“What if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’…

A beautiful project by the folks over at Barbarian Group for GE. Composite video of planes taking off at various West Coast airports over the course of the day that reveals patterns otherwise lost to the stretch of time.

From Jong Kim’s Flickr stream. I love everything about this: the image, the poem, but even more so, the wonderful detail of the process:

“The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful …

Almost two years ago now, my friend Becca (@beccatronic) turned me on to this Radiolab podcast about the relationship between music and language (coincidentally titled “Musical Language”) and it has remained one of the most compelling things I have ever had the pleasure of crossing paths with.

The bus only comes on the half hour at this time of night. But it’s dry and not too cold for mid-February so Jeff doesn’t mind so much. The stop is busy: two girls gossip in Japanese on the bench; a couple snuggles in the shadow of the alleyway; others read the paper, check their phones, count their pennies; while one impatient man, silhouetted in headlights, stretches his neck out past the curb toward the oncoming traffic.

Below is the presentation from the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2010 by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) that outlines their plan to use a proposed new rail line to link Copenhagen and Malm and their surrounding cities into a binational metropolitan area. Ideas as big as this demonstrate that the solutions to our modern problems need to step beyond the preheld definitions of things even as foundational as nations and territories in order for us to use the world as efficiently and sustainably as we can.

“I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals. ” –Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924 — 2010

The Dead Kennedys Logo by Winston Smith.

(for Elyssa Schmid)
She tells him that she has superpowers or, more accurately, one single-use superpower. When she is stressed out, running late for an appointment or wishing she could be somewhere else: by her daughter’s side after a hard day at school or at her father’s hospital bed as he breathed his final breaths — in moments such as these she always asks herself if it is the appropriate time to use it, if this gift was bestowed on her to be unleashed upon the world in this particular instance. …