Open Reading Frame

Uncommon Places
From Dana Doyle's review:
In the late 1960's William Eggleston subverted photographic tradition by embracing color film and irregular compositions reminiscent of snapshots. The prints I have seen by Eggleston (which include many of his iconic images now traveling in an exhibit titled "Los Alamos"), lose their resolution when you get within a few feet.2 The fuzziness of the print echoes the implication of amateur work already knowingly signified, at the time, by color film and the snapshot aesthetic. Shore's prints, less than half the size of Eggleston's, are meticulously crisp in comparison. In his Uncommon Places, Shore tweaks Eggleston's subversion: he similarly embraces color film and vernacular subject matter, however he brings the full arsenal of traditional photographic craft to bear on what was popularly considered unworthy subject matter for the art photographer.
There's more than nostalgia to Shore's photos; it's not just that he's taking photos that you (feel you) could have taken. Look at "Merced River", for instance: is that not every afternoon anyone ever spent by any river? The very ordinariness of the scenes combines with the high-quality images and sneaky formal underpinnings of the compositions to create both immediacy and timelessness. Or something. This shit is hard to write about.

| SPARC | SPARC Resources |
Yet another "I have no excuse" link: SPARC has collected everything I need to start writing about open access.

Airline Pilot Central - FedEx arrivals during Thunderstorms
I like the way the little dots -- they're planes, but I was thinking of ants with a parasol in one hand and a package under the other arm -- make their way around the storm, then scatter to all points when it finally hits the airport. It's actually a very impressive demonstration of what air traffic controllers do. (Hi, John!)

american atheist or agnostic | Ask MetaFilter
This is something AskMeFi is really good at -- lots of little windows into other people's lives. In this case, do atheists/agnostics in the US feel discriminated against?

Bitch Ph.D.: The Hooker Resurgence
My ancestors were fishermen. Fishermen, damn you. But I do like "prostiboots" and especially "Fornigate".

Surname Profiler
It appears that my surname arose in London sometime before 1880. Or, you know, maybe not. But this thing is kinda fun.

Cole/Weisberg Correspondence on Hitchens
Jacob Weisberg: "In my judgment, there is no ethical issue here." Note to self: never trust anything published in Slate.

How Opal Got Openly Despised / Take perverse joy in the downfall of that plagiarist teen author? Can you flip that upside down?
Once again, Mark Morford is right; his is the best take I've seen on the Viswanathan incident, bar none: "Deserved or not, Viswanathan's success and even her stunning failure are excellent motivators by which to pinch and flip around and strip naked your relationship to accomplishment. Is it all about envy and bitter Schadenfreude, or exultation and lessons learned? From where do you draw your sustenance?"

Open Access News
Nature has released the API for Connotea. Sooner or later, I'm gonna have to learn to program for the web.

Being a mom could be a 6-figure job
I usually think salary.com overinflates everything, but these don't look much inflated to me. "Salary.com determined that a stay-at-home mother might be paid as much as $134,121 for her contributions as a housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, janitor and CEO, among other functions. (See full list at right.) The stay-at-home mothers surveyed said they logged a total of 92 hours a week performing those jobs. The market valuation for working mothers — who make up close to 70 percent of all mothers with kids under 18 — comes to $85,876, assuming a 50-hour week in the Mom role. That would be on top of whatever salary a working mother draws from her job outside the home, working 44 hours."

Isaac Laquedem: Endorsements I: Ted Wheeler and Lonnie Roberts
Lonnie Roberts is a homophobic scumbag, and I wouldn't write him in as a candidate to shovel shit.

ARCHITECTURE AND THE MAIL
Neat idea: "We will produce a series of 1000 unique postcards, each depicting a single unpublished image from a relatively unknown designer, and we will send them to a selected group of 1000 influential architects, urbanists, academics, curators, journalists, and critics, who will have the opportunity to respond. Our hope is that we will receive images from all over the world and our plan is to randomly disseminate these images back out into a global context, making unlikely connections, and creating unforeseen acquaintanceships. While this is admittedly a utopian proposal, our aim is to connect fresh ideas with those individuals who contribute to the development of independent careers in architecture. "