For those who were utterly disappointed by Danny Boyle's Sunshine, particularly by the preposterous last third of the film, some images of the sun, courtesy of the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer. These and some of the movies were very helpful in relieving our disappointment.
And lastly, this movie still, which the title of this post specifically refers.
The four panels you see above and others not captured are essentially mini-movies projected onto a gray circular disk. One starts here, then progressing to there, playing for a few brief seconds or even considerably less, while other panels also appear now and then, starting here or there, like stellar detonations. Glimpses of the sun resolving into a whole.
As before, be sure to accompany the movies with a soundtrack of your own choosing.
Preservationists and Modernists certainly must be agonizing over these photos.
Iconoclasts, on the other hand, must be praying for yet more torrential downpours.
One regular Pruned reader, an avowed anti-Modernist, sarcastically asked us if this is what “they” meant by “architecture engaging with the landscape”? He was wondering, or so we assume, whether architectural historians, critics and students--in overpraising the house (and Philip Johnson's Glass House and Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water) for harmoniously intertwining with nature--are simply full of shit, as what they think of as a harmonious engagement (or the idea of those high priests of Modernism “designing with nature”, or at the very least acknowledging context beyond formal and material concerns) is an illusion.
“Nature has been subjugated. There, it is expected to be static, as structured as the building. That or it must act within a prescribed set of parameters. Abnormal hydrology is frowned upon, for instance. So harmonyschmarmony. But thankfully, when things like this happen, architecture is laughingly displayed as impotent.” Too harsh.
In its defense, however, the house does look beautiful and quite striking in its state of quasi-failure.
Meanwhile, we are eagerly waiting to hear, hopefully accompanying other reports of Brad Pitt's generous donation to architecture, that proposals are underway for a levee system to protect the Farnsworth, millions of dollars worth of flood protection that most assuredly will fail in order to further sustain the illusion. We're waiting, because it will be hilarious to hear them.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The Farnsworth Flood of 2008: Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, reports here, here and here — the comments are worth a read. Meanwhile, we wonder how many postscripts bearing this sort of news will we add in the future.
We love the illustrations The New York Times creates to accompany some of their articles. Oftentimes they are infographically dense without being cluttered, readily comprehensible without being too compromisingly simplistic, visually gorgeous without being unnecessarily flashy. For someone commonly tasked to distill fantastically complex information for laymen clients who might consider interpreting plans and schematic diagrams akin to deciphering ancient, dead languages, these illustrations always provide important lessons for creating a successful graphic presentation. There is much to learn (or emulate).
We're huge fans, in other words, collecting them ravenously as though we were lunatic orchidophiles or fanatic philatelists, and hoping all the while that they will be collated and published in a volume, which will be ten times better than anything Edward Tufte puts out, of course, though perhaps similarly overpriced, in which case, if you have your own collection, you should now create a Flickr set for it, such as the one we have recently created.
You'll find there, among others, the following graphic summarizing the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Rapanos v. United States, a dizzyingly complex case (to us, at least) rendered penetrable.
And also this more recent graphic listing five proposals to combat global warming on a gargantuan scale, all neatly and beautifully presented in 800x1155 pixels. It makes you feel as though you no longer need to read New Scientist for further research, although we wouldn't recommend you stop reading the venerable periodical.
One more? How about this on the migrating barrier islands of North Carolina?
Quite clinical and somber in its presentation of the data, and yet it's always a source of endless hilarity here on Pruned. Can you spot the hilarity?
Mike Adams has done a lot of heavy lifting on the pros (and cons) of S.B. 1082 regarding the future of Dietary supplements....
The present concern is that the bill will pass with ambiguous language that could allow its regulatory powers to threaten free access to dietary supplements and functional foods. While the bill's supporters claim there is no such language contained in the bill that would subject foods and supplements to new FDA regulations, they nonetheless refuse to support the food and supplement protection amendments authored by Jonathan Emord (a high-profile attorney specializing in FDA regulatory law) and generally supported by the health freedom movement.
While S.1082 contains some useful provisions that limit advertising for new drugs, it could also ultimately be misused to threaten consumer health freedoms. Furthermore, the bill deepens the financial ties between Big Pharma and the FDA while doing nothing of substance to end corruption at the FDA or to halt Big Pharma's monopolistic trade practices in the United States. Thus, the bill is widely viewed by most people in the health freedom movement as a net loss to consumer safety, which is why grassroots opposition to S.1082 has steadily grown.
What's clear from the Senate's action on the bill is that consumers are not in any meaningful way represented by lawmakers. Rather than fighting to protect consumers' health and hard-earned dollars, the majority of senators have voted in accordance with the wishes of their corporate sponsors -- the drug companies themselves. Thus, the imminent passage of S.1082 is viewed by many as yet one more Senate sellout of the American public to the financial interests of powerful pharmaceutical companies.
