day_of_the_locust

Losers and Winners

2009-02-27T19:36:00.008+01:00

A kind of Appendix to Workingmans Death.

400 Chinese workers break down the Kaiserstuhl coke factory in the Ruhr Valley into manageable parts and ship them back to their homeland: disassembly in the West – reassembly in the Far East. Dortmund’s last coke workers find themselves helping the Chinese to dismantle their own workplace.

Read the full film synopsis here: Link

How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter

2009-02-21T11:59:00.012+01:00

"Everything Bad Is Good For You" is the title of Steven Johnson's book about contemporary popular culture. His theory of the "sleeper curve" depicts the high and steady growing cognitive demands of video games, tv-programs, movies, and - surprise surprise: the internet. It is entertaining written but more important: Its a more systematic attempt to understand popular culture than the sensational title suggests.

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You. How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter. Penguin Books 2005

B-52

2008-11-19T21:22:00.010+01:00

Zuviel von jener Vernichtung, die der Bomber in die Welt setzen sollte, ist noch in seiner eigenen Zerstörung anwesend.

"B-52", a Film by Hartmut Bitomsky

Urban Growth

2008-07-02T20:21:00.006+02:00

I recently read Mike Davis' Planet of Slums. See this interactive map which shows the worlds urban growth from 1955-2015 (estimated) and also the rest of this bbc news site.
Urban Growth Interactive Map

Ozu Site

2008-05-29T19:08:00.006+02:00

I found this site dedicated to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu at del.icio.us yesterday. It offers writings and a lot of pictures about Ozu and his films in a very delicious way. It's still under construction (some contents are missing).
Ozu-San

Workingman's Death

2008-05-24T19:00:00.007+02:00

Recently seen:
Workingman's Death
Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?

Shrinking Cities

2008-05-16T11:12:00.015+02:00

Impressive:
The working papers of the Shrinking Cities- project. Studies on Ivanovo (Russia), Manchester & Liverpool, Detroit, Leipzig & Halle (Ger).

Mass Observation

2008-04-21T14:42:00.003+02:00

The Mass Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981. The Archive is in the care of the University of Sussex and is housed in the Library in Special Collections.

Mass Observation

Very useful:

2008-04-07T12:38:00.003+02:00

BibSonomy is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. [...] The advantage of BibSonomy is that you can access your data from whereever you are. Furthermore, you can discover more bookmarks and publications from your friends and other people.
Bibsonomy

Vietnam! Vietnam!

2008-04-03T20:34:00.006+02:00

Vietnam! Vietnam! from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Readings and this Movie at http://spiegelman.tumblr.com/post/29921323

Thanks to BitBonk for sending the link.

coming soon...

2008-01-29T17:20:00.000+01:00

Some remarks why Howard Becker's "Tricks of the Trade" is a unique imaginative and resourceful book .

Beautiful Statistics

2007-12-06T01:33:00.000+01:00

Watch these galleries with barplots, dotcharts, dendrograms...
R graph galleries
especially this:
US-Election Map

Everything counts...
WB.

HU-Library Open Collections Program

2007-11-25T15:51:00.000+01:00

For those interested in the social history of the United States I strongly recommend the Open Collections Program of the Harvard University Library, especially the collections "Women Working 1800-1830" and "Immigrations to the United States 1789-1930" (full access and very comfortable):

Women Working, 1800 - 1930 focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including:
* 7,500 pages of manuscripts
* 3,500 books and pamphlets
* 1,200 photographs
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression.

WB.

Dust Bowl Photos

2007-11-23T00:08:00.000+01:00

The Dust Bowl was a series of dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1933 to 1939, caused by severe drought conditions coupled with decades of extensive farming ...[from wikipedia]

Dust Bowl Photos
Breathe out,
WB.

Japanese Smileys

2007-11-10T01:33:00.001+01:00

You can feel what they mean!
Japanese Smileys
(Sayonara)
WB.

How movies helped change America

2007-10-29T12:15:00.001+01:00

Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934. DVD Project Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Film Preservation Board

Prohibition, abortion, unions, atheism, the vote for woman, organized crime, loan sharking, juvenile justice, homelessness, police corruption, immigration – in their first decades movies brought an astonishing range of issues to the screen. [...] Treasures III brings this period to life ...

National Film Preservation Foundation
WB.

Primer

2007-10-12T13:19:00.002+02:00

I watched this sci-fi movie yesterday. One of the rare cases a director was able to tell a scifi story without to strain the usual devices like phantastic machines and those foolish explanations about their functionality and the like. The movie hasn't any philosophical content nor intentions (paradoxes about parallel worlds and changing one by doing something in the other, even though the protagonists have to deal with them) and you can simply enjoy their profane and technical dialogs, which cover most of the film.

PRIMER is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe and Aaron, are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities--ones that could enable them to do and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next.

Primer
WB.

Fundamentalism vs. Evolution

2007-10-09T17:14:00.000+02:00

The Creative Archive Pages of the British Film Institute feature

video clips made available for free download to users in the United Kingdom under the innovative Creative Archive Licence, to stimulate creative re-use for non-commercial purposes.

Watch the clip Fundamentalism vs. Evolution which shows a

Head-on train smash staged at 'Monkeyville' to typify clash in U.S.A. between adherents of Bible and followers of Darwin. All America is watching the blaze of conflict between Science and the Scriptures...

Fundamentalism vs. Evolution

WB.

Cesky Sen

2007-10-08T13:10:00.001+02:00

I watched this beautiful movie yesterday. There is hope.

Cesky Sen

Yours,
WB.

The Victory of all-embracing Control called a City

2007-10-04T18:37:00.000+02:00

Watch this site. Its about the City of the Future according to the weird visions of its inventor.
Victory Cities

It's an entire city all under one roof, to be built and operated by private enterprise alone. There will not be just one, but many such cities throughout the entire world. Boasting no crime, no pollution, and no over-crowding, Victory City is a veritable utopia for those who've grown weary of trying to find solutions to today's urban problems.

One might ask whether this is still a city or yet an asylum for the normally insane. Will the people that might live there (actually no Victory City is existent by now) be called inhabitants or inmates?

Lock your doors,

WB.

hazardous waste

2007-10-03T15:29:00.000+02:00

Once the hazardous waste of the future, but still much more beautiful than today's:
Computer History Museum

Use phoneboxes, lined paper and card files.
WB.

Punchcard Art

2007-10-03T13:05:00.000+02:00

Watch this:

Do Not Fold, Bend, Spindle or Mutilate: Computer Punch Card Art - Virtual Exhibition

The punch cards in this exhibit were manufactured 35 years ago but were never used. The staff of the Visual Arts Center mailed the cards, or in this case canvases, to a wide selection of artists and cultural figures. Participants were instructed to create artworks using the cards and to return their artistic creations to the VAC. They were free to write, paint, draw, cut, print, and/or do whatever they wished with the punch card in direct contradiction to the traditional dire warning: "Do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate."

more Science Songs

2007-10-01T12:23:00.001+02:00

Here some more Science Songs (available as sheets) by Biophysicist Greg Crowther. Sing along!

more science songs

Science Songs

2007-09-30T18:25:00.000+02:00

Today's finding: songs about science. My favourite: It's A Scientific Fact. Downloadable as mp3s.

science songs

...

2007-09-29T23:24:00.000+02:00

... unter der Sonne.