The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Russia Today Is Paying Google To Promote The 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
|| 9/7/2009 || 11:09 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

For the last few weeks Van Jones, the White House’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, has been vilified in the media and on-line because signed on to a document in 2004 that supported a new investigation on what happen on 9/11/01. Due to the subsequent public relations fallout, he resigned from his position over the weekend. Yesterday afternoon I decided to do a search for news articles related to this episode in 9/11 political theater and came across something I wasn’t exactly expecting.

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Teki Latex dans un QR Code tee-shirt
|| 8/11/2009 || 12:06 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Screen grab of Teki Latex in a QR-Code T-Shirt

Teki Latex in a QR Code Shirt

I came home very early Sunday morning from a long night out with friends and before I passed out I checked Facebook one last time. It’s a good thing I checked too. It just so happened that Parisian Rapper / Producer / Record Label Owner / DJ Teki Latex had just posted that he was doing a live DJ mix via webcam. I had recently signed up for a competing streaming video website and was curious about what were some of the pros & cons of the service he was using. So before nodding off, I decided to watch/listen to his mix. What I saw, however, was that he was wearing a t-shirt with a big QR Code on it. Over the last few years I’ve tried to document QR Codes that I randomly find, so I futilely tried to take a few screen grabs of the t-shirt, but was unable to get the full image that is needed to decode the message. It would have been the first time I’ve been able to decode a QR Code that was displayed over streaming video.

The next day I left a message on his Facebook page asking what it decoded to and he responded that it was “probably Grenoble.” I guess I’ll have to find a photo of him wearing the shirt again to find out for sure….

Below are a couple YouTube videos featuring Teki Latex:

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Bicycle Freedom! [Vélib’ in DC]
|| 6/3/2008 || 6:33 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

With Washington, DC about to begin the first bicycle sharing program in the United States, I’m posting some videos featuring the Parisian bike sharing service called Vélib’. The names in French is a combination of vélo liberté or vélo libre and in English it means free bicycle or bicycle freedom.

I think these YouTube videos are a fitting follow-up to my new bicycle freedom in Washington, DC :-)

Bikes Belong presents: Velib
Bikes sharing is transforming how cities look at public transit. We went to Paris in November 2007 to see for ourselves what Velib is all about.
[I really like the use of the infographics]

VÃ©lo LibertÃ© – Parisian Bike Culture
The author of Copenhagen Cycle Chic rides around Paris with his wife:
“In ten short months the urban landscape of Paris has been transformed by the Vélib’ bike share programme.” See Blog Entry

Bicycle Freedom
TV News Footage from Canadian Global Television Network:
The city of Paris rolled out a citywide bicycle program involving 10,600 bikes in a bid to cut gridlock and give citizens a greener way to get around town. The program, named Vélib’ a blend of vélo (bike) and liberté allows users to swipe their credit card and take and return a bike from one of 750 stations in the city.

“In the morning, you can go to work in the tram and come home by bike; it depends on the weather, it depends on your mood and on your friends,” said Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe Sunday.

Delanoe aims to cut car traffic in the city by 40 per cent by 2020.

Velib’
[en FranÃ§ais]Voici un reportage sur Vélib’, le nouveau service public offert par la mairie de Paris que j’ai rÃ©alisÃ© pour le magazine Webcarnews. Retrouvez le sujet complet sur www.webcarnews.com
Here is a report on VÃ©lib, the new public service offered by the mayor of Paris that I produced for the magazine Webcarnews.
Find the subject comprehensive www.webcarnews.com

I post more when I find them….

Related Bicycling Entries:

GPS Drawing in the new Mercedes advertisement
|| 4/11/2008 || 7:41 pm || Comments Off on GPS Drawing in the new Mercedes advertisement || ||

GPS Drawing was created by Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood. This artform involves the use of a GPS device to record people’s movements on the surface of the earth. It works on the premise that as one moves through their day, the GPS device continuously records (or tracks) the exact coordinates of the owner. Here it has been copied by Mercedes in their newest advertisements related to their line of cars with built-in GPS devices.

Now say “Ahhhhh” — huh? At first I didn’t get the correlation between the GPS drawing and the location. The GPS drawing shown above appears to be teeth with a starting point of Paris and terminal point at Cordes sur Siel. Upon further inquiry, I found that Cordes sur Siel is home to the Musee de l’Art du Sucre. Yum!

