The Places We Live

This year, for the first time in history, more people will live in cities than in rural areas. One-third of these urban dwellers - more than 1 billion people - live in slums. It is predicted that this number will double in the next 25 years.

Magnum Photos presents the work of Jonas Bendiksen in this interactive slideshow of The Places We Live, where you can visit selected households from around the world. The panoramic photos are amazing.

via Nag on the Lake

geometría callejera

bachmont's photostream

via Vagabondish

Urban parrots

image via

I lived in two areas of New Orleans that had wild Quaker parrots all over the place. When I lived in Gentilly, we had them in the palm trees in our front yard. One of the people in the neighborhood told me that they had escaped from a pet store fire back in the '60s. Since Quaker parrots, aka Monk parakeets, originate in Argentina and are not migratory, it stands to reason that they escaped from captivity of some sort. They thrive there.

It seems that feral parrots are living in cities all over the world.

BrooklynParrots.com a website about the wild parrots of Brooklyn and other environs
Blake Pontchartrain on the wild Quaker parrots of New Orleans
and yes, they did survive Katrina
City Parrots Urban Parrot Conservation
The California Parrot Project

Independent Lens - The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (PBS) (clip)



The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

This Old House: 1918

Shorpy:

Washington, D.C., circa 1918. "Old house, Third Street N.E. Built by Thomas Taylor in 1876." Thought I'd better post this before any more chunks of the glass negative (or house) fall off. National Photo Co. glass negative.

HK

K_iwi's photostream

hat tip: 鏡

stray bullets

A New Addiction: Internet Junkies While compulsive gambling is only beginning to be addressed by mental health professionals, they must now face a new affliction: Internet addiction. This is news?

Judge: Copyright owners must consider 'fair use' A federal judge on Wednesday gave more weight to the concept of "fair use" when he threw a lifeline to a Pennsylvania mother's lawsuit against Universal Music. The judge refused to dismiss Stephanie Lenz's suit claiming that Universal abused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when it issued a takedown notice to YouTube over a 30-second video of Lenz's baby dancing to a Prince song. Right on. (via)

Brightest gamma-ray burst was aimed at Earth Astronomers think they know what caused the brightest ever gamma-ray burst, which was observed in March: a tightly beamed jet of matter that happened to be aimed almost directly at Earth. Kinda strange.

Benjamin Franklin: City Slicker So when Franklin, at 17, ran out on his printing indentures (a serious felony) and fled from Boston to Philadelphia, he was hardly the “poor ignorant boy” he purported to be. (via)

also:
The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs
The uncanny valley: why almost-human-looking robots scare people more than mechanical-looking robots
H.P. Lovecraft Vintage Fonts (via)
World Names Profiler (enter your surname) (via)

viddy:
Secret Military Technology On 60 Minutes, in an interview with Scott Pelley, reporter Bob Woodward claimed that the U.S. military has a new secret technique that's so revolutionary, it's on par with the tank and the airplane. Schneier takes a stab and the commenters take the piss.
Large Hadron Collider: Peter Higgs interview
William S. Burroughs demonstrates his famous literary "cut-ups"
Early demonstration of the Mellotron
Chinese Popeye (via Nick's Brown Bag)

stray bullets

The Rise of the Numerati With the explosion of data from the Internet, cell phones, and credit cards, the people who can make sense of it all are changing our world... Sometimes Morgan's team spots groups of Web surfers who appear to move in sync. The challenge then is to figure out what triggers their movements. Once this is clear, the advertisers can anticipate people's online journeys—and sprinkle their paths with just the right ads. And who actually clicks on those ads? Fewer than you'd think, I'd wager. I always had the feeling that the true power of these people is in their ability to convince advertisers that they really know what the hell they're talking about. (via)

Life of the Party I ran into the Buzzkills at a party last weekend. This is not their real name, of course, and I wouldn’t dare call them that to their face, but Jim and Lori Buzzkill are a white, affluent, middle-aged couple whose mission in life is to suck all the joy out of every single party they attend. They bait every guest into an argument that highlights their moral superiority... The Buzzkills are extremely political and contentious. This is not to say that they just argue about politics - lots of people argue about politics, and I don’t have a problem with that. My annoyance lies in their abrasive stance as environmental anti-globalization vegan warrior activists. They somehow manage to politicize any topic of conversation, whether it be about a recipe for jerk chicken (”people who kill chickens are the real jerks”), or the cute new shoes you bought on sale this week (”too bad there’s no good deals for the starving babies who made those shoes”). (big ups, Radmila)

The Professional Panhandling Plague A big part of the cities’ woes is the professionalization of panhandling. The old type of panhandler—a mentally impaired or disabled homeless person trying to scrape together a few bucks for a meal—is giving way to the full-time spanger who supports himself through a combination of begging, working at odd jobs, and other sources, like government assistance from disability payments. I remember reading a story, back in the late 1970's, about a guy that lost his legs in WW2 and would panhandle the streets of New York. When he died, they found out that he would leave the city in the fall and head down to his home in Florida where he would hang out for the winter and run the bar that he owned. Come springtime, he would go back up to New York and get back to work. Apparently, he left behind a considerable chunk of change, hundreds of thousands.

