atlas(t)

census of marine life

they're almost done. In one year, they'll be releasing the results of a decade-long survey of ocean species called The Census of Marine Life. The LA Times just did an article about this amazing project (with nifty photos):

The scientists set three goals. First, they would build a global registry of every marine life form, worms to walruses, as a baseline for research and public policy. Second, they would map where each species lives and travels to better understand its habitat. Lastly, they would assess the relative abundance of each organism -- past, present and future.

Most marine biologists are specialists who work alone or in small groups. The census has changed that. About 2,000 scientists in 80 countries have joined forces in the largest collaboration in the history of ocean science. ...

"This was a field in need of a revolution," said Ann Bucklin, who heads the marine sciences department at the University of Connecticut. "It has opened up global oceanography."

By next year, the online database will contain photos, DNA codes and websites for at least 230,000 unique species, including more than 16,000 fish, scientists said. ...

The list would be longer, but researchers used DNA analysis to cut more than 50,000 "aliases" -- different names for the same creature -- from the species list. The worst case of multiple identity was a breadcrumb sponge, Halichondria panacea, which had 56 names around the world. Now it will have one.

The whole project cost $650,000,000 (yes, that's millyuns.) I love the scope of the project alone. And the fact that it's (aptly) being compared to mapping the human genome. I love that this brings together my two original obsessions: taxonomy and mapping. But you know (you know) what I love the most. That's right, the actual maps.

The one above is an interactive map of the projects they're running. Click on the dots to get an incomprehensible overview.

Here's one of the cooler maps. Created by satellite tagging 47 white sharks, they discovered an area of concentrated activity between Hawaii and Baja they call the "White Shark Cafe." Awesome. Unless you're a surfer.

There are also a number of super depressing ones like this one, which tracks the "relative abundance of marine life by human cultural period," and another one which shows concentrations of life in the ocean in 1960 and 1990. But you knew there couldn't be a marine-life census without a save-the-whales mentality, didn't you?

But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything? I mean, I know what it is: it's useful; it's necessary. We can't do science, we can't understand ourselves or the world without numbers and measuring and diagrams and charts. And maps. And that's part of it. But there's also the intuitive obsession, the part that just loves binding the world in the lines drawn on a piece of paper. Not needs to, loves to. It's what we drool over in these blogs.

And the lines aren't the same as the artist's lines, although we draw them quite beautifully, often. The lines aren't there for their own sake, but for their relationship to something in the real world: a number of actual creatures, a route of actual migration of actual creatures, an area of concentration of scaly, cold, swishy bodies. And yet we love the lines more than we love the slimy, cold bodies; as much as we love what they mean.

taxonomy of pasta

i know I don't do taxonomy stuff anymore, but Wikipedia is such a treasure trove of hierarchically categorized random shit.

Check out this taxonomy of pasta.

Hungry yet?

michelle obama relationship map

i don't know why I didn't post this back in February when I found it. Probably had some grand plans for commentary which collapsed in the face of actual paying work. I have, of course, also lost track of the source of this link.

The site it's on is Muckety.com, a place to go to look up just such networks and relationships of power. You can find maps there for Chelsea Clinton, George Clinton, and, of course, Kevin Bacon.

The Kevin Bacon one isn't very satisfying. Despite what everyone says, it seems there's not a lot of power in movies.

collective nouns list

wiktionary has an appendix which is a searchable database of collective nouns, those nouns used to collect a group of other nouns, like a "pride" of lions, or, famously, a "murder" of crows. You can search by collective noun, or noun, and they include both standard and ... uh ... made up ones.

This is another item--the quirkiness of collective nouns--that has become popular and trendy lately. I've seen lists of collective nouns in recent quirkster books and mentioned in various quirkster contexts. I'd hesitate to align myself with the forces of collective quirk ... only, it's a database!

I like a "hand" of bananas and a "stare" or a "parliament" of owls (both are so appropriate, no?)

types of mutation

i'm trying to discover the history of the discovery of mutation for my novel.

In the novel, which takes place at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, the characters are on Mars without adequate protection from radiation, so they're all dying of radiation sickness and don't know it. (It's complicated.)

When did people start understanding genetic mutation?

In the course of researchy googling, I came across this diagram to the left. I have no idea what it means, but it looks cool.

I wonder, do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our science makes it seem that way, or do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our most obvious metaphors for physical processes are machines, and then we draw diagrams that make stuff look like machines?

I don't believe that chromosomes look like this, no matter what you say. LA LA LA LA I'm not listening!

atributos urbanos

this very cool dictionary/glossary  was created by the Andalusia Center of Contemporary Art for their Atributos Urbanos, or Urban Attributes, program, which will "generate a framework for reflection and debate on contemporary cities."

Urban Attributes undertakes a synchronic study of urban areas within Andalusia, and also of local and globally relevant phenomena which during recent decades have determined and defined ways of generating a city.

Two complementary work areas have been created together with a program of parallel activities that will take place in autumn 2006... The first of these work areas includes the study of adjectives and nouns assigned to the contemporary city by various authors. A glossary of attributes has ... served to describe urban phenomena from our recent history. ...

