Dec 24
lindsayrgwattRandom contemporary canadian art, national gallery of canada
I’m back home in Ottawa for Christmas and I had the chance to get to our National Gallery to check out their collect. Early Canada was a rough time for painters; outside of Cornelius Krieghoff there just wasn’t a lot of talent in the country until the Group of Seven came along. This means that when you go to the National Gallery, breeze through the first couple of rooms and wait until you get to about 1900; that’s where the fun begins. If you go, check out the following paintings to get a sense of Canada’s contribution to painting.
Note: my blog template resizes the images badly. Try opening any of the images below in a new window to get a sense of what they really look like.
CW Jefferys – Western Sunlight, Last Mountain Lake. If you stare at this painting in the gallery, you can make out the faintest shades of pink in the sky. If you’ve spent any time on the Prairies, you can relate to this.
Tom Thomson – The Pool. Anyone who has spent a fall in Ontario knows exactly where this comes from.
Tom Thomson – The Jack Pine. Possibly the most famous Canadian painting. Many a child grew up staring at this on a place mat.
Arthur Lismer – The Guide’s Home, Algonquin.
Jean Paul Riopelle – Pavane. Fast forward 30 years. Canada is a more urban (but definitely not urban) society. This is reflected in a new artistry. You can’t tell from below, but Riopelle’s canvasses are massive. The work below is roughly 10×20 feet. His brushstrokes are as much a part of the painting as the colour and the composition.
Marcel Barbeau – Nataskhouan. This is possibly my favourite piece of Canadian art. When you stand close to it, it occupies your entire field of view and the canvas begins to dance in front of your eyes.
Gershon Iskowitz – Seasons, No.1. Little globules of colour float across a massive canvas.
Claude Tousignant – Gong 88, No. 1. At first this seems like a silly visual trick: a bunch of bullseyes of different colours. However, as you stare relentlessly at the center of the painting, all colour merges into one. If you blink, the whole scene flashes before you eye and you realize that there is a picture within the picture…
Eric Cameron – Red and Yellows on Green (Type 111q, 1/2″ tape).
Just for fun, here are some shots from the building itself. The Moshe Safdie-designed Gallery is probably one of the best buildings of the 1980’s (a true rarity).
Dec 24
lindsayrgwattRandom maps
I pride myself on being a quick runner, but this is ridiculous. Wen and I were using my iPhone to navigate from New York back to Ottawa, courtesy of Google maps. They were kind enough to give us a lot of options: by car, by bus or by foot. I was interested in how long it would take by foot. Turns out only five days:
That’s not too bad, right? 400 hundred miles in 5.5 days. Totally doable, right? Oh wait, that’s six miles an hour 12 hours a day. What’s interesting is that the average finish time for a man in a marathon is ~4:30 – or about 5.8 miles/hour. I guess we all just need to learn how to run faster than average marathons back to back to back to back and then we’ll have a similar fitness level to those at Google!
(Note: this is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek post. It’s awesome that you can drive around and get on the fly directions. Just might need a little bit more work on those ‘walking’ ones)
Dec 21
lindsayrgwattFood, NYC new amsterdam market, tourtiere
Yesterday was the year’s last installment of the New Amsterdam Market. It’s New York’s most charming farmer’s market and is held in one of it’s most charmless locations (underneath the FDR by the old Fulton fish market). The market is a celebration of the passion and craft of local and regional food artisans. Whether you’re looking for bread, meat, cheese, chocolate, coffee or olive oil, the common thread is an insatiable passion in the topic by whoever is selling to you.
This leads to some outlandishly enjoyable situations: below is a photo of the folks from Prime Meats selling duck confit hot pockets. Unbelievably delicious and yet ridiculous at the same time.
The other great find at the market was Sarah Obratis’ & Hugue Dufour’s meat pies. Technically, the weren’t actually at the market, which meant that you had to literally buy a pie out of the trunk of their Corolla (it all felt very surreptitious). The tourtiere’s have a mouth-watering mix of meat – brisket, pork and turkey – and come with their own Cranberry-based tomato sauce. Ours lasted two days (really, more like 28 hours).
Dec 21
lindsayrgwattRandom Art, photography, richard mosse
A few weeks back, Wen and I went to see Richard Mosse’s The Fall at the Jack Shainman gallery (more Mosse photos). Mosse is a great photographer who travels to the edges of the world to capture images of catastrophe and then prints them on a massive scale. I highly recommend reading his recent interview over at BLDGBLOG (then read the older one). This paragraph captures the spirit of his work:
So how is the catastrophe popularly represented? Through terrorism. Terrorism is a gesture of advertising; it’s a literary act, a form of representation, before all else. Its aim is not primarily to kill, but to capture the popular imagination through killing. It’s for this reason that I’m drawn to the air disaster: there is no finer, more succinct, more international, and more culturally loaded expression of the catastrophe than a plane crash. An airliner in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity’s complete failure.
