ideometric

I’m back in Korea for a year of English teaching. So far we’ve been cooped up at a week long orientation session in the hills of Yongin, an hour and a half south of Seoul. It’s like living in a bubble, everyone speaks English, and we’re isolated in the country among the hills and greenery that, while beautiful and surprisingly clear, have little in common with the smelly, loud, kaleidoscopic city I remember from last summer.

There’s something to be said for the relaxed pace and country atmosphere, where sitting outside a convenience store having a drink under the moonlight, surrounded by farm fields, is the highlight of the night. But I can’t wait to get back to Seoul.

This is slightly genius. Above piece carved out of Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage by Robert The.

Book art is intimate, fascinating, and transgressive. When we talk about books, we are usually talking about what’s inside, but there is a lot more to a book than reading it. Book art makes those other aspects its domain: the way books look; the way that, with their bent spines and marginalia, they record the history of our own reading lives; the way that these mass-produced objects can seem to hold not just letters but knowledge.

DO WANT. Shelby Daytona coupe reproduction.

Osocio.org – a blog cataloging “social advertising and non-profit campaigns from around the globe.”

Good resource for anyone trying to integrate art and social movement activism.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Came across him while looking up the term “affordance.” Sounds interesting.

“This book is part polemic, part science, part serious and part fun. It examines the effect of poor design and equipment failure on human behavior. Intended for a general audience, it covers user-centered design, the psychopathology of everyday things and the psychology of everyday actions.”

“We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects. Here is a book at last that strikes back both at the objects and at the designers, manufacturers, and assorted human beings who originate and maintain this perversity. It will do your heart good and may even point the way to correcting matters.”
— Isaac Asimov

NYT article on higher oil prices un-doing, or at least threatening, the globalization of production and trade.

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

NYT

Exxon’s profits were nearly $90,000 a minute over the quarter, but it was less than Wall Street had expected. Exxon’s shares fell 4.6 percent, to close at $80.43. (The company calculates that it pays $274,000 a minute in taxes and spends $884,000 a minute to run the business.)

NYT