes on to say “Ah, sure, sport’s great, and Munster are good, and Leinster are good too, we’re all pals. Good times, but do you remember the time when something else happened, that was good too….” I may have paraphrased a bit there.

On further inspection, I realised that the picture of old Wills is not, in fact, a puppet of Wille, but the real O’dle himself. Frankly, I can think of no politician more hilarious and terrible to look at than O’Dea, but this picture really brings it home. Obviously, the counterpoint of Bertie Ahern, who, it seems, had to quit high office after deciding to spend his days eating the children of his constituency, provides some gravitas.

Still, it’s a testament to the new multicultural Ireland that a super-marionette can become part of the government. No more are they blocked by the string ceiling.

Councillor Maurice Ahern was canvassing for the local elections in June and came around our road on Saturday. He and his team were all looking a bit sheepish, seemingly only knocking on the doors of houses that looked like nobody was in.

And they put this leaflet through the door:

But mainly at election time.

Here’s a story from the Guardian about a fairly ordinary speculative libel case against Sacha Baron-Cohen and Channel 4. What’s interesting is not the case, but the method Channel 4 used to defend themselves.

Jim and I saw this guy randomly in the Mezz in Dublin a few years ago and he rocked, in as much as singer-songwriters can.

Now he’s doing a YouTube thingy from New Zealand.

This painstakingly crafted isometric portrait of Lower-to-Mid Manhattan is pretty amazing. It turns out such a stylised representation actually gives you a much clearer sense of the shape of each building and of the area as a whole - when you’re in the middle of it you can get this sense of an almost endless forest of towers but large swathes are ‘only’ medium-rise. Also, having been brought up on isometric ‘God-games’ like Civilization and SimCity my immediate instinct when presented with this kind of picture is to look for areas to demolish and replace with vast monuments to my greatness. Nice knowing you, Lower East Side! I’m starting to understand how Robert Moses might have felt …

It’s made by the same Chinese company that did similar maps for Hong Kong, Shanghai and others. I’m curious as to whether there is some automated way of creating these maps or whether they’ve got hundreds of pixel-artists slaving away in some graphic-design sweatshop.

Also known as Jay’s new blog. Our friend Francie is also blogging, brilliantly.

After a morning’s work, I journeyed to the cinema and saw The Boat That Rocked, which I had expected to be a bit disappointing, but it was on at the right time, and there may, I thought, be some diverting aspects. How wrong I was.

“Disappointment” does not do justice to the level of offence caused by this shambling wreck of a film. There are three identifiable story-like substances contained within this film. One sees a ministerial agency attempting to close down sea-borne pirate radio. The second sees a young man come of age after being sent to the ship by his motherm and later starts to wonder about his parentage. The third involves several of the DJs aboard ship generally doing stuff.

Contains “spoilers”, but then, I don’t think you can spoil rotten meat.

Giving the film its due, there is some nice production, decent sets, generally alright lighting and a period-specific use of wide-angle lenses that at least gives the film some stylistic authenticity. That authenticity is as far as it goes. The dialogue is anachronistic. The era of free love has turned into a safe-sex ship. Honestly, DJs, drinking and running amok at sea, and when a woman shows up after weeks of floating about alone, they refuse without a condom.

This is all forgivable, we shouldn’t expect authenticity from light entertainment. What we should expect is, in no particular order: jokes that make you laugh, dramatic tension of some kind, a story structured in any way, good performances, and such like.

The three main storylines do not inform one another and are so shambolically slapped together as to make drama impossible to achieve, the jokes uniformly fall flat (what few there are), and the acting is poor across the board (sad though it makes me to say it of our fellow alumn). Bill Nighy stick-insects his way around the film, half vampire, half Edwardian dandy. His achingly bad fist-pump at the end of the film is like a final insult to your intelligence and your mother. If you were to describe the plot in a sentence it would be “things sort of happen”. The pirates vs. government story is terribly contrived, as is the repeated joke of Mr. Twatt. You heard me, Mr. Twatt, again and again mileage is made of it, and they are long, tough, barefoot-over-hot-coals miles.

Indeed, Twatt could in the final reel could make a connection with the crew of the boat, providing a conclusion to that story and a redemption for that character. Instead, they opt for the not quite, but almost, deus ex machina, and Twatt just disappears from the film, Magic. Indeed, throughout the film the two groups on either side of the protagonal divide only brush against one another once, but the encounter is meaning, and purpose, free.

I’ll skip over the second “story”, cause it’s shit.

The third story, and that upon which the film hinges isn’t a story. It’s just a group of people hanging about, getting into scrapes that aren’t very scrapey (think diseased sheep), mostly having a bit of a laugh. The lows don’t mean much to the characters, including a sham marriage, sexual betrayal, serrupticious attempted rape, public embarrassment, and bodily injury. None of these things seem to matter. It’s just a group having a generally good time and playing some music. If this was my life, I’d look upon it with fondness, but it’s not. It’s someone else’s life, and they’re telling you the story in the pub about the time something almost happened to them, and you’re bored and looking at other people across the bar fiddling with the rim of your glass.

I have become rambling and incoherent with the mental strain of thinking about this film. It’s the kind of cinematic experience that leaves you questioning humanity. I’d best stop here before I need anti-depressants.

Still, some decent music.

Duff McKagan of Guns’n'Roses has some cool dating tips, from the obvious to the insane:

NEVER say someone else’s name in the throes of lovemaking. If you mistakenly call out your old girlfriend’s name, make some shit up, and QUICK!

Ok that was easy. Anything else?

The three A’s: Attention, Affection, and Appreciation. … Here are two examples, one good and one bad:

Bad: “Hey you, you are HOT! [Attention.] Give me a hug! [Affection.] That felt good! [Appreciation.]”

Good: “Are you wearing new lip gloss? Let me kiss you! I like it!”

Actually, both of these would work, and neither of them are stellar, but you get the idea.

“In theory it might be possible for a high-net-worth individual to remain in a panic room for days or even weeks without us knowing.”

Some perfectly fabulous jackbootery has been going on over the Cowen portraits, no need to detail it all here I suppose. The artist has been brought in for questioning ‘under caution’ (eh?). RTE apologised for its news story on the painting, and then whipped the report off the website. Not that one, obviously.

The best bit of outrage comes from the highly-excitable government press secretary, Eoghan Ó Neachtain, who complained on behalf of the Taoiseach’s office without telling anyone. According to the Irish Times:

He particularly objected to an art expert being asked for an opinion on what was clearly a hoax painting…

That makes no sense at all, but if you squint your eyes a bit you can see how it must make such perfect sense to Eoghan. For a laugh, here’s what the Sunday Business Post had to say about Eoghan on his appointment two years ago:

O’ Neachtain would be best advised to try not to see himself as being too important.