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99% invisible

InterestingListenings

A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

99% Invisible

99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

99% Invisible-02- 99% 180

99% Invisible-03- 99% Reality (only)

99% Invisible-04- 99% Details

99% Invisible-05- 99% Forgotten

99% Invisible-24- The Capitol Columns

99% Invisible-25- Unsung Icons of Soviet Design

99% Invisible-26- Chicago's Jailhouse Skyscraper

99% Invisible-27- Bridge to the Sky

A tiny radio show about design, architecture &amp; the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.


99% Invisible-28- Movie Title Sequences

On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into the most miniscule details of a political campaign.  

Andrea reveals seven (and a half) secrets about the staging of events along the campaign trail.  Like how every campaign has an "Advance Team" that flies in ahead of a candidate and makes everything from a campaign rally to a 20-minute media appearance run smoothly.

Andrea spoke with Advance guys John Seaton and Donnie Fowler, who have been directing this very American brand of political theatre for years.  


99% Invisible-63- The Political Stage

When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach.

It has long been hypothesized that stripes on zebras make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one zebra from another when the zebras are in a large herd. The stripes also might make zebras less attractive to blood sucking horseflies. This is called disruptive camouflage.  

When it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage was called Dazzle.

Dazzle painting emerged in the 1910s as design solution to a very dire problem: American and British ships were being sunk left and right by German U-Boats. England needed to import supplies to fight the Central Powers, and these ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic Ocean.  They needed a way to fend of the torpedoes.  

Conventional high-similarity camouflage just doesn't work in the open sea.  Conditions like the color of the sky, cloud cover, and wave height change all the time, not to mention the fact that there's no way to hid all the smoke left by the ships' smoke stacks.  
 
The strategy of this high-difference, dazzle camouflage was not about invisibility.  It was about disruption.  Confusion.

Torpedoes in the Great War could only be fired line-of-sight, so instead of firing at where they saw the ship was at that moment, torpedo gunners would have to chart out where the ship would be by the time the torpedo got there.  They had to determine the target ship's speed and direction with just a brief look through the periscope. 

The torpedo gunner's margin of error for hitting a ship was quite low.  Dazzle painting could throw off an experienced submariner by as much as 55 degrees. 

Our expert this week is Roy Behrens, a professor graphic design at the University of Northern Iowa.  He's published several books about camouflage, and also runs the Camoupedia blog.

99% Invisible-65- Razzle Dazzle

Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever.

By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000).  That's a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile.  For New York City to get that dense, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move to Manhattan.  

To put it another way, think about living in a 1,200 square foot home.  Then imagine yourself living with 9 other people.  Then imagine that your building is only one unit of a twelve-story building, and every other unit is as full as yours.  Then imagine hundreds those buildings crammed together in a space the size of four football fields.

We can't really imagine it, either.

Kowloon Walled City began as a military fort in Kowloon, a region in mainland China.  In 1898, China signed a land lease with Great Britain, giving the British control of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and other nearby territories.  But the lease stipulated that the fort in Kowloon would remain under Chinese jurisdiction.  

Over time, the fort became abandoned, leaving the area subject to neither Chinese nor British authority.  This legal gray zone was attractive to displaced and marginalized people.  Thousands of people moved there after the war with Japan broke out.  Even more people moved there after the Communist Revolution.  It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, and refugees.  And it also drew a lot of normal people from all over China who saw opportunity there.  

They built the city building by building, first blanketing the area of the fort, then building vertically. Buildings were packed together so tightly in the Walled City that the alleys were nearly pitch-black in the day time.  Electricity and water were brought in by illegal or informal means.  

The Walled City gained a reputation as a sort of den of iniquity--there were high levels of prostitution, gambling, mafia activity, and, for some reason, rampant unlicensed dentistry.

But an order did emerge.  The Walled City had no schools, but there was an informal kindergarten.  A resident's organization settled disputes.  And there was lots of industry: a fishball factory, a noodle factory, metalworking shops, a textile mill.  There were stores, restaurants.  You could even receive mail in the Walled City.

Kowloon Walled City was torn down in 1993.  Today, it's a park, and most traces of the city are gone. But the memory of the city lives on.  It was featured in the non-verbal film Baraka, plays a cameo role in Bloodsport. It's also served as the setting in a number of video games, including most recently Call of Duty: Black Ops

This week's episode was produced by Nick van der Kolk.  He spoke with photographer Greg Girard and architect Aaron Tan, who both spent time in the Walled City.  Nick also talked to as Brian Douglas, who helped design Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Nick is the director of the award-winning podcast, Love + Radio.  You can also hear him over at Snap Judgment.



