natecooper.net

Though I’m sure it must be an incredibly difficult job for only the top in the field, I can’t shake the impression that the people who work for the New York Public Library, must sit around coming up with truly nerdy things to do and then execute them. Take this as evidence. It’s a very thoroughly researched Google map of significant literary spots in the west village. It must have taken hours to put together.

I hope they do this on the clock. It’s marvelous to think that someone gets paid to be this nerdy.

(via NYPL Blog)

Just back from the Geoff Manaugh talk @SVA, “Designing the Post-Terrestrial”. Great stuff. Oddly enough I found it a very visceral experience. Not necessarily what I was expecting from a lecture on architecture.

BLDGBLOG, Manaugh’s blog on architecture and design, is clearly intelligent and well written and there’s a sense of wonder when reading some of the articles. In person Manaugh revealed a kind of exuberance when discussing hidden burial structures found accidently by tractors or on purpose by muons, the possibilities of a tour bus with ground penetrating radar like a glass bottomed boat and ancient Native American hills being incorporated into golf courses. His allusions to fantasy/sci fi and gaming culture made the weight of his material less heady and more fantastical. More than once he made a reference to Blade Runner.

Aside from his excellent discussion on post terrestialization (essentially architecture that passes for earth or is the earth), however, Manaugh did take a few minutes to argue passionately as a blogger. He quoted a interlocutor as saying (I’m paraphrasing) “Twitter is the end of civilization.” Manaugh stated (again paraphrasing) “I don’t understand that. Blogging and Twitter are just like a ball point pen. You can write a poem or a ransom note or anything your mind can come up with.”

Perhaps saying that I enjoyed that part of the lecture immediately upon meeting him did make it seem as though I wasn’t paying as close of attention to the bulk of the content. But as with seeing any writer speak what was interesting was getting a glimpse of his personality, which as with most of us in the blogosphere tinges on the nerdy but cool.

John King’s assessment of 8 small parks in San Francisco looks pretty complete. When I was last in SF I played on some of the questionable playground equipment in South Park and figured it was a great find. Certainly a fun day with good friends. Fond memories.

“The problem with shining the spotlight on a handful of San Francisco parks is that too many remain in the dark.”

I love the typography and layout in this old school poster but, honestly, what bridge is this supposed to be? The placement and vantage point suggest it is meant to be the bay bridge but it looks like a big, white slab with dangly support cords.

Still, all this modernism just makes the over-all design that much more intriguing.

(via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats)

It’s been a couple weeks since I finished Steven Johnson’s 1997 book, “Interface.” Though I’d like to say that I’ve been stirred by it’s profoundity enough to be stewing on my own thoughts for a post, the truth is that I haven’t been entirely changed. That isn’t to say that the book is that much out of touch or contains bad ideas. But frankly, it was written 10 years too early. Many of the complaints and questions aroused by the book’s content have been settled or decidedly answered in the decade since it’s first publication.

Though it mentions blogging off-handedly, the book seems to focus a lot on news websites failing to take into account the striking influence and change brought about by community-centered news-sharing. Not to mention the inability to foresee (who could?) the rise of social-centric/web 2.0 news aggregation (read: Digg, Reddit). Of course, it’s hard to fault Johnson. Instead it may have been his musings and insistent resurrection of Mcluhan-like observation that sparked many of the social-tech innovations and cognitive queries seen in the ensuing years.

What’s hard to work through, from my perspective today, is the laborious overtures on long-dead technologies. Microsoft’s Bob is discussed at length over several chapters, though mostly in the context in how its metaphors ultimately fail. Johnson devotes nearly an entire chapter to frames in web-pages. In some ways it’s nice to think we’ve moved so far away from these technologies that to see them discussed in such a serious context is nearly laughable. This of course also begs the question of what will seem old-hat and silly a decade from today?

Johnson writes about The Palace as an example of the coming possibilities (remember ‘97) of a graphical chat-like forum. It was fun in this instance to reminisce. I remember bouncing around in The Palace and thinking what a wonderfully, grand experience it was back then when I would have been in High School. What’s sad reading about it now is, of course, how close Johnson was to seeing such a drastic reorganizing of graphical, social networks. I would have loved to read his take on exploring World of Warcraft and Second Life as social-information spaces. Even the explosion of Facebook in recent years seems like a great example of rearranging information space within a social, graphical environment.

In short, while I really enjoy Johnson’s work and his excellent channeling of Mcluhan to critique a medium– even going so far as to adamantly suggest interface should be understood as an artistic medium– it’s timeliness falls short. Such is the problem with writing about technology and culture. A critique written two minutes ago is immediately out of date. Here’s to reading this blog post ten years from now and reminiscing and laughing about how out of date it is. So it goes.

This list of fire department maps of New York City from the 19th and early 20th century is like porn for cartophiles.

(via NY Public Library Blog)

“nate cooper! last night i had a dream that you owned a… hmm, i guess a park? for kids? and you bought it with student loans. and uhm… there was a tree that had like… 100000 toy monkeys on it, and a hill where you could shoot your choice of projectiles at a target a few hundred yards away.. and there were a million kids in it but they kept injuring themselves because it was all rock. you’re such a crappy city planner.”

Wow, here I thought I was so sensitive to urban development. Apparently not in my friends’ dreams.

Check out this park and landscape in Prague. I have mixed feelings about modernist architecture. It always looks amazing in photography but often is bleak and imposing from the ground level. More recent construction like this, however, re-writes the perspective on a human scale. It looks very functional, almost inviting.

(via bad banana blog)

The passage of Prop 1a is a great opportunity and for me somewhat surprising given this is the first time I’ve voted in a major election outside of California. (As is of course the disappointing passage of Prop 8). The California High Speed Rail Blog has published an excellent list of Next Steps concerning where to go from here to support the High Speed Rail system. In my mind the biggest thing on that list as far as forward thinking planning has to support of current infrastructure (point 6). However, supporting existing rail infrastructure alone is simply one piece of the puzzle. A drastic restructuring of zoning and city planning must simultaneously occur to not only ensure the success of the system but to restructure California to absorb the overwhelming population growth expected in the coming decades.

To be sure, California is going to grow larger and the High Speed Rail project is a landmark affirmation for focusing that growth in existing urban centers in the state. However, the cities themselves need to act resolutely to capitalize on the significant investment to enact change. While in the past several decades urban centers across the state have been financing transit infrastructure improvements — the latest and most notable being Los Angeles county’s Measure R; what has lagged in the state is significant rewriting of archaic (more…)

I wonder how my recent arab-fetish fits into my desire to remake my room with all of these comfy pillows. I am totally in love with all of the decor in these photos. Click on the pic for more.

(via style-files)