In today’s Washington Jewish Weekly newspaper
|| 2/28/2008 || 4:05 pm || Comments Off on In today’s Washington Jewish Weekly newspaper || ||

My piece at the JCC is mentioned in an article in today’s Washington Jewish Weekly:

The piece by D.C. resident Nikolas Schiller portrays the Palestinian refugees’ perspective and, he says, “dissent.” He is dissenting from the 1993 map of Israel and the Palestinian territories, upon which he based his kaleidoscope image, because he sees it as “biased” in showing the territories in stripes, he says.

He also has included an image of Handala, an iconic Palestinian cartoon that he found on the Internet, on the map. Handala, which means “bitterness” in Arabic, “represents the abused Palestinian refugees,” he says.

I don’t remember saying the word “abused” the entire time I spoke with the reporter, but I’ll let it slide.

Read the entire article:

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Carte du Telegraphe Optique [dans l’hexagone]
|| 1/10/2008 || 10:21 pm || Comments Off on Carte du Telegraphe Optique [dans l’hexagone] || ||

Undated Map of Optical Telegraph Stations in France
Courtesy of Low-Tech Magazine via Ecole Centrale de Lyon

E-mail in the 18th Century

Centuries of slow long-distance communications came to an end with the arrival of the telegraph. Most history books start this chapter with the appearance of the electrical telegraph, midway the nineteenth century. However, they skip an important intermediate step. Fifty years earlier (in 1791) the Frenchman Claude Chappe developed the optical telegraph. Thanks to this technology, messages could be transferred very quickly over long distances, without the need for postmen, horses, wires or electricity.

The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.

The other day I found this tremendously enlightening article about optical telegraphs on Low-Tech Magazine. Prior to reading this article I had no idea about this arcane method of communication. The authors supplied a map (above) to really drive home how extensive this system was.

Something that I think few people do when surfing through Wikipedia is to check the articles in other languages. It’s really easy to do and the results tend to be very useful. For words that have equivalent spellings, all one has to do is change the URL’s prefix (fr to en). For words that have different spellings (telegraph vs tÃ©lÃ©graph) you will have to correct this spelling in order for the entry to show up.

For example, the French entry on telegraphe yields quite a bit more information related to the use of semaphores (the object used to construct the optical telegraphic code) than the English entry on telegraphs.

Below is a carte of the semaphoric number system and an engraving of Mont St. Michel with a semaphore at the top. Both images obtained from the French wikipedia.

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French parodies in parallax
|| 11/29/2007 || 7:20 am || Comments Off on French parodies in parallax || ||

“Confessions Nocturnes” by Diam’s Feat Vitaa.

“Mauvaise Foi Nocturne” by Fatal Bazooka feat Vitoo

Over the summer I created my first YouTube mash-up “Scratch Slavery,” which allows you to create a beat track to congressional hearing about slavery being used in the construction the American embassy in Baghdad.

Today I am posting something a little different- French Youtube videos.

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ISO – La Haine
|| 11/8/2005 || 7:59 am || Comments Off on ISO – La Haine || ||

So last night while I was coding my “Geospatial Art” layer for Google Earth, I decided to attempt to find a copy of “La Haine,” online, and of course I couldn’t! The film was recently released on DVD, but only with Region 2 encoding (WTF!). I decided to put a posting on craigslist about it the film, and hopefully someone will respond…. I really want to see the film again!

I was thinking about synergistic events and how the riots in France could easily be replicated here in Washington, DC. Granted I am not one to cause destruction of other people’s belongings, read: I am NOT going to do this, but I was thinking last night how poignant it would be to see the marginalized residents of SE Washington, DC burning cars to show the world that poverty exists here in DC as well. The most far-fetched idea that someone came up with was burning 51 cars from Virginia & Maryland in the confines of DC. The 51 cars would represent DC as the 51st state, and the synergistic aspect to this theoretical vandalism is the Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down the commuter tax the District hoped to impose on Maryland & Virginia drivers. Essentially, DC residents are marginalized both economically (some residents) and democratically (all residents), and the destruction of cars from Maryland & Virginia would show the world that the residents are fed up and beginning to fight back.

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: