Fieldnotes: Week 443

Published in

Fieldwork Facility

2 min readJan 4, 2019

Hello and Happy New Year. Here is the first edition of Fieldnotes in 2019!

Semi-Conductor

This is some serious play. Conduct your own orchestra via your browser. Play here: https://semiconductor.withgoogle.com/

Skateistan

One of my favourite charities needs your support. Skateistan is an NGO with the mission of empowering children and youth through skateboarding and education. Skateistan operates in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa.

The True Size

Maps can be beguiling — especially maps that reveal truths. The True Size is a interactive map that reveals the true size of countries using the Mercator projection. thetruesize.com

It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a “projection” to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.
Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger.

Sip of Hope

Sip of Hope is the world’s first coffee shop where 100% of proceeds supports proactive suicide prevention and mental health education.

What if he falls?

This is a short behind-the-scenes of Free Solo (a documentary following Alex Honnold, as he prepares to climb Yosemite’s 3,200-foot El Capitan wall — without a rope). I haven’t seen Free Solo yet but the BTS offers some interesting analogies for putting together teams on high-risk projects.

Luminist Garden

Semi-conductor reminded us of Folktek’s electroacoustic musical oddities —like the beautifully titled ‘Luminist Garden’ and ‘Resonant Garden’ which create unusually ethereal relationships between interaction and sound.

See you next week.