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HP iPaq rx1950 Navigator: old handheld, new GPS
HP has taken a
novel approach to adding GPS to last year’s iPaq rx1950: rather
than graft a GPS module directly onto the PDA, or include it via a card, the company has built the GPS receiver into a
car mounting cradle. The result is the rx1950 Navigator, which HP is selling in the UK for £299 ($531). Other
than the unusual GPS implementation, the specs remain the same as those of the original rx1950, and there’s no word on
whether owners of the PDA or similar models such as the rx 1955 can buy the cradle separately in order to get GPS
functionality. There’s also no word from HP as to whether this is going to be made available outside of the UK.
However, given that the only mapping deal announced so far is with European provider ViaMichelin, it seems unlikely
that a US version is going to show up anytime soon.
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Justice Mapping
Criminal-justice experts name the “million-dollar blocks” phenomenon when the total cost to incarcerate residents from one city block exceeds $1 million.
The Million Dollar Blocks project is part of a two year research and development project on Graphical Innovation in Justice Mapping by the Spatial Information Design Lab of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia.
These maps have attracted attention nationwide from state legislators struggling to balance their budgets. Prison-spending maps highlight the fact that money spent on million-dollar blocks winds up in another part of the state—far from the scene of the crime.
Via Régine
TNR Cowboy Can Quit MoMA
One of our Essential Readers—the very one, it’s true, whom we hope will fill our red velour shoes when that sad day comes and we must return to our natural labors—has answered the call and sent us highlights of the recent New Republic savaging of the not-so-recent makeovers at MoMA. Ouch: “Almost as soon as the noisy media-drenched re-opening of the Museum of
Modern Art was over, a strange silence enveloped the museum…”
Here are the ten good bits of the New Republic Jed Pearl (great cowboy name,
no?) takedown. The only thing he gets wrong is item 7, where he praises
Riley’s Tall Buildings show, which was in reality as much corporatized
bullshit as the other more obviously apalling shows that Pearl mentions,
such as “Works from the USB collection”, etc. Anyway, dunno about filler,
but they make some yummy writing down at the New Republic. Too bad nobody
reads it.Itemizing:
1. “The new building, which I admired for its refined details and suavely
balanced volumes in the weeks before the grand opening, when it was nearly
empty of people, has pretty much proved to be a fiasco. The more people
there are in Yoshio Taniguchi’s spaces, the less poetic those spaces feel,
which is just about the most devastating thing that you can say about a work
of public architecture. The fault, though, is not Taniguchi’s alone.
Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, and
Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, those landmarks of twentieth-century
art, look lost in the new museum, because they have been torn from the moral
landscape that they inhabited, with its visionary fervor and its
progressivist ideals.”2. “Almost as soon as the noisy media-drenched re-opening of the Museum of
Modern Art was over, a strange silence enveloped the museum and all its
doings.”3. “…people still pay a visit to the Museum of Modern Art now and again,
to see a new show or to look at an old favorite in the permanent collection;
but they approach the museum without any particular hope that they are going
to be moved by what they see, and when they leave they frequently express
neither pleasure nor disappointment.”4. “Great museums stir great debates. The Modern used to do so.”
5. “Perhaps a more seasoned curator would have known to vary a museumgoer’s
experience by avoiding the mechanical contrasts between paintings by Cézanne
and Pissarro that turned a potentially revelatory exhibition into a
numbingly boring game.”6. “When I think back from this leaden, histrionic presentation of Cézanne
and Pissarro to the heartbreakingly intimate chamber music of Rubin’s
exploration of the Cubist moment, I can’t help but wonder how far the Modern
has fallen.”7. “It is discouraging to read about the departure of Terence Riley, the
chief curator of architecture and design, whose “Tall Buildings” show in
2004 balanced artistic and social concerns with extraordinary skill. … One
worries whether the Modern any longer knows or cares about putting the right
person in the right job.”8. “Elderfield has never had much of an instinct for installing works of
art; but then nobody at the Modern since William Rubin has had this
mysterious gift, which involves a confounding combination of disinterested
sensitivity and fearsome self-assurance, and Rubin has now taken his secrets
with him to the grave. That Elderfield’s re-installation of the permanent
collection was lacking in both poetry and lucidity did not come as much of a
surprise.”9. “…the salient fact about the new museum is that there is no longer any
way even to begin to understand how the art of the present, on the second
floor, might be related to the beginnings of modern art, which the Modern
still identifies with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and the other Post-Impressionists,
who are up on the fifth floor. … What has been erased at the new Museum
of Modern Art is this sense of something (of anything!) that is slowly
developed, that is deeply felt, that makes a connection between the past and
the present.”10. “Lowry can write whatever he wants about narratives and realities, but
the message that he has broadcast loud and clear is that in Lowry’s museum
the only important work of art is the one for which a trustee can be
persuaded to cough up a few million dollars–or the one that a tourist will
plunk down the $20 admission fee to see. All that any longer matters is the
health of the institution, by which we are to understand the box office, the
cash flow, the revenue stream, the endowment. Considering that only a year
has passed since the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art, it may still be
too soon to conclude that the operation was a success and the patient died.”
ef=”http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2006/01/31/the_not_so_new_moma_and_downright_banality.php”>The (Not So) New MoMA and “Downright Banality” [The Gutter]
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