Alex Tarr

2/2 "...With the added sophistication of television and computers, it becomes even more tempting for us to cope by staying indoors, glued to the expanding cornucopia of one-dimensional learning, and to neglect further the hard evidence which lurks all around us outside the walls."
- Grady Clay, 1979

"Cities continue to change, in response to access to and control over their energy supplies, as well as to their will to exploit and conserve. But our ability to penetrate our surroundings-to distinguish myth from reality, wish from fulfilment has only begun to cope with environmental change..." 1/2

I'm hoping for an Ai generated Orson Welles voice over that turns the entire film into a nearly three hour advertisement for Coppola branded wines.

who writes about the origins of 'data' as something a subject possess? In something like an ontological sense- in the same way that a subject (once) possessed a soul or personality, one now *has* data. Data that is to be guarded, protected or given at will? When did "my data" enter the zeitgeist?

Most reposting to remind fellow urbanists that you can now follow @city-journal.bsky.social on bluesky!

But, of course, also welcome more feedback on the editorial.
(come for the great art by Tom Schofield, stay for the non-sequitur, but maybe prescient, swipes at Larry Ellison and Oracle)

anyone reach out to poor Cameron Dixon, the civil servant at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency which apparently had to register the .gov domain?

get.gov/posts/2024-0...

Loveless, by Japancakes 11 track album

semi-annual reminder that Japancakes covered My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" in its entirety and it is perfect.
All instrumental (the cellos and pedal steels work brilliantly) so you can put it on at your place of work today!

japancakes.bandcamp.com/album/loveless

will you be taking questions about that beautiful Rural Electrification Administration book cover?

wonder what the mood is over at the NSA this week.

Social Reproduction and the Housing Question There is broad recognition today that there is a link between the crisis of social reproduction and the housing problem. But their precise relationship is not always clear. This paper is an attempt t...

Hot off the digital press, my article in @antipodeonline.bsky.social on Social Reproduction and the Housing Question onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I understand why a studio went with "A Complete Unknown" as the recognisable lyric to use as a title for a Dylan biopic, but I still think they should have gone with "Short Pants Romance."

Looks like there's a new influx of folks here, so boosting the @cplusc.bsky.social starter pack- if you want to hear about the best new ideas in climate and economic policy in the coming dark days, this is a good place to start! bsky.app/starter-pack...

Cities, computation and capitalism Published in City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action (Vol. 28, No. 5-6, 2024)

The wonderful editors at City asked me to write an editorial for the latest issue. Here is what I had to say about Cities, computation and capitalism:
doi.org/10.1080/1360...

(lots of wonderful work I didn't have space to cite, but I hope it furthers a broader conversation and action)

Israeli forces have bombed another UN-run school in southern Gaza, killing at least 20 displaced Palestinians sheltering in the building, witnesses told Al Jazeera.

🔗: aje.io/otnvl2

Admittedly, I may be more excited about the "Drawing and Dreaming" version, but both look like absolute treasures.
a4kids.org/book/city/

and just when I was starting to think tech might just save us.

YouTube video by ThingsICantFindOtherwise Your Duty Is Clear (The Simpsons)

but also:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkg3...
"your job is to build and maintain those robots"

also with the "how are AIs *actually* going to remake cities" piece I'm working on this week :|

"These people looked deep within my soul... and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."

Massive Microsoft data center brings new promise - and water and energy challenges - to Racine County. The data center will have far fewer jobs than even the scaled-down Foxconn operation nearby.

www.jsonline.com/story/money/... my friend Lindsay did a big long piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the impact of local data center development and I'm so proud of her!! Regional coverage is very important for this topic!!

Vol. 5, No. 8: August 2024 - Community-Engaged Mapping · Reviews in Digital Humanities Vol. 5, No. 8 of Reviews in Digital Humanities, a peer-reviewed journal that facilitates scholarly evaluation of digital humanities work and its outputs, edited by Jennifer Guiliano (IUPUI) and Roopik...

🚨 New issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities! Jennifer Guiliano and I are excited to share the August issue of #ReviewsInDH: “Community-engaged Mapping.” reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v5-n8

#plateOfShrimp

The Matrix as in the "actually not that nightmarish virtual world dystopia run by a mysterious cabal of AIs" or the 1999 cinematic masterpiece depicting that world?

hearing a lot of hemming-and-hawing on UK media about why the country is behind in the tech economy, and, more generally, declining productivity.

Has any considered that at the root of the problem is that the '#' key is just in the wrong place on most British keyboards? And non-existent on others?

mine are all in boxes again, but in a moment of remarkable destructive-procrastination in grad school, I once organised them by press and then width and height as subcategories. it was aesthetically very pleasing, if not impractical for ever finding what I needed.

forgot that I'd found this remarkable illustration of the military industrial complex from *checks notes* the magazine Missiles and Rockets, 1958

Want to meet people analyzing historical maps using computer vision? Curious to see MapReader in action? 🗃️

Join the MapReader team for our first community call on Thursday, Feb 15 at 4pm UK time!

Details here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

MapReader: mapreader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Central Pangean Mountains - Wikipedia

It's *really* not my area of expertise, but in short, when the old continents collided to make Pangea 300± million years ago, one thing they formed was the Central Pangean Mountains. When the new continents drifted back apart, they took different parts with them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central...