A new article by Input Magazine gives a good example of green washing and why we need the right to repair our own devices. The article is about a “recycling mode” for Sonos devices that effectively bricks a device, and makes it impossible for it to enter the second-hand market. Read the short article here.
Sonos implements a setting called “recycling mode” that bricks consumer’s devices after 21 days, essentially keeping them from being reused or resold on the secondary market. (…) Sonos’ “Trade Up” program is meant to offer its customers an incentive to upgrade, which, naturally, benefits Sonos the most — by reeling customers with older devices back into a new product lifecycle.
Kottke collected some videos on a technology used by Disney to create realistic three dimensional scenes. Well worth looking at the explainer and exmples videos here.
The basic idea is that instead of animating characters against a single static background, you can animate several layers of independently moving scenes painted on glass. In a 1957 film, Walt Disney himself explained how the camera worked:
Martha Claeys heeft een mooi essay geschreven op de Bij Nader Inzien blog over schaamte en schuldgevoelens wanneer we het vliegtuig nemen. Haar artikel geeft een goed overzicht over de filosofische problemen, maar ook het nut van deze gevoelens. Lees het volledige artikel hier.
Het is niet omdat groene schaamte niet de meest efficiënte manier is om duurzamer te leven, dat het niet ook waarde kan hebben. Bovendien is de individuele nood aan verandering noodzakelijk om structurele veranderingen af te kunnen dwingen. Er moet immers draagvlak zijn voor maatregelen die ook voor die 100 grootste vervuilers gelden. Er moet een publieke vraag zijn. Schaamte maakt die vraag dringend.
The title of the following Vox video is a bit misleading. In fact, the video provides an excellent history on the creation of the fisheye lens and its use in music photography and videos. At the end of the video it even goes into a bit of semiotics, with the images allowing multiple or mediated interpretations for different people.
The following video of Vox explores the technique of rotoscoping, used by animators to create realistic motions: “Invented by Max Fleischer of Fleischer Studios (and echoed and practiced by many others), it involves taking filmed footage and using it as a traceable model for animation. The results are fluid and natural in a way animation had never been before.”
Fun article by Kerim Friedman on the semiotics of bubble tea in Taiwan.
An opinion piece in the New York Times by Professor of sociology Eric Klinenberg on the value of public libraries. As someone who loves libraries, I fully agree with his observations. Read his full piece at the NYT Sunday Review.
Libraries are an example of what I call “social infrastructure”: the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact. Libraries don’t just provide free access to books and other cultural materials, they also offer things like companionship for older adults, de facto child care for busy parents, language instruction for immigrants and welcoming public spaces for the poor, the homeless and young people.
Drew Austin writes at Real Life magazine on the new Airpods. Didn’t quite know how they actually worked and make it possible to keep them on all the time. Definitely seeing increasing use everywhere I go, and he makes some great points on how this technology is shaping our social interactions:
AirPods foster a different approach to detachment: Rather than mute the surrounding world altogether, they visually signal the wearer’s choice to perpetually relegate the immediate environment to the background. The white earbuds create what Kantrowitz calls the AirPod Barrier, a soft but recognizable obstacle to interpersonal interaction not unlike that of phone usage. While staring at a phone suggests that attitude indirectly, AirPods formalize it, expressing potential distractedness in a more sustained and effortless manner. You don’t have to look down at a screen to convey that your mind might be elsewhere — that you are dividing your attention between your physical surroundings and other kinds of interactions, hearing other voices. AirPods efficiently communicate your refusal to pretend to be “fully present.” AirPods, then, express a more complete embrace of our simultaneous existence in physical and digital space, taking for granted that we’re frequently splitting our mental energy between the two.
Last Sunday I saw a great documentary in the “Tegenlicht” series from the Dutch VPRO television station. The title of this episode is “Mijn Bullshitbaan” and it gives an overview of the work of the anthropologist David Graeber on “bullshit jobs” through interview segments with him and examples from the experience of different people in the Netherlands. I could relate to quite a few things from my own professional career. Have a look at the full episode here.
Photographer Ignacio Evangelista has made a beautiful series titled “After Schengen” where he photographed old border control checkpoints between EU Member States that are no longer in service since the Schengen agreement. See the full series here.
These places that prior the Schengen treaty, delimited territories and in which the traveler had to stop and show his documents, currently appear as abandoned places, located in a space-time limbo, out of use and out of the time for which they were designed, as these states have opened their borders to the free movement of people. The observation of these places in the present time, gives them a dimension related to viewing and reading of some episodes in recent history, with the passing of time and memory in the landscape. These quasi- archaeological ruins have become part of the current landscape, forming a presence of the past that lies dormant in the present.
Read more about the project in this article from Bloomberg.