DubiousDesigns

I’m so….I’m just so so sorry for this. 

After a week long debacle, I finally have the site back up and running, no thanks to 1and1’s lousy customer service. I imagine they’re much like the dog in this post. 

Films like Fast Food Nation and Gasland introduced critiques of the food industry and fracking to a broad audience. But as of yet, the active transportation movement has lacked a full-length documentary feature that screens widely in theaters or goes viral on Netflix.

Fredrik Gertten, a Swedish filmmaker with two full-length documentaries under his belt, hopes his film Bikes vs Cars — trailer above — just could be that film. Gertten’s first film – Bananas! — prompted a defamation lawsuit by Dole Food Company. The lawsuit is the subject of his second film, Big Boys Gone Bananas! (Gertten ultimately won.)

Gertten is trying to raise $50,000 before November 1 via Kickstarter to make a film focusing on the global bike movement. So far, it has brought in more than $24,000 in pledges. I caught up with him by Skype recently to learn more about the project:

Angie Schmitt: So I think the trailer sort of nails it. Can you tell us more about why you’re trying to raise this money?

Fredrik Gertten: My last film opened at Sundance and we’ve been playing at all the major festivals, so we have the ability to make a big splash if we do it well. At the same time we, as anybody else in this world, have to fight for survival. It’s complicated when you talk about arts. Both my last films have played in 80 countries and every single state in the U.S.

Documentaries now, is a very strong genre and so they really reach out. We are kind of stuck we have like 50 percent finances. We need a Kickstarter to get moving again.

AS: What’s going to be the gist of the film?

FG: I read a survey about young people, what their biggest worries were, and they were all about climate change. I mean so much that they had pains in their stomach every week. And at the same time the [auto] industry is rolling like nothing ever happened. I mean in Europe and the United States car sales aren’t going up anymore, but in the rest of the world … I’m kind of interested in the mechanisms that make us not change when we know that we should change.

The car industry, the oil industry, the construction industry, they’re all lobbying for all this really big-scale urban planning, so they just push for no change. So that’s what I’m interested in: those forces. I’m also looking into the lobby.

AS: So the car lobby will be part of your focus?

FG: Yes, because they’re very influential in making the changes that are needed. So that’s something I’m looking into but I’m also looking into the bike activists. Because the bike activists are not kind of a traditional political force. A lot of people are just people that started to go on the night ride somewhere and got a passion for bikes and then one day they decided, ‘you know what, if I can do this on a Friday or in evening, maybe I can do this on a Monday to my work.’ And then are out in very dangerous traffic, they also become politicized, because then they have to enter into debate about city planning. We also know that there are more bicyclists killed in traffic than ever before because there are more bikes on the streets now. These people who are not traditional political people, they get political and they are now becoming a very important force in many cities for better city planning.

The Brazilian girl in the trailer says, “this is not a war, it’s a city.” The title is, of course, provocative but for me it’s the war between two kinds of city planning, where one kind of machine took away all space. That’s something you see a lot of time in America. It’s a fight for space. In many places there is no space left anymore.

If you drive through the big American cities, you can see these big car pool lanes, and there’s no cars in the carpool lane. So there is one person in every car, and together they can consume all the space. Imagine if you 100 years ago said, ‘oh in the future we will all be sitting in big boxes and we’re not going anywhere, we won’t get anywhere because we’re all waiting for each other.’ Somebody, a professor in L.A. said that if you put all the space created for cars and you put it flat out in L.A., it would cover 80 percent of the livable area. Can you imagine selling that idea? People would say it was crazy.

I think this is a result of the lobby. They have been lobbying for suburban housing and for suburban shopping and for more cars and more streets and we shouldn’t blame the guy in the car because most of us are sometimes forced to drive by car. We are all victims of a very poor city planning, and of city planning that is kind of lobbied for by mighty forces. We know that we shouldn’t consume that much oil. But we cannot just keep going. The only answer is the people that would lose if we change, they invest so much to keep it going, in publicity and lobby and PR.

