U.S. consumer spending barely rose and inflation was tame in July, offering a cautionary note on the economy as the Federal Reserve weighs cutting back its massive bond-buying program.
According to this article buying stuff "accounts for more than two-thirds
of U.S. economic activity." For more information on why the Fed is cutting back and how the Fed's cutting back on bond-buying may affect us, take a look at "The Effects of Tapering Off the FED’s Stimulus Program" at InflationData. If all this gab about economics is a big yawn for you, you're not alone. Keep in mind, though, that these factors do affect our quality of life. How about some cartoons to ward off the blahs? (Warning: they're a bit depressing, too.) All of the artwork below was found at U.S. News' economy cartoons section. ***
When I lived in Nevada I encountered individuals (aka 'desert rats') from time to time who lived off-the-grid. I've also met some off-gridders in northern California and, of course, there are homesteaders here in Alaska. Here's a sample of what living off-the-grid can be like: ***
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For some insight into why a person might go off-grid, this article -- How Living Off the Grid Works -- by Charles W. Bryant at HowStuffWorks gives a few reasons:
Around the same time each month, millions of Americans go to their mailboxes seeking the comforts of a handwritten letter or their favorite magazine only to be greeted by white envelopes with miniature cellophane windows. We're all familiar with these mailers -- power, water, gas and telephone bills, all conspiring to take your hard-earned money. For most people, paying utility bills is a tiresome and frustrating task. What if there was a way to get out from under the thumb of public utilities and produce your own sustainable energy? Well, there is. Going "off-grid" is becoming an increasingly popular choice for people looking to reduce their carbon footprint, assert their independence and avoid reliance on fossil fuels.
Some people are most interested in the independence part, particularly freedom from the current social environment, constant reminders of corporate greed, or the frustration of unresponsive government. Off-Grid.net, byline "free yourself," offers a wealth of information. Living off-the-grid is possibly a growing social movement: ***
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There are gentler ways to go off the energy grid than John Wells', such as Elaine Brook's revamping of an older house. ***
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If you'd like to keep track of developments in the design of solar, eco-friendly homes, there is a world-wide biennial solar decathlon sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Here's a recent video: ***
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Take a look at this walkthrough of Caltech's entry in 2011: ***
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Whether it's freedom from the power company or from the social environment you want, you have company.
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This video, featuring the artist, gives some good information about the nuts-and-bolts of artwork. And Park's observations about interstitial space are most interesting. ***
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Note how the dichroic film on the plexiglass pieces causes some interesting effects. Pieces in a panel at one angle are transparent, at another opaque and reflective and color-shifted. ***
An article at Buzzfeed -- "22 Dreamy Art Installations You Want to Live In" features Park's work as well. ***
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What it must feel like to work on a project like this for long hours, then finally see it installed in all its glory. The exhibit is scheduled to end August 30th.
These cartoons pretty much speak for themselves, so here they are -- without comments. Today's post takes its title from this cartoon by Joe Heller: ***
With school back in session the eternal struggle with keeping your books in order and yet accessible resumes. The stack of board-brick-board design is always an option, but there are other options too. Keep in mind that you'll be attending classes, doing homework (hopefully), and want to have a bit of a social life as well -- so best to keep the amount of work spent on setting up the book storage to a minimum.
Starting with the stack option, here's an example posted by The Crazy Craft Lady (the shelves are in the back, Pippa's in front). Best not to make the shelves more that 4 tiers high for safety's sake. ***
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Bookends are an alternative to shelves and there are lots of do-it-yourself projects for bookends online, but many of them look like they would be more annoying than functional. Steve Ramsey at Woodworking for Mere Mortals offers instructions for bookends that really work. They also look like a lot of work to make. ***
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With all this in mind, I'm opting for modular storage that can be stacked on the floor or on a desk or table top.
