morgan schwartz

What can I say? I’ve got a soft spot for art projects that incorporate pelican cases.

I don’t know if it is what I would have chosen to draw, but artist Erik Nordenankar claims to have made the biggest drawing in the world using a GPS device and the services of DHL.

Schweppes Burst from ipub on Vimeo.

“Spanish government’s domain names held for ransom over water”

A cybersquatter is holding the Spanish government ransom by refusing to give up the domain names of several government ministries unless they agree to transfer water to all of Spain’s drought stricken regions.
read the full article

Cybersquatter’s have developed a bad reputation for holding hostage trademarked domain names from their legal owners. But to me, this feels like good old fashioned socially conscious civil disobedience.

Hosted in New York City by Parsons The New School for Design, the 5th annual Games for Change Festival will take place on June 2 - 4, 2008.

The festival brings together expert practitioners, academics, activists, funders, and designers to explore the impact of social issue digital games.

There is a great line up of speakers including James Paul Gee (Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University and author of “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning”) Henry Jenkins (Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program), and The Honorable Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

On June 2nd, there will be a special day-long workshop specifically for nonprofit organizations on the basics of social issue game design - “Let the Games Begin: 101 Workshop on Making Social Issue Games”.

This 101 workshop is free of charge, but a brief online application is required (space is limited).

For more information and to register for the Festival and/or the 101 workshop, follow the links below.

http://www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2008/101.php

http://producten.hema.nl/

Crew 65 Mission Patch

I’m off to Mars for a 2-week crew rotation.

I’ll be posting updates at http://walden5.com and you can also follow daily field reports on the Mars Desert Research Station website [I’m in crew 65].

Excellent interview with security guru Bruce Schneier on the Freakonomics blog covering a range of questions and topics about internet and computer security. A must read for computer owners.

His most recent book Beyond Fear explains how security works and provides a practical approach to problem-solving security and privacy issues.

Pierre has initiated an interesting project called Rent Your Soul. This week my soul was one of 20 randomly selected!! Basically Pierre donates $10 to the charity of your choice and also pays you $10. You can do whatever you want with the money, but the idea is that you might make a charitable contribution yourself and perhaps adopt the habit. Sometimes projects like this have the feeling of a pyramid scheme - but as far as I can tell this is genuine and the donations are made in good faith.

In the process of resuming work on my counting project I happened upon these two projects …

The human calendar:

and check out its older cousin the human clock!