There are very few sports from which the language of the everyday almost always borrows and to which it seldom lends.
Usually the vocabularies of sport and the everyday are cooperative. Baseball, for instance, names the plate towards which all offensive action is oriented “home”. And I don’t think I need to mention even one of the thousands of metaphors we’ve re-borrowed from baseball and other sports back into our descriptions of everyday lived existence.
Hurdling is different. The origin of the word “hurdle” may be traced back to the rectangular wicker frameworks which continue to be used for temporary fences and were formerly used to carry the condemned to execution. The first hurdlers, then, merely dragged a bunch of heavy baskets onto a track and raced through—and over—them.
This is no borrowing of signifier to label a new signified. In baseball, runs aren’t scored by players being literally safe at home (although the meaning of “home” is subject to debate). The sport of hurdling instead provides a new meaning for an old, wicker object. The Rortian ironist in me wonders what the sport would be called today if those first hurdlers had instead been in possession of a bunch of permanent fences.
And because the everyday meaning of the word “hurdle” springs straight into English from the sport itself, would we be without yet another word to describe a “problem” or “obstacle”? Don’t we need all of those synonyms we can get?
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Of course maps tell a story. But while cartographers like John Krygier and Cindy Brewer offer us resources for making good maps, how do we tell better stories?
According to This American Life’s Ira Glass, a good story consists of three basic components:
1. Begin almost self-consciously in media res, with an unrelenting anecdote full of “and then…and then…and then…” forward motion.
2. This forward motion is achieved by a stream of questions constantly raised and answered by the sections introduced by each “and then.”3. Reflect upon what it all means.
I wonder if referring in the body of a written work to a map that stands apart from that body is antithetical to good storytelling. I like the approach taken by Edward Tufte, who often introduces his maps and graphics with a simple comma, as he would introduce any words relevant to the preceding paragraph. I once thought this choice was to spare readers from the time and effort of searching for Map 2-1 (previous page) or Table 3-5 (appendix).
I realize now Tufte’s respect for the pace and timing of a good story.
The road to Hengelo is paved with good inventions. The Dutch town [map, wiki, official] is paving a local road with green bricks containing “a titanium dioxide-based additive” that “binds the nitrogren oxide particles emitted by car exhausts and turns them into harmless nitrates” when sunlight is added to the mix.
This is the first test outside of University of Twente laboratories and I’m anxious to hear about the results. I’d like to see more small towns in the United States welcome experiments such as this one.
The University of Twente’s press release and a picture of the bricks may be found here.
If you’re an idiot like me and forget to save your HTML/CSS/whatever and then you make some changes you don’t like, save them in Wordpress, and then can’t remember how to change things back—remember, you’re an idiot like me—then the best thing to do is to find your website in a Google search and go to the cached version of your page.
Hit Command-U to see the source code of that page and paste whatever’s necessary back over your mistake in your editor. This is all assuming you haven’t screwed up this bad since the last time your page was cached.
I’ve spent a busy Friday afternoon preparing to move to Delaware, which is only an hour’s drive from Baltimore, a city I hope to visit several times (if only to see Camden Yards). Last month Steve Rose of The Guardian’s architecture bureau argued that, for all the gritty acting and tangled storylines, the built environment of Baltimore plays the most important role.
The author quotes Bodie Broadus, who rails against modernism in the third season, as a 1960s era housing project is demolished:
“They gonna tear this building down and they’re gonna build some new shit - but people? They don’t give a fuck about people.”
During NBC’s coverage of the Olympics tonight, they paid tribute to the moments during The Games when warring nations’ athletes have come together in peaceful competition. The host reminded us that the “Blood in the Water” polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics—not a month since the end of the deadly Hungarian Revolution of 1956—was anything but friendly:
From the beginning, the match was very physical with kicks and punches being exchanged. At one point the Hungarian captain, Dezs? Gyarmati, caught a Russian opponent with a sucker punch that was caught on film. Meanwhile, the young Hungarian player Zádor scored two goals to the ‘Hajrá Magyarok!’ (Go Hungarians!) cheers of the crowd.
Going into the final minutes of the game, when Hungary was leading 4–0, Zádor was marking Valentin Prokopov, with whom he had several verbal exchanges, abusing his family, etc. At one point when Zádor looked away, Prokopov hit him with a powerful fist, causing a deep bleeding gash above the right eye. Zádor was forced to leave the pool, and his bleeding face was the final straw for a crowd which was already in a frenzy. Many angry spectators jumped on to the concourse beside the water, shook their fists, shouted abuse and spat at the Russians[3]. To avoid a riot breaking out, police entered the arena with one minute to go and shepherded the crowd away.
Hungary beat the USSR 4–0 in that match and eventually beat Yugoslavia to secure their fourth gold medal in 5 Olympics. Hungary medaled each of the 12 Olympics from 1928–1980, did not place at all from 1980–1996, and have recently reconstructed a dynasty, with gold-medals in the past two Games.
