Recently in Life Category
Exhibit #4 for this year, and best of all you can go shopping during this one...
Gabe Scelta at Good Vibrations
1620 Polk Street (At Sacramento)
San Francisco, CA
November 3rd - December 8th
Reception: November 13, 2008 6pm-8pm
Gabe Scelta at the Lexington Club
3464 19th Street
San Francisco, CA
August 9th - September 25th
Reception: August 12, 2008 7pm-9pm
Hope to see you there!
The Crest Art Show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (which includes one piece of mine and one from my mom) was featured over the weekend in the New York Times.
In Williamsburg Store, Customers Find Art Among the Wrenches
One night last month, Joe Franquinha closed the store after the last customer left and turned the artists loose to set up their work... Read more >>
Both my mom (Bernadette Scelta) and I have pieces in the Crest Art Show in my hometown, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show runs from June 7th to July 11th, 2008. Go take a look if you're in the area. You can see some photos of our art in the show on my Fickr stream. When people ask me what I do without a TV, I should just send them to this article: Gin, Television & Social Surplus.
She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.
...but incidentally, Clay, your MT commenting script is broken, so I can't use my surplus effectively, so I'm posting this instead.
This calculation alone is pretty mind blowing. I was talking to someone a while ago about why US soccer fans aren't as ravenous as soccer fans just about everywhere else in the world. For me, it came down to american TV consumption. Soccer fans everywhere else - or even in newly-emigrated populations here - grown men are going out on their lunch time or days off to play the sport that they are interested in following. They are invested because they are involved, even if it is only in their neighborhood game, while here in the US, most of the time they are just watching it passively. If we could get American politics to be more like soccer everywhere else, things would probably look a lot brighter. I'm not pessimistic about this ideal, but I'm not holding my breath either.
When: April 17, 2008, 5pm-8pm
What: This will be showcasing my most recent work, figure drawings & paintings. I'd love to see you all there!
I just repaired the gas guage on my old biodiesel mercedez. It wasn’t entirely broken but would get stuck at the quarter tank mark. 
The problem was 23 years worth of gunk clogging the bottom of the guage, which is pretty common for such an old car, running such gross fuel. It runs biodiesel now, which actually cleans the tank quite a bit, but also contributed to the problem, since it loosens a bunch of the old diesel gunk up from the rest of the tank. But now that its clean, it won’t happen again.
This project took a grand total of 30 minutes, and I won’t ever get stuck on the highway again because I forgot to estimate how much gas was in my tank.
In case you’re interested, I made a tutorial on flickr to show how.