Here are some shots of his work from the exhibit; I’m aware you’re not supposed to take photos in art galleries, but his works are magnetic and I couldn’t help myself:
Dec 19
lindsayrgwattHistory, NYC
Today I went to an exhibition at the Met called Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868. It has given me a new appreciation for how absolutely insane Japanese culture is. First, let’s take a look at some of the different helmets that Samurai might wear into battle:
If you were to ask “Lindsay, isn’t one of those helmets done up to look like a swallow’s tail? And is the other one a set of crabs claws?” you’d be absolutely correct. Apparently the Samurai helmet was the early equivalent of taking your shoe off and banging it on your desk at the UN – an attempt to intimidate your enemy by convincing them that you were crazier than they were.
Their armor certainly suggests that. Granted, to a jaded 21st century dweller, it looks like the sort of costume a psychopathic midget who worships the Village People might wear (the armor dates back to the Middle Ages and the Japanese were quite short back then), but I can only imagine how exceptionally nutty it would look when combined with a very sharp sword.
If you look closely at the images below you’ll notice a few things. First, everyone’s wearing a mask to look a little crazier – although the mustaches undermine it. Second, the guy with brown hair actually does have hair coming out of his helmet-there’s some sort of animal pelt there; a different set of armor (not shown) actually had long, flow, dyed red hair attached to it. Finally, the red outfit suggests where Darth Vader comes from.
Go to the exhibition if you get the chance!
Dec 17
lindsayrgwattNYC NYC, statistics, UncoverYourCity
If you follow this blog, you’ll know that we launched UncoverYourCity to help people better understand New York. Here’s another example of interesting things we can learn about the city by playing with the data.
Let’s say you wanted to see the relationship between people renting and their household income. A few things emerge here: if you’re, on average, poor, you rent. If you’re rich, you buy. The poorest Districts of New York are in the southern Bronx and a shocking 92% of people rent; just up the Harlem River, 94% of people in Morris Heights rent. The average family income here is around $17-22K per year.
The converse is also in the south: in southern Staten Island, 85% of people own and the household income hovers near $83K. Here’s a comparison of all the districts side by side.
However, if you look at the plot of household income vs. rental rates you’ll notice a bunch of outliers in the upper right corner:
These are a couple of districts towards the tip of Manhattan (districts 1, 2, and 4-8) plus district 6 in Brooklyn (Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope).
What’s going on here? Well, if you asked me to pick the areas in New York where people who are passing through (i.e., getting experience before they move to a different city or start a family in the suburbs) live, I would pick these neighborhoods. These are places where younger professionals move to get experience yet maintain a high quality of life (yes, there are lots of people there who are neither young nor professional, but we’re talking ‘on average’ here) and this may be why we see this litter cluster of outliers.
What’s interesting is what’s not in the set of outliers: Williamsburg (Brooklyn District 1) and the Lower East Side (Manhattan District 3). My bet is that these neighborhoods are both subsumed by the averages of their districts and their more bohemian younger residents may have a lower average family income.
This data doesn’t tell the whole story, but it does help us understand the city a bit better. More fun examples in future posts.
Dec 16
lindsayrgwattNYC, Technology Gov2.0, NYC Big Apps, UncoverYourCity
So last week, Wendy, Jill and I unveiled UncoverYourCity. This is a site that we put together as part of the NYC Big Apps competition (you can vote for us here; you’ll need to create an account). We want to share a bit of background on what the project is and why we did it.
Why?
There’s a nascent movement called Government 2.0 which seeks to apply the principles of the web to government and make it more open and efficient. One of the first steps in governments becoming open is making their data available online for any citizens who want to use it. The government has some of the most interesting data out there – everything from demographic info to build permit locations to school scores – and they’ve got more information than just about anyone else.
This movement has gained a lot of traction at the municipal level and San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto and New York are some early cities to start putting municipal data online. New York has gone a step further by creating the Big Apps competition to get people to showcase what could be done with the data. We decided that we wanted to create an app to support the the city and also learn what could be done with the data.
So What Is It?
