Aerial Photographs of Volcanic Iceland by Andre Ermolaev:

At first glance these photos by Andre Ermolaev look like twisting abstract paintings, but in reality are aerial photos of rivers flowing through Iceland’s endless beds of volcanic ash. Given its name and stereotypical depiction it’s somewhat surprising to learn that the small country named after ice is home to no less than 30 active volcanic systems. You’ll remember the eruption of the massive Grímsvötn volcano just last year that spewed some 120 million tons of ash in the first 48 hours and snarled air traffic for days. Of his photographs Ermolaev says:

Iceland is a wonderful country; I would even say that it is a true paradise for all the photo shooting-lovers. But what has become a real discovery for me is the bird’s eye view of the rivers flowing along the black volcanic sand. It is an inexpressible combination of colors, lines, and patterns. The photo represents the mouth of the river falling into the ocean. […] A little bit upstream there is a yellow-colored brook flowing into the river, but yellow currents fail to mix with the main water flow. One can estimate the scale judging by the car tracks that are clearly seen on the black sand. This is just a river, just a volcano, just our planet.

You can see much more of his work over on 500px. (via my modern met)

Guerrilla Grafters covertly add fruit-tree branches to ornamental trees

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Guerrilla Grafters covertly add fruit-tree branches to ornamental trees

The Guerrilla Grafters are a group of rogue artists who roam San Francisco, covertly grafting fruit-tree branches onto ornamental trees to create a municipal free lunch. John Robb calls it “resilient disobedience.”

How can you improve the productivity of your community even if the officials are against it?

One way is through resilient disobedience. For example, there’s a group of gardeners in San Francisco that are spreading organic graffiti across the city. How? By grafting branches from fruit trees onto ornamental trees that have been planted along sidewalks and in parks.

They are using a very simple tongue in groove splice that’s held together with annotated electrical tape. Good luck to them.

Personal Biochar Kilns, Portable Factories, DiY Septic Tank Cleaning, and Guerrilla Grafting

(via Warren Ellis)

Black American sign language and American sign language are different languages

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Black American sign language and American sign language are different languages

I’ve been fascinated by the history and development of sign language for a while now. Highly linked to local Deaf cultures, individual sign languages have deep roots in the home-made systems people came up with in order to communicate with one another and with their families at times when Deaf people were often a lot more socially isolated than they are today. That means that each sign language is unique — even British and American sign language aren’t at all the same thing. English is spoken in both countries, but the cultural history that gave birth to sign was sufficiently different to produce two completely different languages that are unintelligible to one another. (Meanwhile, American sign language is much closer to French, because it also has roots in a system imported from France in the 19th century.)

In that case, it was a physical distance that lead to the development of two different sign languages. But, within the United States, the same thing happened because of social distance. Turns out, there is a Black American sign language that is distinctly different, as a language, from ASL. Its roots lie in segregation, and especially in separate-and-not-at-all-equal school systems. Ironically, though, that meant sign language had a more prominent place in black schools for much of the 20th century. At white schools, up until the 1970s and 1980s, students were heavily pressured to speak and lip-read, rather than sign — because it was thought to be better. Meanwhile, at black schools, sign language continued to be heavily used, growing and changing. By the late 1960s, the two systems were almost completely different languages.

Carolyn McCaskill remembers exactly when she discovered that she couldn’t understand white people. It was 1968, she was 15 years old, and she and nine other deaf black students had just enrolled in an integrated school for the deaf in Talledega, Ala.

… The teacher’s quicksilver hand movements looked little like the sign language McCaskill had grown up using at home with her two deaf siblings and had practiced at the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind, just a few miles away. It wasn’t a simple matter of people at the new school using unfamiliar vocabularly; they made hand movements for everyday words that looked foreign to McCaskill and her fellow black students.

…So, McCaskill says, “I put my signs aside.” She learned entirely new signs for such common nouns as “shoe” and “school.” She began to communicate words such as “why” and “don’t know” with one hand instead of two as she and her black friends had always done. She copied the white students who lowered their hands to make the signs for “what for” and “know” closer to their chins than to their foreheads. And she imitated the way white students mouthed words at the same time as they made manual signs for them.

Turn your personal mob into an army

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Turn your personal mob into an army

The startup team behind Human.io.

Human.io is the new thing from Joshua Schachter, founder of bookmarking site del.icio.us. This time, however, he’s not suggesting you share your travels with a few friends—he’s suggesting that you turn them into an army.

“If you want to build a flash mob, but have it actually do something useful, this is your API,” Schachter said. “It lets you invite your audience to become part of the action.”

The concept—developed by Paul Rademacher, creator of legendary Craigslist/Google Maps mashup Housingmaps, and Nick Nguyen, formerly of Yahoo and Mozilla—is straightforward enough: Human.io is a platform for performing “micro-tasks”.

First, you publish a simple, crowdsourceble activity, such as voting on something, going to a particular location, or taking photos—anything that might be accomplished with a smartphone’s UI and its sensors. Then you tell your readers, followers or friends about it. They start the app, get cracking, and, finally, the results are sent back to you.

Human.io can be scripted in Python and PHP, languages easy enough for laypeople to create basic tasks, but powerful enough to set up more complex and rewarding interactions. Writes Schachter: “missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen.”

To illustrate how the platform works, Human.io developed an app for us aimed at benefiting the Creative Commons, and Wiki Loves Monuments in particular: wikipedia.human.io.

The idea is to help Wikipedia’s project to improve public access to photography of the world’s architectural and local heritage. If you want to participate, install the free Human.io app (iOS, Android) and select the “Photograph a historic place” task. It’ll cough up a list of anything nearby that’s in the online encyclopedia’s monument hit list. All you have to do is head out, take a shot, and let Human.io do the rest. It’ll show up immediately at wikipedia.human.io, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.