Cooper Griggs

In his latest exhibition, “The Future Was Then,”  Daniel Arsham (previously here and here) carved a path through the SCAD Museum of Art’s Pamela Elaine Poetter Gallery utilizing a series of faux concrete walls. The 300-foot-long series of walls starts with the cutout of an abstract shape roughly the size of a human body. As one looks at the progression of carvings and walls, the holes begin to form a representational shape, ending in the fully formed outline of a life-size human.

The “Wall Excavation” installation explores how mankind interacts with architecture, continuously building and destroying the walls around them. This central installation points to this idea directly, showing the path of destruction around a singular human form. By standing between the carved walls, visitors can literally place themselves in the the timeline of our intimate history with architecture, finding their own place amidst the excavated exhibition.

You can follow Arsham’s work on Twitter and Instagram, and learn more about his collaborative art and architecture project Snarkitecture here. “The Future Was Then” will be on display at SCAD through July 24, 2016. (via Designboom)

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Last month, I published an interactive visualization that simulates how and when you will die. It reached millions of people worldwide, and I basically had one eye glued to the real-time traffic dashboard for a week. It was kind of nuts.

A few days in, I woke up and checked the stats. The Daily Mail was in the referral list. I clicked through to the article and my interactive was fully embedded on the page, which was strange because I didn't give permission to do that.

To be clear, this wasn't just screenshots or an animated GIF that showed your life moving along. It was the interactive visualization embedded with an iframe so that Daily Mail readers would stay on the tabloid site to take the “test” created by “Professor Yau.” FYI: I have a PhD, but I'm not a professor, and I'm not especially thrilled I got to see my work reduced to some online quiz, but okay.

Never mind that now. The point is that The Daily Mail lifted my visualization and slapped it on their site. This is what it looked like:
 

 

I was especially confused because just the day before, Stuff.co.nz did the same thing with my visualization (without my permission), so I put in safeguards on both my server and the visualization page itself. Here's me being really mature:
 

 

I made an alert pop up that said “poop” whenever someone loaded the Stuff.co.nz page. Like I said, I'm sophisticated.

So how did Daily Mail embed the visualization without the word “poop” popping up on an empty page? They downloaded all the files from my server on to their own server and deleted the snippet that brought up a poop alert. That way they didn't have to deal with those pesky safeguards I setup.

In other words, The Daily Mail deliberately stole my work.

What.

Who does this?

I open up my email for the first time that day to tell someone over there to take down the visualization. I notice there's an email from The Daily Mail asking for permission sent at 1:44am PST. I was sleeping. So obviously I couldn't give a yes or a no. Instead of waiting for a response, The Daily Mail article went up a couple of hours later at 3:38am PST. Apparently a non-response means all systems go and steal everything.

Anyways, I email back after I get my son ready for the day and take him to school. The response is basically oops, sorry, we didn't know.

I doubt it.

Do a search for The Daily Mail stealing things — photos, articles, and apparently visualization — and it's clearly their M.O. to take from others. For example, note this tidbit from the New York Times:

One former Daily Mail reporter who declined to be identified for fear it would prevent him from continuing to work as a journalist said that when he started working at the paper, his job required him to rewrite articles that ran in other papers.

Also: Did I mention this is the second time The Daily Mail stole from me? In February 2015, I made an interactive map that compared the best and worst commutes, and I got a similar permission request from The Daily Mail. They asked “to see if we can have permission to grab some visuals generated from this page.”

So, screenshots, right? I said fine, as I typically do with these sort of requests. Then The Daily Mail did this:
 

 

They didn't just screenshot the map. They didn't just embed the map itself. They iframed my entire site, which is why the FlowingData logo and header appear on their site. Yay for hosting bills to pay.

Wait.

What.

Who does this? The Daily Mail.

Side note: The way I have my own site setup, this was technically an iframe within an iframe. I feel like I should get some spinning top award or something.

Anyways, this is why when they emailed me a couple of weeks before for an “embed link” to show a different interactive on causes of death by age, I didn't respond. They didn't do anything that time. So I probably would've done the same for the simulation graphic had I been awake, but I suppose from now on I will have to respond with a “no thank you” to make it clear. I don't want another non-response mistaken as something else.

Why has this behavior continued for the past several years? I have no idea. I'm a one-man shop with limited time, energy, and resources to figure this stuff out, which is why it took me so long just to write this.

I'd rather be working with data or helping others work with data.

But maybe that's what The Daily Mail banks on. They take what they want, and if someone asks them to take it down later, they comply — after some page views.

What The Daily Mail does is wrong. It's dishonest. If a visualization creator, or any maker for that matter, doesn't include a snippet to embed on a different site, you don't go sniff around the source code for what you can ripoff.

So I write this in hopes that something good might come out of it, or to at least give a record of what's going on here. I am sure this is not the first time this happened to someone. Probably not the last. It already happened to me twice.

Tags: Daily Mail, theft

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dougiefromscotland:

and on the 8th day god created GIFS

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tastefullyoffensive:

Ass Hat

Using a clever mix of 3D printing and a few well-placed shadows, this sundial designed by Mojoptix projects the actual time as if displayed on a digital clock. The plastic component that casts the shadow—called a gnomon— is printed with extremely tiny holes that create pinpoint dots of light in the form of digits as the sun shines through during the day.

The sundial does have its limitations. The time only shows in 20 minute increments and it only works from 10am to 4pm during the day. Regardless, the results are no less miraculous when you see it in use in the video below (skip to around 13:00 to see it in motion).

The completed device is available for purchase here, or you can download the design files and print your own. (via My Modern Met)

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lunch

“It’s very difficult to go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a new ending.”

- James Sherman

“People think they think like scientists, but really they think like lawyers.”

-

UC Irvine’s Peter Ditto

“Scientists don’t care what the answer is: they look at the data and draw a conclusion,” said Ditto. “Lawyers know the conclusion they want to reach, then they harness a bunch of facts to support that conclusion.”

And this, according to Ditto, is how we construct our political facts (whether we realize we’re doing it or not).

(via ucresearch)

A frozen Lake Superior caused a major ice pile-up on the shores of Duluth, Minnesota on February 13th, its solid surface breaking into layers and layers of icy shards that ranged from 1/4″ to 3″ thick. The strangely satisfying scene was filmed by Dawn LaPointe of Radiant Spirit Gallery who captured the icy waves from several different angles from the lake’s coast. Watching the misty phenomena almost makes you appreciate a long winter… almost. (via Twisted Sifter)

at Goleta, California

Many thoughts on the wall
#santabarbara #california #food #restaurant #pennies #luckypenny (at Lucky Penny Santa Barbara)

Saber wave
#lightpainting

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