Bicycle Built for Two Thousand

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. (more info)

(Daisy Bell was famously performed by an IBM 704 in 1962, in the world's first example of musical speech synthesis-- which is probably why Kubrick chose it for the end of 2001 as well.)

Solomon Burke-- None of Us Are Free

Jazz organ: great instrument, or the greatest instrument?

Population dynamics in Yemen

From the beginning of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom comes an account of how population and cultural forces drove human geography in early 20th-century Yemen. I have no idea how realistic this account is, but as an engineer I think it's kind of inspiring to see this kind of systems-minded analysis used to describe complex human behavior-- and so poetically, at that.

In Yemen the solution was different. There was no foreign trade, and no massed industries to accumulate population in unhealthy places. The towns were just market towns, as clean and simple as ordinary villages. Therefore the population slowly increased; the scale of living was brought down very low; and a congestion of numbers was generally felt. They could not emigrate overseas; for the Sudan was even worse country than Arabia, and the few tribes which did venture across were compelled to modify their manner of life and their Semitic culture profoundly, in order to exist. They could not move northward along the hills; for these were barred by the holy town of Mecca and its port Jidda: an alien belt, continually reinforced by strangers from India and Java and Bokhara and Africa, very strong in vitality, violently hostile to the Semitic consciousness, and maintained despite economics and geography and climate by the artificial factor of a world-religion. The congestion of Yemen, therefore, becoming extreme, found its only relief in the east, by forcing the weaker aggregations of its border down and down the slopes of the hills along the Widian, the half-waste district of the great water-bearing valleys of Bisha, Dawasir, Ranya and Taraba which ran out towards the deserts of Nejd. These weaker clans had continually to exchange good springs and fertile palms for poorer springs and scantier palms, till at last they reached an area where a proper agricultural life became impossible. They then began to eke out their precarious husbandry by breeding sheep and camels, and in time came to depend more and more on these herds for their living.
Finally, under a last impulse from the straining population behind them, the border people (now almost wholly pastoral) were flung out of the furthest crazy oasis into the untrodden wilderness as nomads. This process, to be watched to-day with individual families and tribes to whose marches an exact name and date might be put, must have been going on since the first day of full settlement of Yemen. The Widian below Mecca and Taif are crowded with the memories and place-names of half a hundred tribes which have gone from there, and may be found to-day in Nejd, in Jebel Shammar, in the Hamad, even on the frontiers of Syria and Mesopotamia. There was the source of migration, the factory of nomads, the springing of the gulf-stream of desert wanderers.

Rite of Spring

On a bit of a modernism kick; really such interesting stuff. Quoth Peter Childs (from wikipedia), "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair." Or as Fitzgerald put it (at 23, goddamn I feel like an underachiever now), a generation "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

So anyway, here's the Rite of Spring:

part 2 | part 3

And here's a snip of a documentary on the music.

Swine Flu Aftermath in Egypt

Hmm, and Egypt is now dealing with the repercussions of their decision during last May's swine flu panic to cull over 300,000 pigs in the country: before the cull, the zabaleen were Christian pig-farmers living on the outskirts of Cairo and other cities who went door to door collecting trash, which they either sold to recycling facilities or fed to their pigs. Now that they've been driven out, the streets of Cairo are filling with excess garbage which the city lacks the infrastructure to handle properly, creating a health hazard far worse than the flu itself.

The New Settlers of Detroit

The economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on the American auto industry, and cities like Detroit which were once central to the industry have been gutted by job losses and home foreclosures in the past year. This effect has been so extreme that property in Detroit must practically be given away: Yahoo Real Estate shows dozens of homes around the city selling for mere hundreds of dollars. And still the population of Detroit, a city designed to support roughly 2 million people, has dwindled to less than a million, while the shutdown of many supermarket chains has created a food desert in the city.

Detroit's plight has been well covered in the news, and organizations are already forming to take advantage of the area's collapsed economy. Artists, sustainability enthusiasts, survivalists, and hippie-types in general are coordinating the mass purchase and transformation of land in and around the city. And since this recession coincides with a period of increased interest in locally-grown produce and sustainability, many efforts have a heavy focus on urban farming-- a fact which has received attention from Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture, the Beeb, and NPR among others.

Naturally there's a lot of hype surrounding the whole thing, and it will be interesting to see how this new influx impacts the culture of the city in coming years. For further reading, here are a few people and organizations currently involved in settling the area and documenting their impact:

• Andrew Kemp is a resident of East Detroit who has bought up five lots in his neighborhood and is now farming four of them


• Urban Farming is an NPO which farms vacant lots in Detroit and gives collected produce to the needy


• Detroit UnReal Estate Agency is a group which tracks cultural development in Detroit and inventories cheap property in the area


• the Yes Farm is a collective of artists and urban farmers living and creating in Detroit


• the Power House Project is a social art project attempting to develop an efficient, sustainable home in the city for under $99,000

Photos of Decay in Detroit and Chernobyl

Like the title says. Here's:

A flikr photoset of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository (read the backstory in the blog post here)

and Kiddofspeed.com, photos taken from a motorcycle trip through the dead zone of Chernobyl. (Looks like there's some argument over whether it's real, but it is an interesting site nonetheless.)

Machine with Wishbone

"Caught in a symbiotic relationship, both the wishbone and the machine are unable to manifest fully without the other. We drag our pasts with us and move according to unseen forces. More and more, we interface with the world through our mental and technological creations."

View more of Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculptures on his YouTube channel.

The Amen Break

Okay okay, I couldn't resist grabbing this as well-- again via the Worldwide Cultural Gonzo Squad, an oddly captivating video on the Amen Break, a six-second-long drum loop from the b-side of a 1969 single which was taken up by early sample-based music and is now the basis for entire musical subgenres, as well as every advertisement soundtrack ever. Also interesting for its discussion of copyright law, and the fact that it's narrated by a surprisingly realistic electronic voice.

Kowloon Walled City

Found a fantastic blog post on Coilhouse (go read for more details and nifty video), on Kowloon Walled City-- a dystopian monolith of overgrown urbanization which existed in anarchic limbo in the middle of Hong Kong between 1945 and 1993.

Kowloon's bizarre state of lawlessness attracted thousands of people-- drug dealers, unlicensed dentists, entrepreneurs, refugees-- and the city's population boomed to a high of 50,000, making it one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. Thousands of makeshift expansions were built to cope with the growing population, and the city developed into 14-story monolith, a place where sunlight rarely reached street level and denizens drilled down to tap into water pipes from surrounding regions of Hong Kong. The city was evacuated in the early 90's and demolished in 1993, but its legacy now lives on in popular culture-- it is the basis of dozens of dystopian cities created in movies, books, and video games. Quality of life and sanitation were poor, but the reported crime rate was low, and many small shop owners found it a city of unique opportunity.