The grocery scanner and barcode economy « Virulent Word of Mouse. Think about the world of bar codes and scanners. What was life like before their invention? This post offers an appreciation for this staple of modern retail life. Give the barcode its due. The widespread deployment of barcodes and scanners reduces the costs of keeping accurate and timely inventories. It happened quietly in the last few decades and had numerous consequences. Think about it.
More to the point, all of that happened because somebody took the time to develop the bar code. Among the influential people in that effort was a fellow named Alan Haberman. I never knew the man, so I cannot wax eloquent about his life. It would be an exaggeration to say that barcodes set me on my life’s intellectual path, but they were an influential example when I was a fledgeling and impressionable scholar. Interoperability. Alright, maybe I am (a little) nuts, but read on. In appreciation to Haberman’s life’s work, this is an opportunity to wax on a bit about the joys of the scanner economy. The Working Home - Site Profile. Detroit Looks to Community Gardens, Markets and Farms. Detroit was once called the Paris of the West, but at this point it’s more reminiscent of Venice. Like Venice, its demise has been imminent for some time, as crucial businesses and huge chunks of the population flee. And, like Venice, it has a singular look.
Not everyone will find Detroit beautiful, but with its wide, often empty boulevards, its abandoned, ghost-like train station and high-rises, its semi-deserted neighborhoods and its once-celebrated downtown now jumbled by shuttered storefronts — and the hideous Renaissance Center — it creates a sense of disbelief bordering on fantasy. It’s either a vision of the future or, like Venice, an impossibly strange anomaly, its best days over. But after spending some time here, I saw an alternative view of Detroit: a model for self-reliance and growth. Food is central. And how. But if the market is familiar, the rest of Detroit is anything but. Imagine blocks that once boasted 30 houses, now with three; imagine hundreds of such blocks.
Radical plots: The politics of gardening - Gardening, House & Home. It's a practical, hands-on, common-sense thing we do – and Britons do it a lot. For millions of us, gardening is our regular pleasure. But there is an alternative route, through history and across landscape, away from practice and into ideas, that explores the link between, say, propagation and propaganda, or pomegranate and hand grenade.
Just think of the words of the radical gardener-artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, from his contumacious green space called Little Sparta in the Scottish lowlands: "Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks. " But how can a garden be an attack, a flower a critique, a trowel an agent of social change? Notions of utopia, of community, of activism for progressive social change, of peace, of environmentalism, of identity politics, are practically worked through in the garden, in floriculture and through what art historian Paul Gough has called "planting as a form of protest".
This isn't a forced juxtaposition of plant and ideology. TerraSphere - Home.