By far the simplest, most elegant design is Miso's X-shelf, found at Inhabitat. As far as I can tell this shelf is not offered for retail sale, so you'll have to build it. Looks pretty simple though -- a number of boards with slots in the middle and the short edges mitered. You might want to connect each X in some way; possibly with brass flat braces and brass screws. Take a look: ***
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A spice rack from Ikea might work for a few oft-used books, but it will have to be hung on the wall and there is likely a weight limit. Still, it's only $3.99 (shipping to San Francisco is $11.00); at Amazon the item costs $13.31. ***
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My final suggestion is modular storage cubes/systems. To me iCube is the most interesting. Amazon carries a fair selection of the brand, but I'm not seeing plain cubes without a center divider except in the four-cube kit for $76.57 (black). Individual cubes (with center shelves) average $15-16). ***
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Remember to put the heavier stuff toward the bottom of the stack.
According to the Wikipedia article Sandpainting is a time-honored art form, not always used just for purposes of display:
Unfixed sand paintings have a long established cultural history in numerous social groupings around the globe, and are often temporary, ritual paintings prepared for religious or healing ceremonies. It is also referred to as drypainting.
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The Navaho people call sandpaintings "places where the gods come and go;" and the figures in their paintings "are symbolic representations of a story in Navajo mythology." In Tibet mandala sandpainting is a sacred art by the Tibetan Lamas of Drepung Loseling Monastery, used to heal the Earth. ***
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There's also Japanese tray landscapes, called bonseki, with 3-dimensional elements, looking like miniature sculptures. A more permanent form is called bonga, meaning tray picture. ***
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Present day sandpainting techniques use sand as the medium for an artwork. After the sand is placed, varnish is applied to fix it, making the work more permanent. ***
I don't know about you, but I find this scarey: "T.S.A. Expands Duties Beyond Airport Security." Visions of a police state come to mind. According to the article, I'm not the only one alarmed:
With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.
T.S.A. and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.
This meme, popular with bloggers and originator unknown, sums it up well. ***
Despite lack of support from the Veteran's Administration, soldiers returning from war are finding a way to help themselves and each other. And it's heart-warming to see how they're doing it. You can find a detailed description of some groups' efforts in an article at Time online (open to the public) by Joe Klein, titled "Can Service Save Us?".
Quoting from Joe's article:
This self-help ethos stands in stark contrast to that of the more traditional military-related charities. Eric Greitens, the founder and CEO of the Mission Continues, is notoriously tough on veterans who come to him with service-related excuses. “People understand the tremendous sacrifices that veterans have made — and they instinctively want to do something for them,” he says. “And that sometimes leads people to give veterans an excuse: Oh, you didn’t show up for work on time. It must be that you have posttraumatic stress disorder. Oh, you’re disabled. Don’t even try. Or, you’re being a bad partner to your husband or wife, or a bad father or mother. It must be that you lost a bunch of friends. We simply do not accept those excuses.” Jake Wood has little tolerance for veterans who see themselves as victims. Posttraumatic stress is, he believes, a condition that can be battled and defeated. “If you’re out doing disaster relief,” Wood says, “you’re less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be thinking about the people you’re helping. You’re also presenting yourself, and other veterans, as a model, as a potential community leader.”
My favorite group of volunteer veterans is Team Rubicon. These guys put muscle and skills where needed. They helped clean up after Hurricane Sandy, the recent Oklahoma tornado, and other disasters -- as shown in this video. ***
*** The Mission Continues and Team Rubicon are not the only service-oriented groups out there. There's also All for Good (geared to local needs), ServeNet.org (offering youth opportunities to help and funding for projects), VolunteerMatch (a portal for matching volunteers with local causes), and Catchafire (a portal for professionals to volunteer their skills).
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This phrase, American Sublime, has caught the attention of poets and essayists alike. A poem by Wallace Stevens, titled "The American Sublime," has these lines:
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?
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But what intrigues me is that there's also an art movement by this name and that an art movement called Light and Space, which included Op Art, followed the tradition established by the American Sublime, which was mainly landscapes produced from 1820 to 1880. Three examples are shown throughout this post. xxx
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Even more intriguing is the work of artist James Turrell. Richard Lacayo, writing for Time Magazine, in the article (for subscribers only), "Prince of Light," brings all this jabber about art movements together nicely:
By the time he graduated in 1965 with a degree in perceptual psychology, the SoCal art scene was giving birth to the Light and Space movement. Artists like Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman and Douglas Wheeler were using light itself as their medium. In the process they were writing a new chapter in the long tradition of the American Sublime, the sense of awe before the bright dynamos of nature, conveyed largely through the sheer radiance that courses through American painting from 19th century landscape artists like Albert Bierstadt and Martin Johnson Heade to wide-screen abstractionists of the 20th century like Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.