In the US, 25 percent of all trips are less than 1 miles, 40 percent are less than two miles. People could keep their cars, if they need to go further, longer distances, then have a car, but they could maybe try to go by bicycle to buy the milk or have coffee with their friends instead. In most of the United States, city planning is totally car based. So it’s very hard for people, it’s not an easy change, but it’s not impossible.

A number I would like to play with in this film … I live in Malmö, which is a really bike friendly city rated like number 7 in the world in bikes. But our neighbor, right near by, Copenhagen 40 percent commutes on bike every day. Take 40 percent and move it to any big American city or all big American cities, and you could say, wow if we had 40 percent less cars, imagine the oil consumption or the climate effect it would have and it’s totally mindblowing. This is an existing utopia, it actually exists and it works.

IT’S LIKE PENGUIN POOOOOP ON YOUR WEDDING DAY! - Alanis Morissette

bestrooftalkever:

chazraps:

bassclefsoup:

marxrecords:

capitalism

irony

The Haters silencing the silencing of the Haters.

Music jokes!

Attn: Sara who reads my blog sometimes.

Shelly wasn’t prepared for the helicopter’s natural defenses. 

When the TSA in 2010 introduced the swabbing of some passengers’ hands to detect for explosive residue, we got a call from CNN asking if we’d tell them on camera what we thought of it from a privacy standpoint. It seemed to us that particle sniffers particularly tuned to detect explosives were not a significant invasion of privacy, and that the intrusion of having a government agent swab one’s hand was not significant. Especially in comparison to many of the other airline security measures then (and still) being pushed by the TSA, this was a measure that seemed to represent a good balance between effectiveness and intrusiveness.

But we have learned all too well that if something can be abused, it probably will be abused, so in our role as watchdogs we tried to anticipate any problems that might arise. As CNN wrote in their story (the video is here):

The American Civil Liberties Union has "always supported explosive detection as a good form of security that doesn't really invade privacy," said Jay Stanley….

Stanley said the ACLU is chiefly concerned that the TSA does not discriminate when selecting people for enhanced screening—something the agency said it does not do—and that it treat people with dignity.

"We would not want to see it implemented in a discriminatory fashion, for example, in a disproportionate way against Muslims and Arabs or, for example, people with red hair or anything else. Security experts from across the spectrum will tell you that that's not just unfair and unjust and not the American way, it's also a terrible way to do security," Stanley said.

Swabbing also should not be used to test for nonsecurity-related contraband, such as drugs, he said. "Under the Constitution, searches in airports are only for the purpose of protecting the security of airline transportation; they are not general law enforcement stops. And so it wouldn't be permissible for the government to use these trace portal detectors to look for drugs," Stanley said.

In short, we added three caveats to our endorsement: no discrimination, only test for explosives, and don’t treat people like criminals just because the machine says they’re a positive. What I said on that third point is that these machines are known to generate false positives when detecting traces of certain everyday substances such as heart medicines and fertilizers, that positive results of these tests are likely in almost all cases to be false positives, and that travelers who are the subject of such positive results should not be treated as presumptive terrorists or otherwise treated poorly. (CNN summed up this point as “treat people with dignity.”)

Now, via Gawker, comes an account (laid out in an extensive blog entry) that suggests at least two of our fears were not misplaced.

According to Aditya Mukerjee, a New York City scientist, he was traveling to Los Angeles for a vacation with his family when a TSA swab of his hand turned up positive (later conjectured to be due to contact he’d had with some bed-bug spray). As a result, he was detained for four hours; interrogated repetitively throughout that time by agents from the TSA, the NYPD, DHS, the FBI, and JetBlue security, among others; interrogated about his religious beliefs and practices; and denied access to food or water, despite repeated requests for water.

Of course, unlike many incidents we’ve seen, in which people are questioned on no basis whatsoever, Mukerjee did trip up a particle detector, and so it may have been reasonable that he was subjected to some additional search.

But reporters should ask the TSA whether the average American who happens to trip up a swab because they’ve come into contact with particles of one kind or another that generate false-positives should expect to undergo this kind of treatment.

