current-events

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Understanding the AIDS Epidemic

In a TED Talk released this week, medical statistician Hans Rosling presents a new way to visualize the global AIDS epidemic. By displaying dollars spent per person, graphed as a function of the percentage of the population infected with HIV (by continent), we can see both how AIDS has spread, and how the money spent per patient has affected that spread. Starting in 1983, Rosling's visualization is an animated graph that dramatically demonstrates how the epidemic works, and even allows interaction --... READ ON

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"Happiness is Love," Researcher Concludes

George Vaillant has been overseeing a longitudinal study of men's lives for more than 40 years. The study focuses on the personal and professional lives of men selected in the late 1930's, and its participants include luminaries like John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee (editor of The Washington Post), along with 266 less well-known men. Vaillant has come to a conclusion after four decades of observing these men's lives: "Happiness is love. Full Stop." In an Atlantic article released today entitled What... READ ON

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The Last Mission To Save Hubble

Today, seven astronauts left Earth in one last attempt to save the Hubble Space Telescope. At nineteen years old, Hubble is aging and in need of major repairs. It's also dying a slow death -- at some point around 2015, Hubble's electrical system will fail for good, and then we'll finally have to let go. Today the New York Times has an article about the mission, and the various contingency plans that have been laid in case of (another) space shuttle disaster. The article explains the poignant reality of... READ ON

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A Physicist Explains the Iraq War

Sean Gourley is a physicist who wanted to know more about the Iraq war. He wanted to understand the war via the data -- data about attacks, deaths, types of weapons used, locations, and so on. So he and his team started using publicly available data to chart the war and its effects. His conclusions about the nature of war are powerful: there is order in war; there is mathematical predictability in the way fighting forces work. The patterns that underly the Iraq conflict look the same across many... READ ON

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Recovering NASA History in an Abandoned McDonald's

In 1966, NASA's Lunar Orbiter program performed a detailed survey of the moon's surface. The Orbiters mapped the moon in exquisite detail, searching for suitable places that later missions could use as landing sites. The Orbiters sent back their data via an amazingly complex system employing 70mm cameras, optical scanners running in space, analog lossless image compression, and radio transmitters. The data was stored back on Earth on 2,500 reels of 2-inch tape. Where this story gets interesting is what... READ ON

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Schott's Vocab: Smart Writing About Words

I've been enjoying Schott's Vocab, a new blog from the New York Times. It's about words and word usement (sorry, LA Story reference). Word-nerd Ben Schott has a passion for "lexicographical trifles," and is attempting to document language as it evolves, day-to-day. Today the blog is about the swine flu -- just like every other piece of media in every paper everywhere. But Schott's article isn't about deaths, epidemiology, or where to get a SARS Guard; it's about the language used to describe the... READ ON

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ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

McSweeney's is running a hilarious piece that pretends to be an "internet-age writing syllabus and course overview" by "instructor" Robert Lanham. The course offers a much-needed review of writing that really matters today -- funny Twitter and Facebook messages, the art of the self-involved status update, and so on. The course description says: "Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather... READ ON

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Whose Father Was He?

Errol Morris, documentarian and now blogger for the New York Times, brings us a fascinating investigation into the history of a single photograph (technically an ambrotype). Morris's article Whose Father Was He? explores the mystery of a photograph of three children, found on the body of a Union soldier who fell at Gettysburg in 1863. Here's the... READ ON

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The Panic Over Dungeons & Dragons (in 1985)

In the mid 1980s, the U.S. media latched onto a story: teens were committing suicide, and the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons was somehow to blame. As a kid who was himself playing D&D (and not committing suicide) during this media firestorm, I remember the outcry pretty vividly. All the kids I knew who played the game were nerds, just like me. I was vaguely aware that sometimes teens did commit suicide...perhaps even nerds. Was there any connection between nerds playing D&D and nerds committing... READ ON

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Layer Tennis: Art as Competition

We've discussed Layer Tennis before: it's a live online competition in which graphic designers trade art back and forth, building upon and changing the art during each fifteen-minute turn, in a kind of graphic design Battle Royale. You may say: huh? Well, here are some sample layers from last week's match between Brooklynites Armin Vit and Sam Potts. In the opening salvo, Vit introduces a wrestling/typography... READ ON