Pasadena Pictures

50 Beautiful Women | 2007-2012 | photography by Z. Urbina

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:50:18 -0800

Taking a break from photos for awhile. A long while. Not gonna say “retiring,” because at age 30 that would be absurd. Here’s a look back on amazing adventures, with some very lovely ladies, in SoCal & NYC. -Z

Katie Herzog’s Object Oriented Programming runs at Xerox...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:40:35 -0800

Katie Herzog’s Object Oriented Programming runs at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, CA through March 30th, 2012.

“The key to writing is learning to differentiate private...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:39:26 -0800

“The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment.” - David Foster Wallace

Currently reading Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky about his road trip with DFW immediately following the publication of Infinite Jest. So. Damn. Good. It exposes in casual conversations the raw, slightly damaged side of DFW, but more importantly the philosophies and criteria that guided his work. Highly recommended.

Taipei-based painter Peihang Huang uses oil paints to create...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:32:29 -0800

Taipei-based painter Peihang Huang uses oil paints to create these dreamy, saccharine, and occasionally morbid portraits inspired by Barbie dolls. The paintings above are from two sets of work entitled Floral Funeral and Mad World. [more work]

Rigorously researched and beautifully produced, Pasta by Design...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:42:45 -0800

Rigorously researched and beautifully produced, Pasta by Design at once humanizes mathematics and exposes the captivating complexity of one of the world’s most beloved foods, revealing the dimensionality of design as a cross-disciplinary cultural lens.

Don't Know Why I Love You

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:41:20 -0800

“ It is tempting to dismiss music as a purely cultural phenomenon and rock as an aberration of 20th-century culture. That is pretty much the explanation musicologists and cultural theorists have favoured as they dissect the arcane details of who-copied-what-from-whom, interpreting the history of popular music in a mumbo-jumbo of postmodern critique.

By contrast, an evolutionary biologist starts from the assumption that things don’t happen by themselves, especially things that dramatically increase your risk of dying, as rocking out certainly does. Anything as popular, exciting, sexy, deadly and - most of all - as difficult to do well, needs an explanation. But we need to ask the right questions.

Asking how making and listening to music affects the reproductive fitness of individual musicians and audience members can only tell us part of the story. We also need to consider other evolutionary processes that have operated on individuals and their genes that might predispose something as sexy and dangerous as rock to shake, rattle and revolutionise the modern world.

No sane person would argue that rock is not cultural: it is well known that rock arose in the 1950s out of existing musical traditions including rhythm and blues, folk, blues, jazz and country. It spread through learning and imitation, assisted by a special blend of social and economic circumstances that arose soon after World War II and the spread of technologies like commercial radio, record players and television. But even though rock is a quintessentially cultural phenomenon, it grew in the soil of our evolved biology. That is what makes it so utterly compelling, and why, a decade into the 21st century, it is still going so strong.” continue reading | Cosmos Magazine

[title: Mick Jagger][image: Iori Tomita]

“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:39:00 -0800

“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.” - Christiaan Huygens

hooked on old Feynman videos lately..

My body is a mason jar, transparent as a jellyfish

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:36:00 -0800

“ Maybe there’s a physical experience that goes along with being powerful,” says Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell University, who cowrote the paper with Michelle M. Duguid of Washington University. “For people who are less powerful, maybe other people and objects loom larger, and for the powerful everything else just seems smaller.” Plenty of research has shown that taller people are more likely to acquire power; taller people make more money, on average, and are more likely to be promoted. But our research is the first to show the reverse may also be true power also makes people feel taller.

In one experiment, subjects came to the lab in pairs. First they had their heights measured. Then they were given a leadership aptitude test and told that, based on their feedback, they would each be assigned to play the role of the manager or the employee. They were given fake feedback, then randomly assigned a role. After that, each person filled out a questionnaire with personal information, including eye color and height. People who had been told they would be the manager, with complete control over the work process and power to evaluate the employee, said they were taller than the actual measurement. The subject who had been told they would be the employee gave a height that was more or less the same as their real height.

Other experiments found similar results—that people who feel powerful overestimate their height. So maybe Carl-Henric Svanberg really did feel taller than the people affected by the Gulf oil spill. The results may also explain why diminutive leaders might still behave like people twice their height—they actually feel taller.” continue reading | Psychological Science

[title:Andrea Gibson]

Clever and effortless, the work Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:32:15 -0800

Clever and effortless, the work Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar did for Pepsi-Cola World marks the standard of late 50s/early 60s American kitsch.

Dan LuVisi is a digital concept artist working in the film,...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:51:43 -0800

Dan LuVisi is a digital concept artist working in the film, video game and comic book industry. [more work]

"History is the shank of the social sciences." - C. Wright Mills

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:49:17 -0800

“ Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service — one of America Online’s two main competitors back in the early 1990s — and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country. Eight months after launch, Neil McManus wrote in the magazine Digital Media that all other newspapers interested in pursuing a digital strategy should visit Access Atlanta “with notebook in hand.”

But that was the apex. Prodigy’s membership stopped growing, crushed by the less staid and more freewheeling America Online, and within a year and a half the AJC was forced to end its association with Prodigy, turning to the web later than many other large newspapers. Because the company viewed the digital strategy as a supplement to the print product rather than an eventual replacement, the paper did not see the web as an impetus to change its print-based business model. In short order, the pioneers became also-rans.