99% Invisible-66- Kowloon Walled City

http://99percentinvisible.org/post/36839932084/episode-67-broken-window

When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do.  One was buying geodes and smashing them apart with a hammer.  (You know geodes, right?  Those dull-looking brown rocks that you break open to reveal crystalline structures inside?)

One day, when Melissa was thirteen, she and her friend Liz bought some geodes. They didn't want to wait to get home to crack them open, so they decided to throw them against the wall of an apartment building.  Liz's aim went wild, and the geode went through a window.

Melissa and Liz tried to find person whose window they had broken, but they couldn't figure out which door in the apartment building lead to the unit with the window in question.  Eventually they gave up.

Melissa would have probably forgotten about the incident had it not been for one inexplicable thing: the window didn't get fixed.  Ever.

It was clear that someone lived there.  Melissa would walk by the window and see the apartment lit up by a TV.  Someone was opening the window in the summer, and closing it in the winter.  But the hole remained. 

Melissa finished middle school, then high school, then went away to college.  And when she came home and saw the window still broken, it had this effect of making her feel like the nervous, insecure thirteen year old she was when she broke the window.  

This became a pattern for Melissa: she'd leave home, do some growing up, come home, see the window, and feel like a teenager.  

Melissa traveled the world.  She went to graduate school,  She moved to Washington, DC, She got married.  And every time she'd come home, she'd see the window.  "As much as I was changing, this part of my past was completely frozen," Melissa says.  "As soon as I saw the window I was brought right back to those middle school days when we had broken it."

So in 2011, 22 years after the incident, Melissa went to go find the person who left the window broken for so long.  She brought along a tape recorder.

99% Invisible-67- Broken Window

A short history of hip-hop music using only « skits » - little stories rap artists love to tell between tracks. Because rap skits are like short radio dramas, and this is also what ARTE Radio is about. 
Edited by Alexandre Duval - Mixed by Samuel Hirsch - Produced by http://arteradio.com  
Le rap raffole des "skits", petits interludes sonores entre deux morceaux. Saynètes comiques ou pornographiques, les skits utilisent des sons de rue, téléphone, voiture, coups de feu... ARTE Radio propose un florilège de skits du rap US monté comme une mini-fiction. 

Download : http://bit.ly/OxI7H0

Skit or die

In GBA 90 we get better acquainted with Kevin Allison. We link up between London and New York via Skype and talk storytelling, comedy, BDSM, what to do when expecting a hurricane, where sexuality and religion meet, The State, polyamory, being recognised in the street, how making his podcast Risk! has transformed his life and more!

http://risk-show.com/

https://twitter.com/RISKshow

Kevin Plugs:

The Story Studio: http://thestorystudio.org/

https://twitter.com/StoryStudioNYC


Follow him on twitter:

https://twitter.com/TheKevinAllison


3 non Kevin related Risk stories I really, really, really recommend:

http://risk-show.com/podcast/in-my-own-skin/

http://risk-show.com/podcast/mani-sheriar/

http://risk-show.com/podcast/danny-lobell/


Mentioned:

Kevin's Kink Camp Saga:

http://risk-show.com/podcast/kevin-goes-to-kink-camp-part-1/

http://risk-show.com/podcast/kevin-goes-to-kink-camp-2/

http://risk-show.com/podcast/beyond-kink-camp-part-1/

http://risk-show.com/podcast/beyond-kink-camp-part-2/

His recent story:

http://risk-show.com/podcast/the-god-problem/

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. AND Cacilda Jethá, M.D. (apologies for only remembering one authors name!): 

Tangentially Speaking: http://feralaudio.com/show/tangentially-speaking-with-dr-christopher-ryan/

Christopher Ryan and Dan Savage: 

http://www.thestranger.com/SavageLovePodcast/archives/2010/07/06/savage-love-episode-194

http://www.thestranger.com/SavageLovePodcast/archives/2010/10/27/savage-love-episode-210






You can hear Getting Better Acquainted on Stitcher SmartRadio, Stitcher allows you to listen to your favourite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and beyond.

On-demand and on the go!

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GBA 90 Kevin Allison

In memory of Ravi Shankar, here are 2 minutes from his hour-long interview with Howard, Nov.21, 1971. He will be missed.

Ravi Shankar

I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway. How long are the stripes and the spaces between them? 

You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to.

Over the course of many years, a psychology researcher named Dennis Schafer at Ohio State asked students from many different parts of the country this question and the most common response was that the white stripes are two feet long.

