An image from Chris Jordan’s new project, An American Self-Portrait. Jet Trails, 2007 (60×96″) depicts 10,000 jet trails, equal to the number of domestic commercial passenger flights daily in the US.

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

hi from Switzerland.

The New York Times writes on the growing demand for treehouses:

Within a few years, elaborate treehouses, many costing upwards of $100,000, were becoming almost faddish.

“It’s accepted now that adults can have treehouses,” said Mr. Nelson, who published four of those books. A partner at TreeHouse Workshop, a building company in Seattle, Mr. Nelson has made up a mantra for some of his clients: “Of course we can have treehouses; we’re baby boomers, and we can have whatever we want, and we can have it now, and we have a lot of money.”

Mail Me Art put out a call for submissions:

Submissions can be envelopes or packages which have been drawn on, painted , dipped in acid, covered in paper mache (anything you want really) but they must look amazing and they must have travelled though the post

They even have prizes. While this type of project has been done before, there are already some great entries posted, including this one by Stephanie O’Hearne.

On April 13th, 2007 Tonic was forced to close after more than 9 years as a home for avant-garde, creative, and experimental music in dowtown NYC. I have seen some of the greatest concerts of my life at Tonic.

From Tonic’s website:

We simply can no longer afford the rent and all of the other costs associated with doing business on the Lower East Side.

The neighborhood around us has been increasingly consumed by “luxury condominiums”, boutique hotels and glass towers, all making the value of our salvaged space worth more then our business could ever realistically support. We have also been repeatedly harassed by the city’s Quality of Life Task Force which resulted in the debilitating closing of the ))sub((tonic lounge in January. Coincidentally, this campaign began as our immediate neighbor, the Blue Condominium building - a symbol of the new Lower East Side - prepared to open its doors.

As Gothamist reports, there was a press conference on the steps of City Hall yesterday “in response to the eviction and closing of Tonic, the downtown venue that shut its doors after nine years. A committee of musicians, cultural activists, and supporters made a call for public and political intervention to protect new music/indie/avant/jazz in New York City and to ask the city to provide a minimum 200 capacity, centrally located venue for experimental music.” From the press release, the coalition is asking:

1. that the city council adopt a general principle similar to European cultural policy: that NYC’s new music and experimental jazz/indie musical culture is a unique asset, an essential part of the city’s history, economy, and identity, and not to be left entirely at the mercy of market forces.

2. that the city recognize the damage done to its cultural heritage and status as a ‘cultural capitol’ by the displacement of venues central to experimental musics, and act now to protect those venues still left from displacement either by providing funding sufficient to allow them to withstand the explosion of commercial rents, or by legislation forcing landlords to restrict rents of culturally valuable venues, or both.

3. that New York City intervene to preserve 107 Norfolk Street as an experimental music venue, or make available a comparably sized and centrally located space for that purpose.

Sign the petition here.

The BBC reports that “some schools [in the UK] avoid teaching the Holocaust and other controversial history subjects as they do not want to cause offence, research has claimed.”

Not surprisingly, research shows Bush’s abstinence-only initiative has no influence on any future decisions to have sex:

It’s been a central plank of George Bush’s social policy: to stop teenagers having sex. More than $1bn of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 - posters printed, television adverts broadcast and entire education programmes devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys.
The trouble is, new research suggests that it hasn’t worked. At all.

A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed.

Bruce Schneier points to a Washington Post article that describes how private businesses such as rental and mortgage companies and car dealers are checking the names of customers against a list of suspected terrorists and drug traffickers made publicly available by the Treasury Department, sometimes denying services to ordinary people whose names are similar to those on the list.

Tom Kubbany is neither a terrorist nor a drug trafficker, has average credit and has owned homes in the past, so the Northern California mental-health worker was baffled when his mortgage broker said lenders were not interested in him. Reviewing his loan file, he discovered something shocking. At the top of his credit report was an OFAC alert provided by credit bureau TransUnion that showed that his middle name, Hassan, is an alias for Ali Saddam Hussein, purportedly a “son of Saddam Hussein.”

The record is not clear on whether Ali Saddam Hussein was a Hussein offspring, but the OFAC list stated he was born in 1980 or 1983. Kubbany was born in Detroit in 1949.

Climate models indicate region will be as dry as Dust Bowl for decades.

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”

You can’t make this stuff up.