atlas(t)

offensive place names with Hasan Minhaj

new orleans is ridiculously unrealistic

Like, look at this river. All these different places it could enter the lake or the sea, but no, it goes ALL THE WAY to the very tip of the land to enter the water. Artificial? Maybe, but who would bother? Totally unrealistic. pic.twitter.com/9vxBvtEQRT

— James L. Sutter (@jameslsutter) March 19, 2018

 

an RPG designer tweeted a series of posts critiquing the landscape of New Orleans as being an unrealistic design. It's pretty awesome. He even, halfway through, invents a freelancer named Steve, who is supposedly submitting this thing.

 

And speaking of sloppy: Did you seriously just label this thing as a LAKE? It is ATTACHED TO THE FUCKING OCEAN, STEVE. THAT MAKES IT, BY DEFINITION, NOT A LAKE. pic.twitter.com/MdodcUrjje

— James L. Sutter (@jameslsutter) March 19, 2018

 

Here's the whole thread. Enjoy!

cascade of geolocation fuckups

The default location for Pretoria, South Africa: someone's backyard.

 

yes, this blog is mostly dead, but my friend Thy Tran sent me this article from Gizmodo about a global geolocation fuckup that's, in its own small way, quite spectacular. And I had to put it on here.

At the private home in South Africa of a human rights lawyer and his nurse mother:

The visits came in waves, sometimes as many as seven a month, and often at night. The strangers would lurk outside or bang on the automatic fence at the driveway. Many of them, accompanied by police officers, would accuse John and Ann of stealing their phones and laptops. Three teenagers showed up one day looking for someone writing nasty comments on their Instagram posts. A family came in search of a missing relative. An officer from the State Department appeared seeking a wanted fugitive. Once, a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner. The armed commandos said they were looking for two iPads.

See, it seems that those "find my phone" applications -- and many, many other geolocation apps -- are fed data by a company called Maxmind, which draws its geolocation data from a U.S. federal government agency, the NGA. Much of this data is mapped to IP (internet provider) addresses; and when an IP can't be mapped to a specific address, it's mapped generally to a city.

But instead of providing an entire city on the map, the NGA, and then Maxmind, choose a central location in that city and make that the default address for the entire city. They, of course, provide what's called an "accuracy radius" (of 5 miles or 100 miles or what have you,) but the apps they feed the data to aren't required to also provide this data (except in their fine print, away from search results.)

So when someone goes looking for a stolen laptop that ended up somewhere in Pretoria, South Africa, they will be directed straight to the house of the human rights lawyer and his nurse mother, which is the default location for all of Pretoria.

There's, apparently, also a house in Kansas which is the default location for all of the United States. And there are many others.

This is the perfect story for our times. Especially the part where the South African lawyer and his mother were being sued by an online store that had fallen so woefully behind on their orders that they were being accused of fraud and cyberbullied. Naturally, they traced the location of their cyberbullies to ... well, you know where.

So a cascade of failures on one side (from the NGA to Maxmind through whatever series of lazily organized apps) and on the other (from the online store's poor management through its customers' unacceptable online behavior) all landed on the doorstep of some good folks who had nothing to do with anything.

No one was deliberately creating FAKE NEWS, but multiple layers of falsehood were created all the same, through laziness, through irresponsibility, through greed (that of the app middlemen, trying to make a buck without providing thorough information,) through the willingness of multiple layers of people to jump to conclusions and go from zero to nuclear in five seconds ...

You don't need bad faith, deceit, or corruption in this world. The internet provides the ability for your smallest mistakes to go viral, and no one is holding anyone accountable for those.

 

mapping stereotypes

via Woffy, this hilarious collection of maps showing how Europe looks to various Europeens. Not a new idea, but still a funny one. Fortunately, this all doesn't really require commentary, but you might be interested to know that this is all the work of one UK-based designer.

Below is the map of how Europe looks to the U.S. Enjoy!

hyperart: thomasson

i'm so proud of our new book trailer!

I've been working with Kaya Press for about a year now, and we've produced two book trailers, each one for a book that it's really difficult to describe in words. The one above is for our new title -- available next week -- HYPERART: THOMASSON by Genpei Akasegawa. Akasegawa is a Japanese conceptual artist -- a contemporary and colleague of Yoko Ono -- who came up with the concept of "Thomassons" in the late seventies, early eighties.

When an urban structure loses its usage, but remains standing, attached to the property it used to serve, and still being aesthetically maintained, then it is a "Thomasson." We're talking about staircases that lead to nowhere, bricked up ticket windows, outside doors in the third story of a building, etc. Akasegawa contends that these things are not stairs, windows, and doors, but rather art shaped like stairs, windows, and doors: unintentional art created by the city; hyperart.

He and his colleagues refined the name to "Thomasson" because at that time, 1982, American baseball player Gary Thomasson was playing for the Japanese team the Yomiuri Giants ... or rather, NOT playing, because he couldn't seem to manage to hit a ball. Yet they still paid him to be there. Akasegawa thought him the perfect, living hyperart, and named the whole phenomenon after him.

In the mid-eighties, Akasegawa had a column in a Japanese photo magazine about Thomassons, where he accepted submissions of thomassons: photographs, and descriptions. He published these and discussed whether or not they were thomassons, why, and what kind. These columns were eventually collected into a book in the 80's which quickly became a cult classic among Japan's youth.

This publication is the first time that Hyperart: Thomasson has been translated. To mark the occasion, translator Matt Fargo created a Thomassons website where people can submit their own thomassons, as well as vote on whether or not submissions are thomassons, and discuss these.

And I'm working with Kearny Street Workshop to develop a guided performance tour of local San Francisco thomassons. The project is called "SF Thomassons" and there's a special page on Matt's Thomassons website for local exemplars from our stable of photographers.

And finally, Kaya and KSW are having a book launch partay on December 18 in San Francisco, where you can get a free preview of the tour. Yay!

drawing cities in perspective

a lousy tutorial, but a fun visual. (A clue to why it's a bad tutorial: he was a big Frank Miller fan. Plus, this is his first tutorial.) Anyhoo, don't watch the whole ten minutes, just skip through it.

This one has no soundtrack, which is also a mistake. And it's hard to see what's going on. Also, not as cartoony, so not as fun.

Whoa. That is trippy. It's a 180 degree image, as if taken with a fish-eye lens. This guy says he can go up to six-point perspective. That's drawing on a sphere. Wait, he's got one:

Isn't that crazy? Dude has insane spatial relations in his head. That's something I might could learn to DO (with pain and suffering and a lot of help), but could never learn to SEE.

This just makes me remember that all these drawing tricks are just tricks, to make us think we're seeing what we see when we look around us. 2D drawing is an illusion. Adding points to perspective doesn't bring you closer to how you actually see the world, it just allows you to draw more from the same vantage point. More from your 360 degrees from the same vantage point. Which is ridiculous, since you can't SEE 360 degrees from one vantage point.

So, how many points could you add, just to be ridiculous? And how would you do it? Where would you add the seventh point? Where would it take you, anyway? Would you be drawing 360 degress in all directions from the same vantage point, rather than just 360 degrees around the horizon line? And at that point, does it lose all visual coherence and become illegible?

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?

map animation v

huh? Wha-? This one is literally two seconds long and is mysterious and interesting. Maybe because it's random and only two seconds long and has no soundtrack. Why would someone put something like this up on YouTube? Huh?

map animation ii

yeah, I have no idea, either. It starts out like the opening animation for a news broadcast, and then turns into ... nothing?

dave matthews gps

somehow, this just works for me. Except the part at the end where Dave Matthews actually shows up.