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the brilliant book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), reveals the real answer and some of the other perceptual countermeasures that are designed to make you feel comfortable going way faster than your brain can adequately process. 

We also talk about how this design language of exaggerated scale and wide vistas is great for limited access highways, but it’s problematic when these features are grafted onto suburban landscapes where they don’t belong. 

All the music in this episode is courtesy of my favorite new label, the Utah based, Hel Audio. Specifically, we played the bands OK Ikumi and Mooninite. Hel Audio focuses on physical releases of electronic and experimental music. I just bought myself the full Hel Audio catalog on four glorious cassette tapes, along with less glorious but more versatile (and free) digital downloads of the same songs. The tape deck in my twelve-year-old Golf has never been happier. http://www.helaudio.org/


99% Invisible-68- Built for Speed

One of the world's leading coffee producers, Andrea Illy, talks about the driving forces behind his family-owned business, which was created from a dream to offer the best coffee possible.

Philosophy of mission, passion and obsession

In the Advent Podcast for 14 December, comedian Eddie Izzard tells Robin Ince his thoughts on the personal hygiene of scientists, and the "smelly genius" of Isaac Newton.

Recorded in 2008. Music by Andrea Rocca.

New Humanist Advent Podcast 14 December: Eddie Izzard

In the 15th Advent Podcast, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant tell Robin Ince which thinkers should be celebrated at Christmas, and reveal their surprising decisions to convert to Christianity and creationism.

Recorded in 2008. Music by Andrea Rocca.

New Humanist Advent Podcast 15 December: Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant

An oral history of interstates in Louisville. Featuring: Metro Councilman and historian Tom Owen, Professor and historian Carl Kramer and urbanist and writer Branden Klayko.

Produced by Gabe Bullard (@gbullard)
Music by Company Flow and Grapes

The Past and Future of Highways in Louisville

Amnesty’s Secret Comedy Podcast returns with Jeremy Hardy sharing one too many secrets about working with Burt Reynolds and Chris McCausland reveals how he cheated in a school exam. There’s a song about the future from self-confessed nerd Helen Arney and Tom Allen gives us a right good giggle with his award-winning stand up comedy.

<b>There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a free podcast and we hope we made you laugh. If you can, please consider <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=K3H8GNJJJ9ZJY">chipping in a few quid</a> to support our work. Thank you! <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=K3H8GNJJJ9ZJY">Donate</a></b>

Subscribe on iTunes

Secret Santa Comedy Podcast 2012 #02 - Jeremy Hardy, Helen Arney + more

When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city--until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on freeways.

But like most legends, the one that Eric heard about the Red Car is not entirely accurate. It's true that Los Angeles did have an extensive mass transit system called the Red Car, which at one time ran on 1,100 miles of track--about 25 percent more more track mileage than New York City has today, a century later.  

But the Red Car wasn't the victim of a conspiracy. The Red Car WAS the conspiracy. 


99% Invisible-70- The Great Red Car Conspiracy

Though its official name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park.  With its sleek granite benches, geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement, its success as a pedestrian plaza is debatable.  But it turned out to be perfect for skateboarding.  As skateboarding culture grew in the 1990s, LOVE Park became a Mecca of the skating world--even though skateboarding was officially banned there.  

Skateboarder and radio producer Andrew Norton takes us for a ride through the surprising history of LOVE Park, and pulls back the curtain on a decades-old battle over public space in Philadelphia and beyond.


99% Invisible-71- In and Out of LOVE

I liked the audio prompts... "Wait"... "Wait"... "Wait"

The walk sign at MLK and Liberty, Savannah GA

On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”

And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.

Many viewed the car as a death machine. One newspaper cartoon even compared the car to Moloch, the god to whom the Ammonites supposedly sacrificed their children.

At first, pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. Parades were held in dozens of cities to commemorate the dead children. Cities built monuments. Mothers of children killed in the streets are given a special White Star to honor their loss.

The main cause for these deaths was that the rules of the street were vastly different than they are today. A street functioned like a city park, or a pedestrian mall, where you could move in any direction without really thinking about it. The only moving hazards were animals and other people.  

But automotive interests wanted to claim the streets for cars. 
So they put forth a radical idea--cars weren't to blame, it was human recklessness. They found that they could exonerate the machine by placing the blame on individuals. 

They also coined a new term: "Jaywalking."

99% Invisible-76- The Modern Moloch

A tiny radio show about design, architecture &amp; the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

http://99percentinvisible.org/

New episodes every Wednesday.

On the radio on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am.  And public radio stations across the country.

Created by Roman Mars.