Here's some wit from one of the twoLisas on Houston's "fat":
(from Lisa Gray of the Chron)
Why are Houstonians heftier than people in other cities? A few years ago the culprit seemed obvious. Urban sprawl, the argument went, packed on our pounds.
Several much-quoted studies found a correlation between obesity and spread-out, car-loving cities like ours. People who live in tight-packed metropolises tended to be thinner than people like us, whose suburban-style lives involve freeways and parking lots.
Researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Rand Corporation argued that living in a car-hostile city where walking is part of daily life naturally keeps people lean.
The difference between living in Manhattan or a spread-out, car-dependent suburb of Cleveland? For an average adult, it's six pounds, according to the University of Maryland's National Center for Smart Growth.
Sprawl was blamed for Americans' soaring obesity rates. And it seemed only natural that Houston, one of the most car-besotted places in the universe, was also one of the country's fattest. Here, only the intrepid dare to journey on foot to the corner store. In a loose-packed city like ours, places of interest often lie miles apart. Our streets, designed for drivers, leave pedestrians with daunting choices: slog across muddy sidewalk-less private yards or dodge SUVs in the road. It seemed no wonder that roughly two-thirds of Houstonians are either overweight or obese.
The researchers' arguments made intuitive sense, and the message seemed obvious. To avoid becoming XXXL tubs o' lard, we'd better move to Manhattan. Or make Houston more like it.
(snip)
Lately, a new round of research has raised objections to the original sprawl-makes-you-fat studies. Suburban sprawl, they point out, was around for decades before the obesity epidemic started. But in the '50s, '60s and '70s, Americans were much thinner than we are now.
Some academics say that the sprawl researchers' methods were flawed, that it makes little sense, for example, to compare whole counties to one another.
The University of Illinois' more specific ZIP-code analysis of Chicago found that race, education and income had much more to do with obesity than a neighborhood's density. In fact, that study found, the leanest Chicagoans lived in the city's near-in suburbs — places where residents tended to be white, wealthy and well-educated.
In typical Chron fashion Ms. Gray touches lightly on the corners of the obesity issue, flanks it, and then oversimplifies it.
She does get ONE thing right however and deserves kudos for that:
Matthew Turner, one of those researchers, argues that it's not where you live, it's who you are. A fit person who likes to walk naturally gravitates toward places where walking is a pleasant part of daily life — but will tend to exercise anyway, even if it's inconvenient.
An obese person, for whom walking is miserable, will prefer life with an SUV — but is unlikely to grow much thinner even if having to sometimes schlep groceries from the corner store.
Being fit and healthy are personal choices. They take effort and sacrifice like the young lady attending fat camp is being conditioned to make:
Isabel woke before counselors began their round of knocks on campers' doors.
"This is going to be a heck of a day," she thought, her feet sliding to the tile floor of the dorm room. Her sleeping roommate, a shy teenager from Wharton, had hung posters of boy bands next to her bed. Beside Isabel's, a Tinkerbell nightlight glowed.
It was the first full day at weight-loss camp.
"All right, do we have those pedos everybody? — Pedos?" counselor Katie Barthelmes asked before the morning stretch. "Great, you don't want to miss these steps. Trust me."
The campers stretched in brand-new sneakers and sagging backpacks, their pedometers — or pedos — clipped to belts or shoes. Filtering onto the trail, they formed a straggling line on their nearly 3-mile walk, soon to be one of many routines of their summer days.
Isabel caught up with two girls, Riley Bird and Alicia Stone, from her assigned team, "Blanco," a group of 10 teenage girls. The day before, counselors had weighed and measured each of them. Isabel logged in at 179 pounds and 5-foot-1.
There's no amount of development (smart or otherwise), Government intervention or planning that's going to change this.
(from Danny Robbins of The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram)
Even after five years, Loretta Lewis vividly recalls the day she visited the home of her daughter, Angel Montgomery, to hear a talk by Max Brache, a sales associate for Mannatech Inc.
Much of Brache's presentation was focused on Montgomery, who only months earlier had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
And, in Lewis' view, much of it was frightening, making the case that her daughter could conquer her illness by stopping her chemotherapy and taking Mannatech's dietary supplements instead.
"The thing that still galls me is how you can look somebody that sick in the eye and give them that kind of hope," she said.
For Lewis and others close to Montgomery, who died in November at 31, old emotions have been stirred by the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed against Mannatech last month.
Montgomery's experience with Brache is among the incidents cited in the suit, which accuses Mannatech, a Coppell-based multilevel marketer, of allowing its supplements to be sold as cures for cancer and other diseases.
I've seen Mannatech at various bodybuilding competitions in Texas, and they've always seemed to be responsible there, so I think that this story illustrates how one bad apple can spoil the entire barrell.
If supplements are to remain legally available then the industry is going to have to get serious about policing itself and making sure that they aren't allowing hucksters to give the entire industry a bad name.
