Yes, it’s a zoomable 26 gigapixel photo of Paris, the biggest image ever stitched apparently. It looks brilliant, and there’s loads of info about how they did it here. You can see right into people’s windows! Unfortunately nobody seems to be doing anything interesting.

Found this presentation from a recent GIS conference analysing data from the DublinBikes stations. Probably nothing that surprising in the results, but I like the way they got the data by scraping it off the DB website.

They’ve just released Tableau Public:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/download

I like the last paragraph of this

To steal from their biggest fan, whom I know personally, “But they’re both so talented, it’s so hard to decide”

This via the Guardian

Carfull now!

Moonwalk One, the poetic, beautiful, fascinating film about the first moon landing was broadcast last night on one of the Discovery channels. Lost for 35 years and rediscovered about a year ago, it’s a mix of documentary and a sort of film-poem, both touching and informative.

Discovery decided to show the film with introductory and break segments, featuring an anonymous, young, doctor of space, telling us about times he spoke to a mission commander, or that the astronauts were spacemen, and you can see the moon if you go outside and look up. Banal stuff, especially in contrast to the film it surrounded.

Worse, though, was watching something really great, unlike the normal television documentary, only to have a presenter tell you what’s coming up, what you just saw, and what’s on now. Formula television, drab, pointless, half of its time spent pointing to the other half. In a way, it’s surprising, with more and more channels out there, more and more people making films, more freedom for people on the fringes or without a standard film education to take up their cameras and produce works interesting, works unusual, works defective or even imaginative, that we delve deeper into the world of structurally and formally monotonous television. Teenagers and their love triangles, cops and their murders, spies and their double agents, families and their comedic mishaps. All of them walking side-by-side, stopping, turning to face one another, and continuing their conversation in over-the-shoulder-shot-reverse-shot.

Back in the world of 3D movies, Clash of the Titans came out yesterday in Ireland to minimal fanfare. I’m sure it will make several hundred dollars at the box office, and will make some idiots happy, though not many. It’s a dull movie, badly written and full of erratic, disorganised action. It has an obligatory “in-joke” for the three people still alive who saw the original (nobody laughed), and a great scene with Liam Neeson in which he tells the other gods “Leave us!” only to turn to camera and say “Release the Kraken!”, thus highlighting the ten lines of missing dialogue. This is, of course, about the standard one should expect of such a film, it’s a summer blockbuster, and the studio that made it hopes it will be a “tent-pole” picture. That is, one of their big money efforts which will prop their business up for the year.

Over the last few years a few movies have been dual-releases in regular old flat-o-vision, and glorious 3D.  Up,  Alice in Wonderland, Avatar are the most recent big movies to open in 3D. Clash joins them, but unfortunately I think it joins them in a nasty sub-group of 3D: the hastily cobbled together conversion. Films like Avatar, were made and released in 3D (that is dual camera rigs, stereoscopic editing and effects, the full bit). …the Titans appears to have been shot on a single camera, intended for a 2D release and then converted by a team of lackeys into a chimera. Not 2D, not really 3D either.

Dropping my polarized glasses to look at the screen, I could see entire scenes with barely a hair of depth. Everything with people in it seemed flat, the titles and a few of the 3D monsters had depth (see also: acting, characters). The same could generally be said of Alice in Wonderland, another converted feature film. And despite my earlier enthusiasm for on-the-fly conversion to a small monitor for home viewing and for providing the content necessary for widespread domestic adoption of 3DTV, I find the result on the large screen frustrating and disappointing.

As any dullard can tell you, spectacle is at the heart of the Hollywood cinema experience. And 3D promises to enhance that with various buzzwordy traits, like “immersion”, “naturalism”, “edge-of-your-seat-thrill-ride-a-minute”, and maybe “diegesis”. The 3D of Avatar was well realised, and enhanced the experience of watching it. The extra half-dimension of Clash of the Titans, does not.

So why do it? Well, all those films that released in 2 and 3D, made more money per screen for the 3D version. Avatar became the most profitable film of all time partly because more people wanted to see it in 3D, and they paid a few extra shekels for the experience. Audiences, that film showed, are willing to pay more for an extra dimension (wait till Jerry Bruckheimer finds out that there are 11 or more). It came out in November, just when CotT was in production (or somewhere near post), some executive called down to the lackey department and demanded a conversion for super-profits. The problem is, if they continue to do conversions like this and Alice in Wonderland, that add little or nothing to the experience, the 3D cash cow will be killed. Audiences will gradually find little to attract them to the 3D screenings. Hopefully, the lesson has been learned this year and more films will be shot specifically for their 3D release, as it offers a lot of filmmaking possibilities that have yet to be explored.

By the way, did I mention that CotT is a terrible film?

• Fancy re-arranging London’s skyline? You can also add buildings from around the world. Includes further confirmation that the Burj Dubai is rather large.
• The first cut of Annie Hall was two and a half hours long, had very little Annie Hall in it, and was awful.
• Pics from the computer museum in Paris.
• Crazy real-time airplane tracker
• Cheery map of where cyclists have been killed or seriously injured in London in the last ten years
• Flickr group for charts relating to the Beatles. I like the one about how their pronunciation grew less Americanised over time.
• My suggestion would be this chart showing mentions of the Beatles in Parliament through the 1960s. Most of the early mentions are about hair.

If only we knew.

Okay, I couldn’t leave it there. What if Woody Allen had a childrens’ television programme? Hot Dog! If you look at the third video, it also appears to feature Stalin in the cast of thousands. I always wondered what he did after he was finished making the USSR.

There were of course a series of TV panel-game-shows of questionable merit featuring Herr Allen, including I’ve Got a Secret, and the now uncommissionable Password, and a meat version of Through the Keyhole called What’s my Line? . Then movies came along for Woodles, and he had to undergo the trauma of scatalogical promotional interviews, including one for Bananas.

Naturally, many of these links have been culled from a more thorough post to be found on WMFU, which tells of the early career of Mr. Konigsberg, in lengthy, almost obsessive, detail.

The Wes Anderson is my favourite. But more things should be narrated by Werner Herzog!

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.