links for 2009-08-29

Los Angeles street art duo Cameron McNall and Damon Seeley ("Electroland") created a great bit of surveillance art found here in the Indianapolis Airport, entitled "Connection." In a stretch of the airport where two moving walkways pass each other, and the ceiling is perhaps ten feet high, the ceiling is gridded with foot-wide lights. As you move along the walkway, whatever light is above you is lit up. When somebody else is also on a walkway, the lights between the two of you light up, Connect 4 style, and a happy musical sting plays from unseen speaker. When it fired up, the few other people in the hallway with me all smiled broadly, following the lights to the previously-ignored other folks, exchanging looks of joy. As I sit here waiting for my plane, I regret that I didn't use this time to go back and forth on the walkway again. The linked video demonstrates the effect.

The Republican candidate for governor is unrepentant for saying that he'd buy a hunting permit to kill the president. In fact, given a chance to apologize, he said that he couldn't get such a permit because Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting permits in Washington D.C. Ha! Assassinating the president! That's high-larious! Ahhh… Good times.