drmstream[writing]

Early Win­ter Morn­ing When I am ready to bury you I want the weather to coop­er­ate. That would be a sign of god’s grace. I don’t want to be stand­ing by the open grave In a dri­ving rain, The umbrella flut­ter­ing queru­lously over­head; Or star­ing at the crys­tals of a deep frost Bound to the irregular […]

via bldgblog.blogspot.com Bios­phere 2 was a ill-conceived effort to recre­ate the earth’s ecosys­tem within an vast geo­desic dome, a kind of Earth-pod on the sur­face of Earth. Bldg­Blog is fea­tur­ing the pho­tos of Noah Shel­don, who recently vis­ited the defunct struc­ture and recorded nature’s steady creep. A dead build­ing, Bldg­Blog pro­claims. A dead build­ing is one […]

via cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com This is believed to be the old­est photo of New York, show­ing a farm on what was Bloom­ing­dale road, most likely some­where on the Upper West Side. from Dan McCarthy’s Stream

via ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity is up there on the hill where St. Luke’s was in 1900. (St. Luke’s is still on Ams­ter­dam, just not so promi­nent.) But, three-quarters of a cen­tury later, the bucolic vista had turned into a dark, tan­gled park of vio­lence and intrigue that was bor­dered on its west side by a […]

Just how bound up nat­ural beauty is with art beauty is con­firmed by the expe­ri­ence of the for­mer. For it, nature is exclu­sively appear­ance, never the stuff of labor and the repro­duc­tion of life, let alone the sub-stratum of sci­ence. Like the expe­ri­ence of art, the aes­thetic expe­ri­ence is that of images. Nature, as appearing […]

via mjperry.blogspot.com More peo­ple, liv­ing longer, con­sum­ing more resources, increas­ing com­pe­ti­tion, dri­ves inno­va­tion. I look back over my life­time and believe that the sin­gle biggest force of change has been the growth of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion from 150 mil­lion to 300 mil­lion and the global pop­u­la­tion from about 3 bil­lion to 7 bil­lion. One major […]

Seed Mag­a­zine has a post elab­o­rat­ing on the phe­nom­e­non of the uncanny val­ley, and con­nect­ing the writ­ing of Freud and the gen­e­sis of the con­cept of the uncanny val­ley from Masahiro Mori with the recent work from Asif Ghaz­an­far. The hypoth­e­siz­ing about the uncanny value has focused on the premise of human­ness, the essence of […]

I have looked in a mir­ror and won­dered who that is. I’ve caught a glimpse of a man­nequin as I’ve turned a cor­ner on a dark, wet night and felt uneasy. This is the val­ley effect. The object looks too real but is too flawed. It is encroach­ing on the space of human­ness. The discomfort […]