[Image: Trevor Paglen, "PAN (Unknown; USA-207)," from The Other Night Sky]. I had the pleasure last winter of attending a lecture by Trevor Paglen in Amsterdam, where he spoke about a project of his called The Last Pictures. As Paglen describes it, "Humanity’s longest lasting remnants are found among...
Weather is the Future of Urban Design
[Image: From a newscast about Istanbul's recent tornadoes]. It's hard to resist a story where urban design is blamed for creating tornadoes. But the recent cluster of "freak mini-tornadoes" striking Istanbul offers an anomaly in search of an explanation, and the newly built outer edges of the metropolis...
Powers of Quarantine
[Image: Liberian security forces implement "a quarantine of the West Point slum, stepping up the government’s fight to stop the outbreak and unnerving residents." Photo by Abbas Dulleh/AP, via Al Jazeera America]. Of Forcible Blockades and Military Isolation A neighborhood-scale quarantine was forcibly...
The Great Age of Clouds
[Image: A "hurricane" at Saturn's south pole, via NASA; see also The Planetary Weather Report]. In Frédéric J. Pont's new book Alien Skies, he describes the atmospheres of other planets: what storms are like, what the clouds are made of, how a sunset might appear through a chemical haze at high pressure...
Minecraft
[Image: Der Bergbau, courtesy of the British Museum; view larger]. Der Bergbau is a beautiful 19th-century German board game set in a mine, currently in the collection of the British Museum. They describe it as a "game-board showing a cross-section of a mine and the network of tunnels leading down from...
The Fall
[Image: David Maisel, from ToledoContemporánea]. At the end of 2013, photographer David Maisel was commissioned to photograph the city of Toledo, Spain, as part of a group exhibition called ToledoContemporánea, timed for a wider celebration of the 400th birthday of the painter El Greco. Maisel's photos...
Survey Says
[Image: Screen-grab from The New York Times]. Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters "has created a drone air force to map, monitor and safeguard his country’s ancient treasures," according to the New York Times. Researchers in Peru "struggle to protect the country’s archaeological heritage...
Emergency Exit
[Image: The SkySaver backpack in action via Kit Up!]. The SkySaver is a kind of emergency exit in a bag: a controlled-descent backpack loaded with hundreds of feet of fire-resistant cable. Just hook the line onto some fixed point in the structure behind you and lower yourself, two meters per second,...
Military Cave Logistics
[Image: "Humvees are stored inside the Frigaard Cave in central Norway. The cave is one of six caves that are part of the Marine Corps Prepositioning Program-Norway, which supports the equipping of Marine Expeditionary Brigade consisting of 15,000 Marines and with supplies for up to 30 days." U.S. Marine...
The Future T.B.D.
[Image: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory]. The TBD Catalog soon to be published by the Near Future Laboratory is a fictional catalog of possible products, all described and illustrated like mail-order props in some unrealized everyday life of tomorrow. Part satire, part industrial brainstorm,...
Buy a Fort
[Image: Screengrab via the BBC]. A maritime fort constructed in the 1860s in the middle of the Thames Estuary is on the market for half a million pounds, or roughly $835,000. [Image: Screengrab via the BBC]. With its fifteen-foot thick walls and insanely daunting approach—accessible on foot only at...