If the answer is yes, that’s bad news and Americans need to know it. If the answer is no, then that just confirms what seems clear according to Mukerjee’s account: he was the victim of discrimination because of his ethnicity. Although he is a Hindu, some of his interrogators made clear they thought he was Muslim. He writes that an FBI agent told him,

“You’ll have to understand, when a person of your… background walks into here, travelling alone, and sets off our alarms, people start to get a bit nervous. I’m sure you’ve been following what’s been going on in the news recently. You’ve got people from five different branches of government all in here—we don’t do this just for fun.”

Invasive questioning of perceived Muslims about their religious beliefs and practices is an abuse we have long seen at the border.

As Gawker examines in more depth, although Mukerjee was eventually cleared by the government agents, he was also denied boarding by JetBlue and had to book an expensive last-minute flight on another airline.

How I feel whenever someone tries to show me that Miley Cyrus performance from the VMAs.

My least favorite chore.

i saw Pacific Rim

I spent most of the movie with my feet up on the seat, screaming into my jacket

in a good way

like it’s been a while since I’ve been sucked facefirst into a movie and it beat me into a pulp with awesomeness

go see this movie is what I’m saying here

quadrangledreality:

godofidea:

The Generation We Love To Dump On by Matt Bors

THANK YOU

“At $10 an hour you’d have to work 1,250 hours to cover the UW’s $12,500 tuition (more, once...

“LYDEN: You commissioned a dozen studies on women in media from the Annenberg School at USC. Some of the figures just really boggled the imagination when you think that women are half of all moviegoers. If we didn’t go to the movies, maybe this would make more sense. But we turn out in droves.

DAVIS: I know. It really does boggle the mind. In family films and kids television shows, for every one female character, there are three male characters. But lest people think that it’s all bad news, we were able to see an increase in the percentage of female characters in family films, such that if we add female characters at the rate we have been for the past 20 years, we will achieve parity in 700 years.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIS: And my institute, we have dedicated ourselves to cutting that in half. And we will not rest until it’s only 350 years.

LYDEN: Why is this the case?

DAVIS: My theory is that since all anybody has seen when they are growing up is this big imbalance that the movies that they’ve watched are about, let’s say, five-to-one as far as female presence is concerned. That’s what starts to look normal. And let’s think about in difference segments of society - 17 percent of cardiac surgeons are women, 17 percent of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

LYDEN: I wonder what the impact is of all of this lack of female representation.

DAVIS: We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

LYDEN: Oh, my goodness.

DAVIS: So is it possible that 17 percent women has become so comfortable and so normal that that’s just sort of unconsciously expected?

LYDEN: Why else, Geena Davis, do these kinds of disparities matter?

DAVIS: What we’re in effect doing is training children to see that women and girls are less important than men and boys. We’re training them to perceive that women take up only 17 percent of the space in the world. And if you add on top of that that so many female characters are sexualized, even in things that are aimed at little kids, that’s having an enormous impact as well.”

- NPR, “Casting Call: Hollywood Needs More Women" [x] (via mswyrr)

It's no surprise that Hideo Kojima, maker of games about people, giant robots and war would like a new summer blockbuster about people, giant robots and monsters. (Hey, two out of three...) It is nevertheless refreshing to see how gleeful the Metal Gear mastermind is about next week's Guillermo Del Toro action flick, Pacific Rim.

Because this is the year 2013, Kojima has given his appraisal of Pacific Rim via Twitter.

Dear twitter friends, The followings are my comment regarding "Pacific Rim". Luckily I was allowed to tweet in public by WB.

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

I have never imagined that I would be fortunate enough to see a film like this in my life.

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

The emotional rush I had inside me was the same kind I had when I felt the outer space via "2001: A Space Odyssey" and....

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

and when I had touched the dinosaur in "Jurassic Park". Animation and special effects movies and shows that I loved in my childhood days -

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

they all truly exist in the screen. Director Guillermo del Toro offers this spectacular vision of massive kaijus and robots in PACIFIC RIM.