We wanted to create an app that would compare the quality of life in different New York neighborhoods and help people find the neighborhood that was perfect for them. If you know this city, you know that there are 8 million people that exhibit remarkable diversity. It’s what makes the city magical but also makes it hard to grasp. We wanted a tool to help people grasp it.
However, we quickly realized that this was way too hard to do (more on that in a future post) and that we weren’t comfortable placing a “quality of life” ranking on different areas. Instead, we decided that the right thing to create was an app that would let people learn more about the neighborhoods they live in and compare them with others.
The result is UncoverYourCity. We’ve combined almost a dozen different data sets (sounds easy, but it’s not) so that people can see how their neighborhood squares with others. You can use it to discover the leafiest streets in NYC, compare the neighborhoods with the highest and lowest murder rates (bet you don’t guess either one) or see interesting relationships like that between poverty and renting.
This isn’t a gimmick, rather, we believe it’s got the potential to help you see the challenges facing the city in a new way. Take the Mayor’s plan for making the city greener. I’ve no idea how the city is thinking of making the city greener, but one hypothesis might be that if we increase population density we might be able to increase recycling rates (if you live in condos, etc. they usually have recycling designed into the building). However, our stats suggest that there’s no relationship between recycling and population density:
However, there’s a pretty strong relationship between education levels (% population holding bachelor’s/graduate degree) and recycling rates (graph below). This suggests that making the city greener may need to include elements to improve education. It’s a similar story if you compare recycling rates with medium household income or poverty rates.
The tool can also show us outliers that may represent opportunities to learn new approaches to apply elsewhere in city. One of my favorites is the relationship between Median Household Income and Family Poverty. There’s a big outlier in the bottom left of the graph: Brooklyn Community 13 – if it was like other districts, based on its income it should have a poverty rate of about 28% but instead its holding out at 18%.
Is this due to the housing projects of Coney Island working as planned? Maybe it’s the tight Russian community of Brighton Beach taking care of their own and making sure that everyone’s doing okay. Or maybe Sea Gate’s population is so affluent that it skews the poverty level down. I don’t know, but if I were trying to reduce poverty in the city I’d try to find out.
So give the app a try. It’s not perfect – the site’s a bit slow (we’re not great programmers) and the navigation can be awkward (we ran out of time to get it polished) – but there’s something there for everyone. If you want to learn more about how we built it and why the Gov 2.0 movement is important, stay tuned to this blog (we’re also open sourcing all the code; stay tuned for links to code and data). And, when you’ve got a moment free, vote for us.
Dec 13
lindsayrgwattScience energy, genetics, technology review
I was reading the most recent issue of Technology Review and two things popped out at me. The first, was the difference in energy density (measured in MJ/kg) between gasoline, ethanol and batteries:
This, in a nutshell, highlights the reason why you don’t see very many electric cars on the road today. They either weigh the same as gasoline cars (and are therefore underpowered) or are full of batteries galore (and therefore cost a lot more). It’s going to be very interesting to watch this statistic change over time.
The other was about what Japanese researchers have been doing with Marmosets:
This spring, news of a biological breakthrough arrived in the form of baby marmosets whose feet glowed green under ultraviolet light. Researchers at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Kawasaki, Japan, had genetically engineered the monkeys to incorporate a gene, derived from jellyfish, that produces green fluorescent protein. It was the first time scientists had added a gene to a primate in such a way that a new trait could be passed to a second generation.
This is unreal news. If this turns out to be scalable and applicable to humans (both very big ‘ifs’), we could be looking at a future where it will be possible to speed up evolution. You could now pick and choose the best traits from anywhere and attempt to graft them into a human genome and see the results enter the global human gene pool immediately. (I’m not recommending any of this, rather it’s important to realize how fast this technology is evolving and what it’s implications are)
Dec 12
lindsayrgwattTechnology algorithms, facebook, fail
Wow, I haven’t even been married six months and Facebook already thinks that I’ve got marriage issues. I’d like to think that my marriage is going really well. In fact, I thought that the day we spent today, traipsing around town, was some of the most fun in ages.
But Facebook apparently thinks otherwise. In fact, when I logged in tonight, it invited me to reconnect with Wendy Franks, my wife:
Apparently, their algorithms have determined that we’re drifting apart and need to ‘reconnect’. I guess Wendy keeping me in her profile photo is just a charade (and a particularly cruel one, given that it’s one of our wedding photos) – but Facebook knows better. In fact, it’s completely unimaginable that the reason that I don’t write on her wall could be the fact that I live with her and spend more time with her than anyone else on earth, right?
Time to tweak the algorithms folks.
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