The New Yorker, 2007-05-14
Dec. 18th, 2007 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe"Into the Sunset: Horse Talk" / Roger Angell
__ Bring along a handful of marbles to drop on the pavement: police horses hate marbles.
"Banksy Was Here" / Lauren Collins
__ scenes of anti-authoritarian whimsy: Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing... His aesthetic is clean and instantly readable—broad social cartooning rendered with the graphic bang of an indie concert poster.
__ Banksy... illustrated the cover for “Think Tank,” a 2003 album by the band Blur, of which Damon Albarn is a member. Albarn went on to found Gorillaz... Remi Kabaka, who provides the voice for the band’s drummer, works at the gallery as a sort of majordomo.
"Crash Course" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ Heron of Alexandria (who lived around the first century A.D.)... described the basic principles of steam power.
__ Or is what we consider important about technology—which is, above all, that it is useful—different from what the Greeks considered worthwhile: amusement, enlightenment, delight for its own sake?
__ Inside the corroded rock was what looked like a geared embryo—the incipient bud of an industrial age that remained unborn for a millennium.
"Branson's Luck" / Michael Specter
__ At Virgin, Branson's nickname is Dr. Yes, largely because he has never been able to bring himself to fire people.
__ After finding a company that would charter a jet for two thousand dollars, he divided the price by the number of seats, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote, "Virgin Airways, £39 single flight to Puerto Rico." As he recalls it, "I walked around the terminal and soon filled every seat on the plane."
"The Illusionists" / Justin Davidson
__ Called the Blur Building, it had no walls and no interior - only a walkway and hundreds of nozzles spewing water vapor into the air, creating and artificial cloud. The regulators insisted that it have a sprinkler system, too.
__ "Architects love shining light through everything. They're like kids who will put anything in their mouths."
__ Why was the "plan view" the standard perspective for blueprints, when nobody ever saw the world from directly above?
The Seagram Building ; Busby Berleley girls; Malcolm McLaren
<<
__ Bring along a handful of marbles to drop on the pavement: police horses hate marbles.
"Banksy Was Here" / Lauren Collins
__ scenes of anti-authoritarian whimsy: Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing... His aesthetic is clean and instantly readable—broad social cartooning rendered with the graphic bang of an indie concert poster.
__ Banksy... illustrated the cover for “Think Tank,” a 2003 album by the band Blur, of which Damon Albarn is a member. Albarn went on to found Gorillaz... Remi Kabaka, who provides the voice for the band’s drummer, works at the gallery as a sort of majordomo.
"Crash Course" / Elizabeth Kolbert
- “All science is either physics or stamp-collecting,” (Rutherford) is supposed to have said.
- Alternatively, it is possible to ride through the tunnel in one of the dozens of bicycles CERN provides for its staff, but in that case a supply of emergency oxygen is required.
- These magnets are supposed to operate at minus 271.25 degrees Celsius... —a temperature colder than that of deep space.
- The Compact Muon Solenoid will... hold enough iron to reconstruct the Eiffel Tower.
- “It’s a general fact about physics that the people you tend to remember are the theorists,” (Nima Arkani-Hamed) went on. “... And there’s a natural reason for that, because... the ultimate goal is to understand and explain things about nature. So, for that reason, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. But definitely you want to be the chicken.”
- "You pick up a violin and it weighs sixteen ounces. You pick up a guitar and it weighs seven pounds. Hasn't anyone wondered what a four-pound guitar sounds like?"
- Customers can choose from various degrees of wear, from Closet Classic... to Heavy Relic.
- "I have a piece of veneer from the twenties or thirties," Thompson told me. "I pick it up and I'm in awe. I can hardly bend it. It has the weight of wood but it feels like ceramic. And I'm supposed to find a piece of wood in the world today that's forty-thousandths of an inch thick and that stiff?"
- For the nut, I located a man in southern Alaska with a cache of fossilized walrus ivory, five thousand years old.
__ Heron of Alexandria (who lived around the first century A.D.)... described the basic principles of steam power.
__ Or is what we consider important about technology—which is, above all, that it is useful—different from what the Greeks considered worthwhile: amusement, enlightenment, delight for its own sake?
__ Inside the corroded rock was what looked like a geared embryo—the incipient bud of an industrial age that remained unborn for a millennium.
"Branson's Luck" / Michael Specter
__ At Virgin, Branson's nickname is Dr. Yes, largely because he has never been able to bring himself to fire people.
__ After finding a company that would charter a jet for two thousand dollars, he divided the price by the number of seats, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote, "Virgin Airways, £39 single flight to Puerto Rico." As he recalls it, "I walked around the terminal and soon filled every seat on the plane."
"The Illusionists" / Justin Davidson
__ Called the Blur Building, it had no walls and no interior - only a walkway and hundreds of nozzles spewing water vapor into the air, creating and artificial cloud. The regulators insisted that it have a sprinkler system, too.
__ "Architects love shining light through everything. They're like kids who will put anything in their mouths."
__ Why was the "plan view" the standard perspective for blueprints, when nobody ever saw the world from directly above?
The Seagram Building ; Busby Berleley girls; Malcolm McLaren
<<