Obviously, the Journal-Constitution bet on the wrong horse — and, in this case, the wrong technological platform, since after AOL drove Prodigy and Compuserve out of business, the World Wide Web rendered AOL’s proprietary service irrelevant. But it’s hard to fault the Journal-Constitution for failing to predict the future correctly. After all, nearly every newspaper failed in that. Even though the AJC guessed wrong on the answers, its management and editorial staff asked a lot of the right questions. And they placed a decent-sized bet on their guess.” continue reading | Nieman Journalism Lab

“The ethics of war are built on an imagined...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:45:55 -0800

“The ethics of war are built on an imagined reciprocity.” - Daniel Swift

epic Chinese volleyball rally. thanks, Devour.

The walls of the known, the boundaries were close at hand.

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:42:10 -0800

“ The most famous missing person of the late nineteenth century was surely Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in 1847 with over a hundred crewmen while navigating a section of the Northwest Passage. Over the next thirty years, forty-one expeditions set off to find him, or some relic of his trip, and at the insistence of Lady Franklin, more men had died searching for Lord Franklin than on the original expedition. Eventually, word trickled back that the ships had been caught in the shifting Arctic ice and the men had starved and some had been cannibalized.

It’s been speculated that of the nearly one thousand explorers and crew who have traveled to the Arctic, only a quarter have returned. In an 1895 address to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, S.A. Andrée proposed an expedition to the North Pole that would risk only three lives, avoiding the crushing ice floes by using a mode of transportation that promised to be safe, quick, and relatively comfortable.

He would travel by balloon.”

continue reading | Brain Pickings

[title: Alec Wilkinson]

Gabriel Pacheco is a Mexican illustrator. He became a published...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:38:21 -0800

Gabriel Pacheco is a Mexican illustrator. He became a published artist after his sister asked him to illustrate a story. Pacheco continued to explore his native talent and created a splendid portfolio of illustrations for children books, poetry volumes and fantastic literature. [more work]

Frequent Passenger by Alvarejo up for vote at Threadless.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:25:05 -0800

Frequent Passenger by Alvarejo up for vote at Threadless.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:20:06 -0800

“…in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies.

The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away.

…

Anthropologist Wade Davis claimed to have identified the ingredients of the bòkò’s zombification powder which supposedly included tetrodotoxin – a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in some animals, like the pufferfish, which can cause temporary coma-like states.

I won’t say much more about the ‘neurotoxin’ theory of zombification, not least because it was brilliantly covered by science writer Mo Costandi and I couldn’t improve on his fantastic article which will tell you everything you need to know.

But on the cultural level, zombies are identified by specific characteristics – they cannot lift up their heads, have a nasal intonation, a fixed staring expression, they carry repeated purposeless actions and have limited and repetitive speech.”

continue reading | Mind Hacks

[title: Djuna Barnes][image: Phil Noto]

In late-1979, New York Times columnist William Safire compiled a...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:15:05 -0800

In late-1979, New York Times columnist William Safire compiled a list of “Fumblerules of Grammar” — rules of writing, all of which are humorously self-contradictory — and published them in his popular column, “On Language.”

Remember to never split an infinitive.
A preposition is something never to end a sentence with.
The passive voice should never be used.
Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
Don’t use no double negatives.
Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn’t.
Reserve the apostrophe for it’s proper use and omit it when its not needed.
Do not put statements in the negative form.
Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
No sentence fragments.
Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
Eschew dialect, irregardless.
And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
Write all adverbial forms correct.
Don’t use contractions in formal writing.
Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Don’t string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
Always pick on the correct idiom.
“Avoid overuse of ‘quotation “marks.”’”
The adverb always follows the verb.
Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; They’re old hat; seek viable alternatives.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Employ the vernacular.
Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
Contractions aren’t necessary.
Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
One should never generalize.
Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
Be more or less specific.
Understatement is always best.
One-word sentences? Eliminate.
Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
Who needs rhetorical questions?
Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with a point

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:10:05 -0800

“ Despite the ever present claims that the music industry is on its knees, begging for mercy from the savage beast that is internet piracy, there is some respite in the news that vinyl sales rose by 39 percent in 2011.

While dance music’s biggest players continue to move away from the format, preferring to use CDJs or digital platforms like Traktor and lighten their record bag load, the increase in vinyl sales seems to be fuelled by the home consumer.

Media research agency, Nielsen Soundscan reported an increase in sales of the format from 2.8 million units in 2010 to 3.9 million units in 2011 and suggested the consumers desire for a tangible product as the driving factor.

In the last few years, more mainstream acts have begun to release on vinyl again meaning the formats resurgence has moved from a nostalgia fuelled hipster phenomenon to something with mass market appeal.”

continue reading | MixMag

[title:Djuna Barnes][image: Sam Cooke]

Fatale #4 and #5 covers by Sean Phillips.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:05:05 -0800

Fatale #4 and #5 covers by Sean Phillips.

New stuff from Bill Mayer.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:05:00 -0800

New stuff from Bill Mayer.