I would like to see a map plotting the medals earned in water polo at the Summer Olympics over time, to really illustrate the eastward creep of the sport’s center-mass of talent.
According to a Google Search, installment 1
According to a Google search, to what person, story, or occurrence is each year in my lifetime most linked? The following is a list the top hits for Google searches done for each year from 1979 to 2008. I have two rules: the first is that I will not count links to websites that just contain a list of things that happened that year; the second, that I will count websites for people, stories, or occurrences that may not even have happened during the year in question.
2008 — US Presidential election
2007 — The 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering, in Istanbul
2006 — Where the Hell is Matt?
2005 — The UN Human Development Report
2002 — The Novel Prize in Chemistry
2000 — US Presidential election
1998 — The Nobel Prize in Physics
1995 — US Department of Health & Human Services’ 1995 press releases
1993 — The Nobel Prize in Physics
1992 — The US Presidential election
1991 — The Nobel Prize in Medicine
1989 — The Nobel Prize in Economics
1988 — The 1988 US Presidential debates between George Bush and Michael Dukakis
1987 — The Nobel Prize in Physics
1986 — The Nobel Prize in Economics
1985 — Bowling For Soup’s 1985
1984 — George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
1983 – US Code: Title 42, 1983. Civil action for deprivation of rights.
1982 — Entrez Gene: EIF4G2 eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4 gamma, 2 [Homo sapiens] GeneID: 1982
1981 — The Nobel Prize in Economics
1980 — 1980 games, “old online video and arcade games for free.”
1979 — The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979
Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address wins for 1978, by the way.
I’ve found and perfected (and it’s still not quite there yet) a Yahoo Pipe that takes in longer feed items and spits out versions containing only the title and the first paragraph. I usually hate this from my feeds (the New York Times, for instance), but some sites update so frequently and contain information that’s so time-sensitive I’d hate to pass them through a service like aideRSS.
Feel free to clone my Pipe and input the RSS feed of your choice. If it’s not working correctly, look at how the feed’s code is structured. You’ll need to cut it right after whatever code lets the machine know the first paragraph is finished and it’s time to skip a line and go to the next paragraph.
A friend from college was here yesterday for another friend’s party. He studies linguistics at the University of Illinois and we had a good conversation on his Ph.D. dissertation, a study of Parisian residents’ perceptions of other Parisian residents’ ways of speaking. I eventually steered things towards one of my side-interests: what it has meant to be cool, historically, and the origins of what is cool in contemporary America. I think a good idea for a book—an academic text with an eye towards popular readership—would be a genealogy of cool, spatially, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically.
I’ve always wanted to know a) what the concept of cool was (if any) in the 16th century Polish hinterland (for instance) and b) who influenced what was cool there. I’m pretty sure no concept of cool can exist without massive amounts of leisure time and some sort of print media, so it must be relatively new (note that I’m not referring to what is known as “popularity”).
I’d like to find evidence of when occurred the shift during which people in the United States and Europe stopped obsessed over the things their economic-elite were buying and doing and saying and began to care more about what their immigrants and impoverished were buying and doing and saying. Were the former Irish and German residents of our inner-cities as “cool” as the current residents of our urban cores? Was it like that in 16th Century Poland?
Creative Commons Licensed photo credit: Pesterussa
In a Marginal Revolution post considering some different ways of getting at one question—why are some countries free while others are not?—Tyler Cowen wonders why buildings in the historical district of Oamaru, New Zealand [map, websites one & two] remind him of Chilean urban architecture, leading him to question “what that means for the current Latin economic pecking order.”
Top photo of Oamaru, New Zealand, taken by: GothPhil
Bottom photo of Santiago, Chile, taken by: monadc
Gordon Brown attemps an end-run on the media gatekeepers by launching his own TV station, Number10T.
Cidade dos Logos has collected dozens of country logos, most of which are for popular tourist destinations. I’m surprised at the number that have an almost hand-drawn feel to them.
For the month of May, retail sales growth in London (+3.5%) far exceeded expectations (-0.1%). Everybody’s congratulating the weather.
“I’m staggered,” said Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec. “The figures are just on a completely different plane compared to market expectations. They contradict other anecdotal evidence suggesting retail sales activity is softening. There are bound to be questions about whether they reflect a true picture of activity and they will raise speculation of rate hikes.”
Brian Hilliard at Société Générale said: “It is amazing. I cannot believe this is a reflection of the underlying trend. A stunning number. We suspect weather as the explanation.”
The illustration of Rod Hunt is wondrously nostalgic; he draws cities, mostly, in a style that reminds me of illustrated childrens’ almanacs.
Kids in England are using Google Earth to find potentially untended swimming pools in which to have Facebook-organized dips with their friends. My parents’ pool is in the middle of this map. Let’s have a party there next Tuesday night. View Larger Map