rodcorp

Pictures from Zagreb, Croatia, October 2004

In Zagreb's main square, buildings covered in lettering and adverts.

I'm not lovin' it: small demo against McDonalds.

Cathedral spires and light pylon. Statuary behind fencing at the Cathedral: one, two, three.

Glagolitic text in the cathedral, which unlike some in North-Western Europe has the feeling of a living, working religious building. The script was devised by St Cyril in the C9th from Greek forms, and is the foreunner of Cyrillic (history of the Glagolitic script, and an explanation).

Beautiful C19th building in a little disrepair.

Statue of knight and dragon.

Miracle wall at Kamenita Vrata: in 1731, a fire burnt everything in the area around this gate into the walled town of Gradec. except a painting of the Virgin. The people put signs up thanking the Madonna for the miracle, and people pray there today.

Nearby, a wall: lamp, road signs, keyed render, painted sign.

Tiled roof on St Mark's Church (C13th, roof added in 1880), in the Trg Svetog Marka. Depicts the coats of arms of the Kingdom of Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia (L) and of Zagreb (R), and looks like Lego.

Green netting over blue scaffolding in the Upper Town. (Across the Adriatic in Northern Italy, they tend to use black scaffold with gold fitments.)

Cool Jesus.

Suspended airplane at Ljubljana airport, Slovenia.

At the exact centre of London, Britain's smallest police station

On the pavement a few feet behind an equestrian statue of Charles I that sits on a traffic island just south of Trafalgar Square, there is a plaque:

On the site now occupied by the statue of King Charles was erected the original Queen Eleanor's Cross, a replica of whch stands in front of Charing Cross station. Mileages from London are measured from the site of the original cross.

When Queen Eleanor of Castile died in 1290, Edward I commissioned twelve crosses, each at one of the stopping places on her body's procession from Lincoln to Westminster. The original cross was replaced, then demolished (the stone being re-used used to make paving along Whitehall, round the corner), and in 1863 a rather ornate version (not strictly a replica) was put up in front of Charing Cross railway station, a couple of hundred yards away. Mileage distances on road signage are still measured from this point.

Nearby, at the South-East corner of the square, is Britain's smallest police station (says the London Encyclopedia), a phonebox-sized space inside the granite walls of a lamp post.

So how many other ways can the (exact) centre of London be defined?

Measured definitions...

Geography/latitude: Greenwich (meridian).

St Pauls/The Thames/Charing Cross as the centroid... or is it Camberwell, after London's expansion southwards? (and also: Hammersley has some interesting comments on geographic centres of continents)

Systemic...

Transport: Charing Cross station is the centre of London for Black Taxis. Piccadilly Circus is considered the centre of the Underground network (though Victoria is the busiest, and the first line ran from Farringdon to Paddington via King's Cross). London's Night bus routes all go via Trafalgar Square.

Postal districts: useful explanations here and here, and history of postal systems.

Historic...

Roman London: The city's square mile roughly defines where Roman London stood, and there was a basilica and forum in Cornhill, dating from 70/90AD. Distances were perhaps measured in Roman London from the London Stone (if it were indeed London's "golden milestone"), which was placed in the walled city area. It sits today in a niche in a wall of a bank in Cannon Street.

In name: Apsley House - 'No 1, London', from which London's street numbering traditionally radiates.

People in the city...

The flow of people - commuting, shopping, socialising - multiple centres. Taxi drivers informally report that most of their journies merely enable other transport: they commonly connect railway stations to each other, or to Heathrow.

Retail and finance: where are the most/highest transactions and revenue? Oxford Street? City of London for non-retail.

Emotion and memory: where you were brought up. Your favourite place. The ideolocator: "You Are Here".

(Sources: London Encyclopaedia, various, and from the old website - a previous rodcorp zentrum, where contributions from Chris, Struan, Paul, Jack, Dorian were made - thanks.)

De/Normalizing people

Normalize: to make normal, especially to cause to conform to a standard or norm.
Denormalize: the process of attempting to optimize the performance of a database by adding redundant data.

Interesting words. Heartfelt comments on denormalizing versus normalizing your data, provoked by a Ludicorper's presentation on Flickr: "Normalised data is for sissies". Lots of discussion there on technical best practice, but only a little on that other stuff: the people. Well, we know nothing about database design, but Matt Webb's suggestion that (de-)normalizing can be a socially-driven choice - as much as it is a technically-driven one ("half of software architecture is making sure that somebody can fix a bug in a hurry, add features without breaking it, and be lazy without doing the wrong thing") - sounds right given that so much of everything else in Getting Things Made is social.

Alistair Cockburn, following in the footsteps of Brooks, DeMarco et al, has been Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development since 1999, advocating picking the methodology that fits your team, or at least allow the nature of your team (as well as the project) to influence which method into practice, and how. Better that than forcing your team to adopt a process that won't work for them. No one Capital-M Methodology fits.

