ANDY PARTRIDGE Andy Partridge EP 1994
10 minutes ago
Saturday 26 February 2011
Model predicts 'religiosity gene' will dominate society
In the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010. The huge growth stems almost entirely from the religious culture’s high fertility rate, which is about 6 children per woman, on average. At this rate, the Amish population will reach 7 million by 2100 and 44 million by 2150. On the other hand, the growth may not continue if future generations of Amish choose to defect from the religion and if secular influences reduce the birth rate. In a new study, Robert Rowthorn, emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge University, has looked at the broader picture underlying this particular example: how will the high fertility rates of religious people throughout the world affect the future of human genetic evolution, and therefore the biological makeup of society?
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Lisa Zyga @'PhysOrg'
Wisconsin Assembly Rams Through Walker's Budget Bill
It was an ugly end to 61 hours of debate and deliberation. After days of Democrats attacking Republicans and Republicans attacking Democrats, hundreds of amendments being offered, and Democrats using every move in the book to delay a vote, the Wisconsin state Assembly finally voted on Republican Governor Scott Walker's controversial "budget repair bill," which would gut collective bargaining rights for most public-sector unions, among other things. In the end, the final vote was 51 to 17, with 28 members—25 Democrats, two GOPers, and one independent—not even voting.
Why? Here's how it went down. A shade after 1 a.m. on Friday morning, the Assembly speaker pro tempore suddenly cut off the debate and demanded a vote. Then the voting window was opened for just a few seconds, long enough for a GOP majority to cast its votes and approve the bill. The moment the vote ended, the Republicans picked up and headed for the door. The move stunned the Democrats in the Assembly, leaving them livid. Some Democrats yelled "Shame!" and "Cowards!" at their Republican counterparts; others hurled papers into the air; one even threw a drink.
The whole thing caught Assembly Democrats by surprise. For one, they still had 15 speakers on deck to debate the bill. Republicans also failed to invoke the traditional motion and roll call used when signaling that the debate is over and it's time to vote.
The post-vote comments by Democrats hid none of their anger. "What a sad day for this state when we are willing to ignore the traditions that people died for in this state, that people fought bitterly for," said Rep. Peter Barca, a Democrat. "We ignore our forefathers who made this a great state." Said Democratic Rep. Kelda Helen Roys: "We never imagined they would do it as they did, not even properly using the nuclear option."
Republicans saw nothing wrong with the move, which they say brought an end to days' worth of delay. "In the end, we're going to head the state in the right direction," said Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, the speaker of the Assembly.
Of course, the fight is only half over. The state Senate now takes up the bill. But with that chamber's 14 Democrats still in hiding—their "filibuster on feet," as one senator called it—it's unclear if or when the senate will take up the bill. Democrats say they have no plans to return anytime soon, not until Gov. Walker relents and throws out his ban on collective bargaining. "I'm not paid to be their rubber stamp," Sen. Chris Larson, a Democrat, told me last night. "I'm not elected to be their rubber stamp."
Andy Kroll @'Mother Jones'
#Libya
Twitter user Abukhit in Tripoli reports gun fire outside his house. He reports that he had to run back into the house after witnessing a shoot out, and someone being shot in the head. He continues to give running commentary of the events outside his home. Here is a picture of a bullet hole in the wall.
@'Al Jazeera'
Damaged Goods: The 10 Best Abused Artworks Ever
Art is both a precious commodity and a significant cultural symbol of our time. The museums and art centers that display the works are public domains, in which anything is likely to happen. Throw a bunch of publicity loving crackpots, wannabe performance artists, youthful vandals, social protesters, and accident-prone eccentrics into the mix and you enter the damage zone, where art gets hurt — or at the very least, publicly humiliated.
After recently reading about a portrait of Mao Zedong getting shot because its hallucinating owner thought it was the actual Chinese despot in his house, we decided to investigate other tales of artful accidents involving works by celebrated artists — ranging from Monet and Picasso to Warhol and Serrano — and bullet holes, crowbars, felt-tip pens, and flying elbows and fists. Click through below to discover our gallery of damaged goods.
Two bullet holes in Andy Warhol’s 1972 screenprint of Mao didn’t deter a collector from buying it for $302,500 — 10 times the high presale estimate of $30,000 — at Christie’s in New York last month. The reason the piece was coveted has to do with the shooter as much as it has to do with the artist and subject matter. During a wild night in the 1970s, Dennis Hopper got spooked by the picture and shot it twice. Warhol loved the results and annotated the holes with circles and the words “warning shot” and “bullet hole,” which made the work an unplanned collaboration.
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After recently reading about a portrait of Mao Zedong getting shot because its hallucinating owner thought it was the actual Chinese despot in his house, we decided to investigate other tales of artful accidents involving works by celebrated artists — ranging from Monet and Picasso to Warhol and Serrano — and bullet holes, crowbars, felt-tip pens, and flying elbows and fists. Click through below to discover our gallery of damaged goods.