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

This film is not simply a film to be respected, but most importantly, it let us dream the future of entertainment movies.

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

Pacific Rim is the ultimate otaku film that all of us had always been waiting for. Who are you, if you are Japanese and won't watch this?

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

I hope you would accept this inspirational love letter that had traveled across the Pacific, written by Director Guillermo del Toro.

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) July 5, 2013

---

And if you don't want to take Kojima's word for it, heres the word of that of the expert of things that are the greatest of all time, Kanye West.

I saw a pre-screening of Pacific Rim yesterday and it's easily one of my favorite movies of all time.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) July 4, 2013

This is not another "Robot" movie. Guillermo del Toro is a master.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) July 4, 2013

gifcraft:

Source video: Lost in Motion

Vader's Little Princess

Are you Dark Lord looking for a book that truly captures the joys, trials, and tribulations of raising a daughter. Vader's Little Princess from the NeatoShop is for you. This irresistibly sweet book follows Darth Vader as he raises Princess Leia. Witness Vader partake in tea parties. See how he refuses to let Leia leave the house in a skirted metal bikini. Raising a daughter in any galaxy can be so hard.

Vader's Little Princess is by Jeffrey Brown and features hilarious full-color illustrations. Darth Vader and Son also available. Buy both and make it an amazing set. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Star Wars items. 

Link

This Toronto Sun article by Julia Alexander is simply bad comedy: a Sun reporter – and for those of you not aware, the Sun is the most conservative paper in the city, a right-wing tabloid rag that makes a point of showing off nearly-naked girls on page five every day – starts out by declaring how she hates cyclists, and then in a spontaneous fit of journalism actually decides to try out cycling downtown. At this point she learns that, whoops, cyclists have it way worse than drivers, and spends two hours scared out of her mind. But, because she is a Sun reporter, Ms. Alexander’s final conclusion is this:

I used to hate cyclists, but I don’t anymore. I understand them, but for things to get better, they need to start understanding drivers, like myself, have needs too.

At which point you just have to throw up your hands and say “no, what actually needs to happen is that you need to fuck off.” Because cyclists understand drivers perfectly well. Most of us do drive cars on occasion, you know; most cyclists are not rabid environmentalists to the point of refusing to drive. We know what it is like to drive a car, and we also know that the majority of drivers simply do not give a shit about cyclists. We know this via statistics and we know it via experience.

This is generally the point where some well-meaning driver just exclaims in frustration that no, they really do care, they just wish cyclists would obey traffic laws. But any experienced cyclist knows this is bullshit, because it is a tossup at any given time whether drivers get pissed at you for disobeying traffic laws or pissed at you for obeying traffic laws. I have literally had drivers get out of their car and shout at me when I was waiting for them to advance at a stop sign. Cyclists know that it is simply a tossup as to whether a driver gets pissed at you for trying to execute a proper and legal left turn or if they get pissed at you because you choose to cross with the pedestrian crossing because you’ve been nearly killed too many times trying to execute proper and legal left turns. It is up to each driver’s individual whimsy! What fun!

Of course, all of this assumes that the driver deigns to acknowledge your existence in the first place, and that itself is a hit-or-miss proposition to say the least. Ms. Alexander confesses that she often opens her door into traffic without checking first, and since the two times I have come closest to getting killed while on my bike were because of drivers dooring me in my goddamn neck and causing me to collapse over towards the middle of the road, I will at least note that she is being honest about something that I think causes more cyclists to think murderous thoughts than any other, but that is all the credit she gets because, you know, there were those near-death experiences and I’m still a little put out about them. Ms. Alexander explains them away in this manner:

Ironically, drivers and cyclists share a similar concern — survival. Cyclists don’t want to be hit by an oncoming vehicle and drivers don’t want to hit them.

