Monthly Archives: November 2008

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Spain’s solar graveyard

When they perfect that spinach-based solar power, maybe they’ll use it to landscape cemetaries:

Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a gritty, working-class town outside Barcelona, has placed a sea of solar panels atop mausoleums at its cemetery, transforming a place of perpetual rest into one buzzing with renewable energy.

The town doesn’t have a lot of room for solar, so the cemetary was the only place for 462 panels that can light up 60 homes. The panels are arranged above mausoleum niches, and the town’s residents seem to appreciate the respect for the dead shown by the placement.

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]

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Art attack: visual themes in movie SF

Ken MacLeod points to a visually arresting web-essay called Star Wars: A New Heap, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Death Star that highlights connections between architecture, design, movie SF and art:

Lucas envisioned a World of Tomorrow dominated by black, white, and gray; hard-edged, massive, and inorganic forms, covered with a salty acne of apparatus.

The film’s visual program was a departure from the saucers and occasional capsules writ large that sci-fi audiences had grown accustomed to, but its colorless symmetrical ships should have been recognizable to at least a small portion of its audience—those familiar with contemporary art.

…

Lucas hired so many members of Kubrick’s team that their subset of the Star Wars crew was dubbed “The Class of 2001.” But he borrowed selectively. Kubrick’s 2001 environments were cohesive and balanced, informed by architectural theory and late-’60s aesthetics; they upheld the distinction between the astronaut modernists and the alien minimalists.

By contrast, Lucas willfully mashed together minimalism, modernism, and NASA design. Two visual rhetorics are at war on-screen: The first is that of an industrial superpower; the second is that of a rogue fringe of misfits and mismatches.

[via Ken Macleod][image from Phil Romans on flickr]

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John Maynard Keynes’ post-capitalist vision

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With the recent economic troubles many commentators have brought up the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes with regard to fiscal stimulus to avert or ameliorate the effects of a recession.

One of the most interesting comments I’ve read talks about Keynes’ attitude to capitalism in general, from John Nalsh in The Times, is a reference to an essay entitled Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren in which he predicted:

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

This is a brilliant point. Keynes is basically saying that capitalism is necessary to create wealth – but it is not the be all and end all of human existence. Consuming and speculating is a means to an end.

The aim of capitalism is in the long run to make capitalism irrelevant. Once everyone on the planet has a high standard of living then we can all get on with other things.

[essay available here, via The Times][image from Jacob Bøtter on flickr]

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Plague2.0

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rat paratrooper, stencil graffitiIt’s almost as if – despite our advancing technologies – all the health risks we considered dead and buried are coming back again. You’ve probably already heard about the resurgence of tuberculosis, but you might not have heard about the Bartonella bacteria, a newly emerging family of zoonotic pathogens – in other words, bacteria transmitted by rat fleas that have the potential to cause a variety of maladies in human beings, from serious heart disease to nervous system infections. [image by yaraaa]

All we need right now is a new plague, on top of everything else we have to deal with. But then again, Bird Flu was the new plague a few years ago, and despite all the yammering and media panic nothing really happened at all… [story via MetaFilter]