Two bullet holes in Andy Warhol’s 1972 screenprint of Mao didn’t deter a collector from buying it for $302,500 — 10 times the high presale estimate of $30,000 — at Christie’s in New York last month. The reason the piece was coveted has to do with the shooter as much as it has to do with the artist and subject matter. During a wild night in the 1970s, Dennis Hopper got spooked by the picture and shot it twice. Warhol loved the results and annotated the holes with circles and the words “warning shot” and “bullet hole,” which made the work an unplanned collaboration.
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Unreal cities: Sohei Nishino's magical photographic maps of London, Tokyo and utopia
"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker," wrote Susan Sontag in On Photography, "reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." Sontag's "voyeuristic strollers" included Atget, Brassai and WeeGee, all of whom were "not attracted to the city's official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations". She could also have mentioned Bill Brandt, an often-solitary wanderer on the night-time streets of wartime London, or Cartier-Bresson, forever in search of the decisive moment, as well as all manner of street photographers, from the frantically obsessive Gary Winogrand to the gently observant Helen Levitt.
Interestingly, Sontag also saw the photographer as a kind of flaneur. "Adept at the joys of watching," she wrote, "connoisseur or empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque'". The term "flaneur", which originally meant "stroller", "saunterer" and, interestingly, "loafer", was appropriated by the poet Charles Baudelaire, to describe "a person who walks the street in order to experience it". That is certainly what street photographers do, though one wonders if the act of taking a photograph, as well as the photographer's need to be constantly on the look-out for a subject, might come between the walking and the experiencing; might, in fact, run contrary to the meandering spirit of flaneurism (flaneurie?).
One also wonders what Sontag, or indeed Baudelaire, would have made of Sohei Nishino, a young Japanese photographer whose work goes on show for the first time in Britain at the Michael Hoppen gallery next week. Like Winogrand, Nishino is an obsessive, one who relentlessly pounds the streets with a camera. Yet unlike Winogrand, and every other photographer mentioned above, Nishino does not go in search of the city's dark seamy corners or neglected populations. What he does is photograph the city in detail, and then construct a composite map from the thousands of detailed images he has amassed on his wanderings. Thus far, he has recreated 10 cities, including Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul and New York. The end results, which he calls "diorama maps", are both breathtaking in their ambition and disorienting in their oddness.
Diorama Map Night (2009-10) ... Nishino's cities are 'familiar yet oddly disjointed'. Photograph: Sohei Nishino/Michael Hoppen Contemporary/Emon Photo Gallery
Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London – which, come to think of it, does not seem that long a time for the task in hand. He took over 10,000 photographs, which, on his return to Tokyo, he edited down to 4,000. Then the real work began. Having hand-printed the photographs in his own darkroom, Nishino then set about cutting them up and piecing them together – slowly and meticulously – into a giant composite photographic map of the city of London. It measures 7.5ft x 4ft, and will be shown at Michael Hoppen alongside his other diorama maps.
In the meticulous assembling of these photomaps, Nishino creates epic artworks that, despite depicting many familiar icons of modernity and post-modernity – the Empire State building, the Gherkin, the Pompidou Centre – look oddly old-fashioned. He creates what look like medieval or renaissance maps of modern cities. In them, everything is familiar yet oddly disjointed, nothing seems quite in scale and, here and there, whole areas are missing or seem crushed or out-of-proportion. Some of his photographs are taken from above, some from far below. Buildings loom and tilt, as does the terrain, and sometimes a segment of put-together sky appears.
For Nishino, it would seem, the process is the thing. He has paid homage to the great 18th-century Japanese cartographer, Ino Tadataka, who spent 17 years surveying and mapping the coastline of Japan. (The mammoth project was completed by his surveying team after his death.) But Nishino's obsessive cartography is of a different order: fantastical rather than scientific; imaginative rather than literal. "His images are true to form in a sense, and yet incorrect", notes Seiji Komatsu, director of the Emon Photography gallery in Tokyo. "In other words, he is trying to depict an image that comes from within the memory."
Nishino's imaginative journey has taken a different turn of late. His recent I-Land project, in which the map is even bigger and in colour, depicts an imaginary Japanese city that echoes Thomas More's Utopia, while simultaneously looking like a future-world from a sci-fi film. Here, old and new photographs are used to create a timeless cityscape that is unreal but oddly familiar. Again, the process has been painstaking and obsessive and the end result, like all Nishino's work, seems to fly in the face of Photoshop and digital manipulation. He is a creator of virtual worlds all the same, but what is important here is not just the end result, but the labour and dedication that underpins it.
"This work required a great deal of my passion and energy and entailed a great deal of financial, physical, and spiritual hardship." Nishino has said of the diorama map series. "After completing it I realised that it grew out of my experiences during a Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage that I went on alone as my high school graduation trip. The pilgrimage for me meant simply walking the route – I had no particular underlying motivation or goal for doing it. I think the spiritual core of my work came from this experience, and I continuously take pictures to emphasise the spirit of going ever forward."
