Posts Tagged ‘LSD’
Go directly to jail…
The U.S. has under 5% of the world’s population– but jails over 25% of the world’s imprisoned. We have (by far) the highest rate of incarceration in the world; and with the encouragement of the the private prison industry, it’s growing.
Josh Begley, a master’s student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU, wanted to represent what all of this means, to communicate not just the sheer quantity of prisons in America, but their footprint, their volume on our landscape. The result: Prison Map, not really a map so much as an extraordinary collection of Google earth photos of “correctional institutions” across the country.
Read more at Atlantic Cities, and visit Prison Map.
***
As we ponder the perils of profligate privatization, we might take a moment to meditate on Timothy Francis Leary; he died on this date in 1996. As a Harvard psychology professor in the early 60s, Leary was among the first researchers into the therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs (when those drugs were legal, and widely considered promising). His early experiments, conducted “in the clear” and according to accepted research protocols, were contemporaneous with covert CIA tests. But while Leary’s work produced encouraging results, his project was closed, and he was fired from his post. Leary spent the next three decades advocating the use of psychedelics– and influencing a broad swath of the counter-culture.
In his final moments, Leary said “why not?” to his son Zachary Leary repeatedly, in different intonations– as a question, as a statement, softly, loudly, thoughtfully, ruefully, and confidently. His last word, according to Zachary, was “beautiful.”
“Turn on, tune in, drop out”
“Think for yourself and question authority”
Knowing the Distance: More Fun With Numbers…
The Fibonacci sequence describes the golden ratio (or golden spiral), an ideal form found in the more beautiful corners of nature, and much beloved by designers everywhere.
The Fibonacci numbers are the sum of the previous two numbers in the sequence, starting with 0 and 1: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…
A Fibonacci spiral created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in a Fibonacci tiling; this one uses squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34. (source)
It turns out that the Fibonacci sequence also neatly matches the relationship between kilometers and miles. Three miles is five kilometers, five miles is eight kilometers, eight miles is 13 kilometers. It’s not perfect: eight miles is actually 12.875 kilometers– but it’s close enough in a pinch.
If one needs to convert a number that’s not in the Fibonacci sequence, one can simply break out the Fibonacci numbers, convert, and add the answers. For instance, 100 can be broken down into 89 + 8 + 3, all Fibonacci numbers. The next numbers are 144, 13, and 5, which add up to 162. 100 miles is actually equal to 160.934 kilometers. But again, close enough.
[TotH to MNN]
Special bonus arithmetic amusement: the quadratic equation, explained (as though) by Dr. Seuss.
As we marvel at math, we might wish a Happy Birthday to a master of “numbers” of a different sort; author and prankster Ken Kesey was born on this date in 1935. While at Stanford in 1959 (studying writing with Wallace Stegner), Kesey was a paid volunteer in CIA-funded LSD trials (Project MKULTRA), an experience that informed his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and that inspired him to form the “Merry Pranksters” and embark on the cross-country school bus trip memorialized in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
“Leave no turn unstoned.”
“The map is not the territory”…
“The Treachery of Images,” René Magritte, 1928-9
Alfred Korzybski reminds one (in the title-line quote, above), as does Surrealist wit like Magritte’s, that representations are not the things they represent.
Still, they fascinate us– precisely because of their power to evoke the thing that they aren’t. And when the things that maps evoke aren’t real things at all? Even niftier!
Consider, for example, two kinds of maps of fictional territories…
For nine years, from 1943 to 1952, Dell published 557 mystery novels with “map backs.” Some charted fictional action on “real” terrain, for instance…
But most located the imagined plot in an imaginary setting, for example…
and…
In a different imaginary arena (not to say “a parallel universe”), the world of comics, comic books, and graphic novels, maps also play an important role…
Sometimes they are used to elaborate on a conceit in a way that adds narrative credibility through detail, e.g…
Nick Fury’s Tunnel, Strange Tales #141
…and sometimes, simply for dramatic effect, e.g…
Superman throws out the first pitch
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hypperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is never the less the map that proceeds the territory – pressesion of simulacra- that engenders the territory.
– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation, 1994
Or, as someone who isn’t a French Post-Structuralist might say, way cool!
Readers can find more Bantam map-backs at Marble River’s Ephemera (from whence, the examples above) and at Mystery Scene. Readers can get more graphic guidance at Comic Book Cartography (the source of those examples). Grateful TotH to reader MH-H for the lead to CBC.
As we endeavor (but not too hard) to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 (44 years to the day after “Bicycle Day,” the day that Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, deliberately took the hallucinogen for the first time) that The Simpsons debuted, as a short within The Tracey Ullman Show.
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