also:
Future Doctors Could Sniff Out Cancer
Atlas of electromagnetic space (extremely cool visualization) (via)
Eno's Oblique Strategies (via)

French Manhole Covers

Regard de chaussée français

via Nag on the Lake

New Shanghai Living

Design You Trust offers us a look into the living spaces of Shanghai as presented in Hu Yang's exhibition, New Shanghai Living, featuring 100 images of varied lifestyles in one of China's most vibrant and evolving cities.






























































ht: suwaowa.log

stray bullets

Mexico's Cocaine Capital The bullet holes in the safe-house door tell you who's winning Mexico's drug war. The armor-piercing ammunition, fired from the inside by drug traffickers, shredded the 20-gauge steel like small cannonballs; the rounds fired from the outside, by federal police, merely punctured the metal like so much bird shot. After that midnight firefight on May 27--the result of a botched police raid in the desert city of Culiacán in northwestern Mexico--seven cops lay dead. Only one narco gunman died; the rest, at least half a dozen, escaped. For neighbors, the carnage carried an unambiguous message. "I realized," says Victor Rodríguez, a fishmonger and family man, "that the power of the narcos has surpassed the power of my government."

Cyber War and Cyber Terrorism in India India is also suffering from the menaces of cyber war and cyber terrorism. Nobody cares about any these threats in India. Far more citizens were concerned of the Amarnath issue than by potential risks of nuclear conflict, or near-breakdowns in Net and mobile security. China's intensified cyber warfare against India is becoming a serious threat to national security. (via)

India's 'fragrant' rubbish dumps Authorities in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) have been dousing rubbish dumps with perfume to lessen the putrid stench. Loved this: "Segregation of garbage is the solution to reducing stench," he said. (via)

also:
He dreamt up Bond, but did Fleming also create the CIA? (maybe helped) (via)
13 things that do not make sense (via)
A Conversation with Malcolm McDowell (audio)

viddy:
Buzz Aldrin Interview
Jay J. Ames, private investigator with hands of steel
Gordon Bradt's Six Man Clock Kinetic Sculpture
Interview with Douglas Hofstadter (en français)

A Street Cart Named Survivor

Ing-Tse Chen's entry was one of 5 ex equo winners of designboom's Shelter in a Cart, a competition to create convenient and portable shelter, storage and in some cases, conveyance for the homeless. The frugal traveler and urban adventurer may also take note. Many would be great for junk collectors and street musicians, as well.

There are an abundance of workable designs mentioned, some more inviting than others. Browsing through, I felt as if I was house hunting.

via cut 'n' paste
hat tip: NOTCOT

stray bullets

Trading Places We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen... This has been happening in the South for close to ten years. (via)

Mark Cuban: A Note to the MPAA = Promotion works better than prevention Invest in a positive message that can get people more excited about their member products and the unique experience offered in theaters, or send a message that your customers are crooks and pirates... I have more than 1 billion dollars invested in the entertainment industry. I get to see our content distributed illegally online. I get a daily report of all the torrents and other files available online. You know what I think about that? So what. That's what I think. It's collateral damage. Unlike music, it takes time to upload and download movies. People with more time than money will steal content. They weren't going to pay for it otherwise. People with a conscious will pay for the content. Fortunately that is most people.

also:
The Five Things You Need to Know About Finding the Work You Love (via)
10 Literary Geniuses Who Went To Jail
'Dancing Plague' and Other Odd Afflictions Explained
Parasite 'turns women into sex kittens' (via)
First Look: The Road (photos)

viddy:
Fishing with Ween: Brownie Troop Fishing Show (latest episode: Ween fishing with the Butthole Surfers) (via)
This Video will Make You Understand Fuel Cells and Catalysts in 10 Minutes
Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2008 - Steven Pinker (via)
Grant Morrison interview

Minowa-Entuujis

Sato Shintaro Photo Gallery

ht: this isn't happiness

Lost Cities

Badami, Karnataka, India

Lost Cities (many photos of many lost cities)

via Coudal Partners

Man and Dog

A Chronicle of Urban Life
via FFFFOUND!

Storm Sewer System / Saitama, Japan

Impressive Storm Sewer System / Saitama, Japan
via NOTCOT.org

70 Borden Street: 1912

November 1912. Providence, Rhode Island. "Privies and clothesline, 70 Borden Street. For child welfare exhibit." Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

from Shorpy

Vagabond

John Thomas Smith (1766-1833), Vagabondiana; or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London; with Portraits of the Most Remarkable, Drawn from the Life (London: Published for the proprietor; and sold by J. and A. Arch [etc.] 1817) Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Oversize Rowlandson 929.3q

Vagabondiana

Portland

bnzai9
via FFFFOUND!

Crowded Bus

I think I'll just walk.

from ziza.ru
via Blame It On The Voices