Nishono is a flaneur, then, but one whose motivation is not just to experience the city he walks though, but to memorise, remap and re-imagine it. His composite photographic map of London portrays a city both real and unreal, recognisable but alien. A city you can get lost in all over again.
Sean O'Hagen @'The Guardian'
Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London – which, come to think of it, does not seem that long a time for the task in hand. He took over 10,000 photographs, which, on his return to Tokyo, he edited down to 4,000. Then the real work began. Having hand-printed the photographs in his own darkroom, Nishino then set about cutting them up and piecing them together – slowly and meticulously – into a giant composite photographic map of the city of London. It measures 7.5ft x 4ft, and will be shown at Michael Hoppen alongside his other diorama maps.
In the meticulous assembling of these photomaps, Nishino creates epic artworks that, despite depicting many familiar icons of modernity and post-modernity – the Empire State building, the Gherkin, the Pompidou Centre – look oddly old-fashioned. He creates what look like medieval or renaissance maps of modern cities. In them, everything is familiar yet oddly disjointed, nothing seems quite in scale and, here and there, whole areas are missing or seem crushed or out-of-proportion. Some of his photographs are taken from above, some from far below. Buildings loom and tilt, as does the terrain, and sometimes a segment of put-together sky appears.
For Nishino, it would seem, the process is the thing. He has paid homage to the great 18th-century Japanese cartographer, Ino Tadataka, who spent 17 years surveying and mapping the coastline of Japan. (The mammoth project was completed by his surveying team after his death.) But Nishino's obsessive cartography is of a different order: fantastical rather than scientific; imaginative rather than literal. "His images are true to form in a sense, and yet incorrect", notes Seiji Komatsu, director of the Emon Photography gallery in Tokyo. "In other words, he is trying to depict an image that comes from within the memory."
Nishino's imaginative journey has taken a different turn of late. His recent I-Land project, in which the map is even bigger and in colour, depicts an imaginary Japanese city that echoes Thomas More's Utopia, while simultaneously looking like a future-world from a sci-fi film. Here, old and new photographs are used to create a timeless cityscape that is unreal but oddly familiar. Again, the process has been painstaking and obsessive and the end result, like all Nishino's work, seems to fly in the face of Photoshop and digital manipulation. He is a creator of virtual worlds all the same, but what is important here is not just the end result, but the labour and dedication that underpins it.
"This work required a great deal of my passion and energy and entailed a great deal of financial, physical, and spiritual hardship." Nishino has said of the diorama map series. "After completing it I realised that it grew out of my experiences during a Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage that I went on alone as my high school graduation trip. The pilgrimage for me meant simply walking the route – I had no particular underlying motivation or goal for doing it. I think the spiritual core of my work came from this experience, and I continuously take pictures to emphasise the spirit of going ever forward."
Nishono is a flaneur, then, but one whose motivation is not just to experience the city he walks though, but to memorise, remap and re-imagine it. His composite photographic map of London portrays a city both real and unreal, recognisable but alien. A city you can get lost in all over again.
Sean O'Hagen @'The Guardian'
Legislators Are Going to Unbelievable Lengths to Gouge Clean Water Laws and Cozy Up to Big Coal
Big Coal's backlash over the EPA crackdown on future mountaintop removal operations went from denial and anger to the outright absurd last week, as state legislatures conjured their own versions of a sagebrush rebellion and the new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a sheath of regulatory gutting amendments to its budget bill.
On the heels of its Tea Party-backed coal rallies last fall, the dirty coal lobby couldn't have paid for a better show. As millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives continued to detonate daily in their ailing districts and affected residents held dramatic sit-ins to raise awareness of the growing health crisis in the central Appalachian coalfields, Big Coal-bankrolled sycophants fell over themselves from Virginia to Kentucky to West Virginia, and in the halls of Congress, to see who could introduce the most ridiculous and dangerous bills to shield the coal industry.
Their breathless message: "The EPA don't understand mining," as Kentucky’s House Natural Resources and Environment Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, declared to his colleagues.
That misunderstanding dates back to last spring's breakthrough announcement by the EPA, following up a memorandum of understanding between the numerous federal agencies, including the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation Enforcement, on finally issuing guidance rules and cracking down on the irreversible and pervasive destruction of mountaintop removal mining operations to waterways. Based on government studies that conclusively demonstrate that "burial of headwater streams by valley fills causes permanent loss of ecosystems," the EPA issued new conductivity levels "to protect 95% of aquatic life and fresh water streams in central Appalachia" and effectively bring an end to the process of valley fills (and the dumping of toxic coal mining waste into the valleys and waterways).
After an eight-year hiatus of enforcement under the George W. Bush administration, in which an estimated 1,000-2,000 miles of the headwater streams were jammed and sullied by toxic coal waste(my emphasis), along with the destruction of hundreds of mountains and tens of thousands of hardwood forests and the depopulation of historic Appalachia communities, the EPA's return to its true role as enforcer of the Clean Water Act made it a convenient target for Big Coal outrage...
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