A planned set of paintings, now underway, of cardboard maquettes of vehicles of massive hubris and monumental disasters, each doomed in their own way, done partly in dialogue with the work of William Daniels. Vehicles include:

The Hindenberg
The Titanic
Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc
The Challenger Space Shuttle
The Ryugyong Hotel
The V2
Sputnik-2
The Lobotomobile

“he’s coming up with this totally crap story that means nothing to him but trying to present it as this sort of like transformative, mythic, religious experience and hoping he can bluff people into believing it.”

‘There is an old saying that says, “too many cooks, spoil the broth.” In this web page the inverse is introduced, that is “many bad cooks, make good soup.”

From simple mathematics, we know that negating a negative number produces a positive number. In a game of chess, you might sacrifice pieces in order to win the overall game. But, can two losing games be set up to produce a winning scenario? The answer is yes. This counterintuitive behaviour is called “Parrondo’s Paradox.”

Parrondo’s games were devised by the Spanish physicist Juan M. R. Parrondo in 1996 and they were presented in unpublished form at a workshop in Torino, Italy. After about three years, in 1999, Harmer and Abbott published the seminal paper on the games, naming them after Parrondo who’s genius inspired them.

The main idea of Parrondo’s paradox is that two individually losing games can be combined to win via deterministic or non-deterministic mixing of the games.’

-from The Official Parrondo’s Paradox Page, via The New York Times 9th Annual Year in Ideas

As part of LAND/ART New Mexico, on the grounds of the Harwood Art Center, Christopher Robbins and John Baca will prevent a tree from losing its leaves this autumn.

That’s where I am now, living under a tree with John Baca, preventing a tree from losing its leaves, one by one. As you can see, Autumn got a head start. Tomorrow the Generator arrives.

I haven’t actually seen the movie, just this one scene from White Heat in which James Cagney, on top of a burning building, shouts “I made it, Ma: Top of the World” before collapsing in a ball of flames. It was in some movie with “Brooklyn” in the title, in which some kid gets involved with drug dealers, so they kill his father. They were cutting school watching this movie on TV, and I was captivated by the Destruction as Freedom evinced in that gangster’s fall.

It’s still a beacon to me. Perhaps I should grow up, but then, maybe it is not that easy. I once took a test I heard on NPR that some businesses were giving to decide if potential workers were anti-social or not, and it said I was dangerous just because I thought I would rather live in a world without scientists than madmen.

Is that TMI?

The Machine from mudlevel on Vimeo.

mudlevel brings us tiny “scams” so intricately-orchestrated and time and labor intensive that the monetary benefit becomes more of a punchline than an actual goal.

via shoesfullofdust | Dylan Foley