To complement this we propose the analysis of five urban areas affected by intense socioeconomic, infrastructural, and cultural transformations, i.e.: the Campo de Dalias-Campo de Níjar, the Costa del Sol, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bay of Cadiz, and the SE30-SE40 district within the metropolitan area of Seville.

Some favorite terms:

• Buffer City: Global buffer cities become spaces of transition between countries and continents, where differences in economic development cause the uncontrollable decanting of people and businesses. The interest of the buffer city lies exclusively in the fact that it is crossed to reach the other side, and this condition of area of passage, where legal exchange and illegal traffic are more intense, gives it a high degree of crossovers and social conflict that become spatially various manifestations of a provisional nature.


• Cannibal City: We understand such a city to be one that in the process of its territorial expansion and growth engulfs any other urban area that it encounters. This is an organicist characterization of the city, which resorts to the analogy with natural phenomena to reveal the most irrational facet of its behaviour. Cannibalism becomes a valid reference for situations in which the expansion of the city is subject to the vicissitudes of the free market and the changing interests that encourage property speculation, which raise doubts about the efficiency of any regulation, norm, or form of planning.


• Surfurbia: Coined by Reyner Banham in his Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), the term surfurbia is used to describe the influence that the overwhelming trinomial of the three Ss (Sun, Sand and Surf) has on the construction of the contemporary metropolis. In the first place, surfurbia arises as a habitual process of suburbanization: Since it was founded, the city of Los Angeles was kept separate from the sea until in the early 20th century the coast became the declared objective of its expansion. This process, as in the remainder of North American cities, was based on an alliance with rail companies which permitted easy access from the downtown area to the first exclusive resorts of the periphery such as Santa Mónica, created as a result of the growing fondness for bathing of the Los Angeles bourgeoisie of the late 19th century.


• Villa Miseria: Villa Miseria is the Argentinian version of a term that has numerous local equivalents: Favela in Brazil, callampa in Chile, pueblo joven in Peru, katchi abadi in Pakistan, shanty town in Kenya, bidonville in Algeria, township in South Africa, barong-barong in the Philippines, jhuggi in India, etc. All of them refer to the same phenomenon, the slum housing that surrounds the large metropolises of developing countries. The Villas Miseria are unplanned settlements. They appear as a result of the initiative of a group of citizens (normally from rural areas) who appropriate furtively and illegally an empty territory located on the periphery of a large city.

urban flora

the description on youtube says:

Urban Flora is a project that aims to alter city dwellers' experience of their environment through a series of stickers that identify objects in the urban environment. These "urban flora", such as mailboxes, lamp posts, and fire hydrants, are presented in a traditional taxonomy such as one would see in an arboretum or botanical garden. By defining these man-made artifacts in the context of the botanical world, the project draws attention to the presence or absence of nature in the urban space.

but it's really just a time-spender for urban artsies with too much time on their hands.

Either that, or these people are "artists" who need some "projects" under their belts. That would be indicated by the earnestness of the text. I'd actually prefer the former. My friends and I used to sit around and drink beer and come up with ideas galore for projects. Sometimes we'd even do them, but we mostly just sat around and talked. Doing the projects was problematic because it always required some work, and the projects were always one liners, like this one, so it never felt quite sane to spend 200 hours--or 20 or even two--making something that people would look at for a second, say "huh" about, and then walk away.

But I realize that these sorts of one-off projects are how artists cut their teeth so I'm trying not to be too much of a bitch. And it's a neat idea, for about a second. Then it's just precious. My main issue is art that purports to invite random mans on da streets to "think about" something. Unless the artist is very careful, and very thoughtful, these invitations are more along the lines of demands. Condescending demands that offer an ill-defined idea in the confidence that viewers have never thought of such things before.

Such projects also do all the thinking necessary for engaging with the piece, so that when your two seconds of engagement are up, so is all the thinking around the piece.

The problem here specifically is that this idea requires a great deal more thought and discussion to really give anything new to the random viewer. Pretty much every city dweller has thought, at some point or another, about the lack of vegetation, or wished for more trees or green or just plain shade. Pointing out that we've "replaced" trees and shrubs with hydrants and streetlamps doesn't really cut it--for anyone.

The fire hydrant sticker was starting to get somewhere interesting with its line about hydrants now serving multiple purposes. But the format of the stickers was too brief to allow thought to go anywhere. This could have been solved in a number of ways:

1. making the stickers a little bigger and giving oneself a little more leeway to spin out fantasies
2. making a lot more stickers about a lot more objects, and shaping a discussion by sheer accumulation
3. adding a url to a website that included longer (and maybe not so earnest) discussions about the taxonomy of street furniture, or a map of said street furniture, or a taxonomic table or family tree, or maybe simply an interactive component where viewers could suggest other objects to taxonomize

I hate to see a good idea go to waste.

taxonomy of popular techology

what wired geeks do when they're bored.

taxonomy song

wow. Taxonomy sorts out all life on Earth, in the present day, in the future, and all through the past. ... Classes will take us up one further rung. Mammals for example, all suckle their young ... except when they use formula ...

It's a great idea, but maybe a songwriter should have written it.

what we are

point:

counterpoint: