Passed along by Jane Nisselson, a photo she found in the New Yorker, apropos of my continued fascination with command centers and the selection of information they highlight:

I think it was those clocks and choice of cities that were memorable. It is actually One Police plaza and not the terrorism HQ on Coney Island. The photographer is Eugene Richards.

For New Yorker readers, the original article is here.

There’s simply no way to give people access to others’ private records — in the name of security or otherwise — and trust those given access to do the right thing. From a New York Times story on the NSA’s expanded wiretapping:

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

This is not isolated, and this will always be the case. From a story in The Boston Globe a month ago:

Law enforcement personnel looked up personal information on Patriots star Tom Brady 968 times – seeking anything from his driver’s license photo and home address, to whether he had purchased a gun – and auditors discovered “repeated searches and queries” on dozens of other celebrities such as Matt Damon, James Taylor, Celtics star Paul Pierce, and Red Sox owner John Henry, said two state officials familiar with the audit.

The NSA wiretapping is treated too much like an abstract operation, with most articles that describe it overloaded with talk of “data collection,” and “monitoring,” and the massive scale of data that traffics through internet service providers. But the problem isn’t the computers and data and equipment, it’s that on the other end of the line, a human being is sitting there deciding what to do with that information. Our curiosity and voyeurism leaves us fundamentally flawed for dealing with such information, and unable to ever live up to the responsibility of having that access.

The story about the police officers who are overly curious about sports stars (or soft rock balladeers) is no different from the NSA wiretapping, because it’s still people, with the same impulses, on the other end of the line. Until reading this, I had wanted to believe that NSA employees — who should truly understand the ramifications — would have been more professional. But instead they’ve proven themselves no different from a local cop who wants to know if Paul Pierce owns a gun or Matt Damon has a goofy driver’s license picture.

Adobe Illustrator has regressed into talking back like it’s a two-year-old:

Asked for further comment, Illustrator responded:

CANT DO THAT. MOMMY NOOOOOO! CANT!

No doubt this is my own fault for not having upgraded to CS4. I’ll wait for CS5 when I can shell out for the privilege of using 64-bits, maybe the additional memory access will allow me to open files that worked in Illustrator 10 but no longer open on newer releases because the system (with 10x the RAM, and 5x the CPU) runs out of memory.

Casey wrote with more info regarding the previous post about Pelham. The command center in the movie is fake (as expected), because the real command center looks too sophisticated. NPR had this quote from John Johnson (spelling?), New York City Transit’s Chief Transportation Officer:

“They actually … attempted to downplay what the existing control center looks like, because they wanted to make it look real to the average eye as compared to… we’re pretty Star Trekky up in the new control center now.”

So that would explain the newish typeface used in the image, and the general dumbing-down of the display. The audio from the NPR story is here, with the quote near the 3:00 mark.

This is the only image I’ve been able to find of the real command center:

Links to larger/better/more descriptive images welcome!

I might go see the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three just to get a better look at this MTA command center:

Is this a real place? Buried within the bowels of New York City? And Mr. Washington, how about using one of your two telephones to order a new typeface for that wall? Looks like a hundred thousand dollars of display technology being used for ASCII line art.

Maybe I’ll see the original instead.

Last week at the CaT conference, I met Sheena Matheiken, a designer who is … I’ll let her explain:

Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade’s boudoir.

Interesting, right? Particularly where the idea is to make the outfit new through the sort of forced creativity that comes from wearing a uniform. But also not unlike the dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of other “I’m gonna do x each day for 365 days” projects, where obsessive compulsive types take a photo, choose a Pantone swatch, learn a new word, etc. in celebration of the Earth revolving about its axis once more. Yale’s graduate graphic design program even frequents a yearly “100 day” project along these lines. (Don’t get me wrong–I’m happy to obsess and compulse with the best of them.)

But then it gets more interesting:

The Uniform Project is also a year-long fundraiser for the Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India. At the end of the year, all contributions will go toward Akanksha’s School Project to fund uniforms and other educational expenses for slum children in India.

How cool! I love how this ties the project together. More can be found at The Uniform Project, with daily photos of Sheena’s progress. And be sure to donate.

I’m looking forward to what she has to say about what she’s learned about clothes and how you wear them after the year is complete. Ironic, that the year she wears the same thing for 365 days will be her most creative.