Which: no, we don’t share a similar concern. Cyclists are concerned about their own survival. Drivers, when they are concerned about cyclists at all – and again, this is very much a hit or miss proposition – are concerned about somebody else’s survival, and I shouldn’t have to explain that worrying about somebody else’s safety is not the same thing as worrying about your own. If those two things were equivalent then Ms. Alexander wouldn’t be opening her goddamned car door into traffic without looking, or doing all of the other stupid, negligent things drivers do every day when they operate their vehicles, which in case we have forgotten are large and dangerous enough to be able to kill somebody when they are only moving fifteen kilometers per hour.

And this is the thing: I drive as well, and I get it. Driving has become more and more stressful over the years; I would not be surprised to find that the incidence of road rage has increased at basically the same rate that the real median wage has decreased, because the more costly any accident becomes for an individual, the more they personalize their driving experience – where an accident in decades past might have been unfortunate but livable, now an accident means an often-unaffordable increase in insurance premiums and the loss of something vital to many people’s jobs.

More to the point: driving is very, very easy to fuck up! Forgetting to check your blind spot, not signalling a turn, sudden dangerous stops, not obeying traffic signs properly – every driver alive does something wrong at least once per day, because there are simply so many things you can get wrong. On my bike ride home from work each day, I see at least three or four “rolling stops” at stop signs – hey, they’re only stop signs! Really, if I had a nickel for every basic driver error I see each day, I could go buy my own private island, pave it and cycle around on that instead.

But just because I understand that driving is stressful and much more difficult than people assume doesn’t mean I’m sympathetic to this article’s position that this is a teachable moment for all concerned. Because it isn’t. The problem is not cyclists. Yeah, there are a few asshole cyclists out there, but there’s a few assholes everywhere: most cyclists are generally law-abiding. The problem is drivers, because the root of the problem is that every driver wishes that they had the road to themselves, and unlike their relationship with other drivers, the relationship a driver has with a cyclist is inherently an imbalanced one.

So don’t come to me, as a cyclist, and tell me I need to “understand drivers.” Because I understand what drivers want from cyclists. They want them not to be there.

Hyperlapse photography involves shooting a series of photographs over large distances and then stringing the photos together into a time-lapse video that zooms the viewer through the locations. Creating a real hyperlapse involves quite a bit of work, so the folks over at Teehan+Lax Labs decided to go virtual by turning to Google Street View to source the necessary photos.

The gorgeous hyperlapse video above was created entirely using Google Street View photos, and shows the locations visited by the Street View camera van in a way that’s very different from what you see through your browser.

That’s not all, though. In addition to creating the video above, the team actually developed a web app that can let you easily make your own!

It’s called Google Street View Hyperlapse. All you need to do is pick two points on a map using an “A” and “B” marker.

Once you have the start and end points selected, simply hit the “Create” button to have your hyperlapse video generated!

To keep the server load low (which lets more people enjoy the app), the team decided to limit the online generator to 60 frames per animation. However, if you’d like to play around with the app more seriously, they’ve actually open sourced the whole thing on GitHub. As long as you’re a bit handy with code, you’ll be able to play around with higher frame rates, better image quality, and even introduce fancy camera movements to your hyperlapse!

Google Street View Hyperlapse (via Teehan+Lax Labs via Doobybrain)

SF editor’s note: This video features plenty of examples of San Francisco’s stressful bicycling streets — the kind that the SFMTA hopes to transform in its Bicycle Strategy. The agency has determined that only 10 percent of the city’s bike network is “comfortable for most people.”

Last December I traveled to Amsterdam for the first time. I don’t ride a bike, but as a pedestrian, to be surrounded by human-oriented infrastructure (see these Streetfilms) was a little like visiting another planet. And the strangest part was how normal it was. In the Netherlands, bikes are about as controversial as umbrellas, and only once in eight days did I feel threatened by a driver.

From BicycleDutch, this critique of street conditions in the U.S. flips this dynamic on its head. You’ll chuckle and cringe as the narrator calmly eviscerates typical American bike “infra.” (See? Even their descriptors are more elegant.)

On the other hand, he seems impressed that American cyclists have the fortitude to ride the streets at all, and that bike lanes are “popping up everywhere.”

What do you think, Amerikanen?