Turrell's works centers on a fascination with light itself:
But it may be that not since God has anyone given so much thought to what light is and what can be done with it. Though Turrell's art doesn't insist on, or even encourage, spiritual interpretation, some of his earliest encounters with the idea of illumination came by way of his Quaker upbringing in Pasadena, Calif. The Quaker way of characterizing meditation as "going inside to greet the light" intrigued him. And as a native of sunny Southern California, he knew all about the light outside. Painting had always been in large part about the representation of light. Turrell wanted to drink from the tap. At art-history slide lectures at Pomona College in the early 1960s, he was as fascinated by the beam from the projector as he was by the slides. Maybe more. (Lacayo, Time Magazine)
And thus, in this one last quote, we come to what his art is about:
Turrell aimed to make art in which not just light but perception itself was his medium--the viewer's perception--works that prompt you to examine the very act of seeing as you do it.
So what does his work look like? Basically you have to walk through it and experience it. This image shows one of his earlier works and was produced by beam of white light projected into a darkened corner: xxx
There's an interesting piece of news today, Folks. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, just bought the Washington Post. His purchase and recent buy-outs of other newspapers are discussed in this article published by Forbes. Here's a related cartoon, found at The Week and by Adam Zyglis; it's titled "Print Media's Future." ***
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And I couldn't pass up a couple of jabs at John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House. First there's this by Mike Thompson, titled "House of Indulgence." ***
Recently my son told me about a video on YouTube that showed a man arrested for filming the police and the police killing his dog. The video has some disturbing elements, so I'm not including it here. The exact title is "Cops arrest man for filming them and then kill his dog" -- you can search for it. The lesson here is -- if you're going to film, be aware of how your actions may affect those being filmed.
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Going deeper into the concept of advocacy, good information can be found on the page Video Advocacy 101. This film gives the basics: ***
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Note that both these pages refer you to the Hub, which is no longer accepting content. A link on the front pages directs you to an explanation why.
Video4change offers some insights on reasons why you might use video for social activism. Digital Democracy emphasizes "empowering marginalized communities to use technology to fight for their human rights." And MIT has a Center for Civic Media that promotes "visual literacy."
As Sergeant Phil Esterhaus used to say in Hill Street Blues, "Hey, let's be careful out there."
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While still as unpopular as ever, the topic has acquired some new variants, such as muon-catalyzed fusion which, according to Wikipedia is "is well established, real, and repeatable." Also, there's pyroelectric fusion and a polywell.
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Polywell WB-6 model assembled, Wikipedia
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One of the problems with cold fusion was the inability of independent labs to repeat the original experiment, as the Wikipedia article on cold fusion states:
Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes fell with the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts.
However the U.S. Navy persisted with its own work, zeroing in on the low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) and chemically-assisted nuclear reaction (CANR) aspects of cold fusion. According to an article at Phys.org (March, 2009), there may be a "'Cold fusion rebirth." Quoting the article:
Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called "cold fusion" that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.
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An experimental "cold fusion" device produced this pattern of "triple tracks" (shown at right), which scientists say is caused by high-energy nuclear particles resulting from a nuclear reaction Credit: Pam Boss, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), phys.org
If I were one to speak from a soap box, my topic would be income inequality, aka the Great Divergence. President Obama spoke about this topic recently, saying:
[If we don't do something about income inequality,] "Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot,” Mr. Obama said. “If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction." (The New York Times, July 27, 2013)
Cartoonist R.J. Matson, recently laid-off with 22 other employees from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, shows us how it's rolling now in "The Top 1%:" ***
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And don't be fooled by Republicans' idea of trickle-down economics -- you don't narrow the gap by making the rich richer. Here's a cartoon by Adam Zyglis that serves as an illustration: ***