But Frederick Taylor lives on in many offices, where the managers want the men to be interchangable, and there is often a constant effort to "normalize"* the team (Tuckman's "forming/storming/performing/norming" model of team development names this explicitly perhaps): to pursue replacability, repeatability, predictability and directability (often at the cost of innovation and motivation - DeMarco's Slack is good on this), to remove redundancy by making redundancies...

... Yes, that's probably a totally different sense of "normalization". This organisation-as-database trope is worn, exhausted, redundant.

Sandpaper for the eye: Frieze 2004, London

You are at the Frieze art fair. You know that it's as much a social spectacle as it is a survey of the state-of, and that it's poorly hung and sofa-centric (though the addition of artist names and price labels would have helped), but there are people from the real world here, which is a good thing. The fair goes on forever so your method must be to keep feet and eyes moving. Your feet track straight along the passages, like Chodzko's timber wolf; your eyes dart left and right into the spaces, sliding over surfaces quickly. They glance, barely registering the content, slipping onwards like an EPG on scan, inert-primed, waiting for a bump in the pattern, a knot in the fabric, prick and bruise the eye. Sufficient texture in the image will be required - more than that of the background mean - something to arrest and hold the eye's movement. Sandpaper for the eye. Or something to trigger eye-memory of things you've seen, seen and liked, or things that look like the things you already make.

You see:
the Frieze map hand-oriented a hundred different ways.
Again, Peter Peri at Counter.
David Thorpe at Maureen Paley/Interim.
Clare Woods at Modern Art, gloss painting getting tired.
Christoph Wedding at Aurel Schreiber.
Avish Khebrehzadeh at Galleria SALES Roma, projecting animation onto drawing.
Hiraki Sawa's planes at James Cohan NY.
Aaron Spengler at LFL NY.
Do-Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin NY, looking less regal than at the Biennale.
Kevin Zucker at ?, a ship at sail on a Gillickian sea.
Ed Ruscha at Gagosian. Ok.
Nigel Cooke at Andrea Rosen, intertwingled successfully with school of Bosch.
James Jessop, in the flesh.

And then, red-eyed, you're done.

Life in the Walking City

Excerpt from a testimony found inside the back cover of a book misfiled in the Rodcorporate library:

My home is a living pod that's embedded, for the moment, in a frame in a tube in one of the masts that support and move the hull of the city.

The city moves slowly enough that there is little noticeable lateral movement in the masts, but they are often pitched at an angle for long periods of time whilst the other masts move in turn. And they often telescope quite quickly to span a mountain range or find anchor in a valley, which makes some visitors ill. We're proud to be able to live and work in these conditions - the simps in the passencore could never manage it - though if we're honest we look forward to joining them and retiring to the wide-open of the bridge levels.

These days, most walker masts have gyroscopic decks that self-level, but ours doesn't - it's one of the eaters - so we often work and live on a pronounced slope. (We have stories that in premobile times men would traverse the seas in vessels pushed across the surface of the water by the wind - these ancestors also lived for weeks at a similar angle, the wind making the vessel lean over.)

The eater masts support the city, like the many walker masts, but also grab the rock and organic material that help supply the city. My work is to keep the eaters' tubes (which convey the material up to the city, processing and rendering it on the way) and the gastropod (the parts that do the eating) clean and in good working order. We grow new chitin plates for the gastro's radulae; we fit guards and cutting filaments around the gastro so it won't get fouled in the rock, marsh, forest and other Belowmatter. I have been very close to the Below. Most people can't stand its look, smell and stillness - but you get used to it. After a while I could see that the Below is not so different: it changes like the city moves, just slower.

When I'm not working, I go outside and rope-climb the wall in the wind on the cratered weather side, or in the mosses and aquaface of the leeward side. Or I climb the tube to the hull and walk through the city's districts. Barbaropolis and Velicity are settled and stratified but they're always changing as new parts are replaced - even the plug-in frameworks themselves. However, out beyond them, some areas of the city have many old streets and districts: Times Square, the Bab al-Luq, Westworld, Cruzeiro... They were parts of the premobile urban settlements that were absorbed into the city when it was first built, and are falling apart because even though they were originally designed to be temporary they aren't pluggable. You can't get feeds or change things, so people avoid them - they're mostly deserted now.

Often I imagine what it would be like to live in one place that doesn't move. To pick a point - "this is the place" - on the Below and fix my pod there, to look out from my porthole every day at the same view, and to move only when I moved myself. You would need to take your pod apart to move across the Below, or even leave it behind! I can't explain why I like the idea. I know there are others that feel the same way, but we don't discuss it. It is of course forbidden: the city must never stop moving.