Human and Dense Dancers

It's a weird feeling when a seemingly hokey, ridiculously popular song keeps going through your head. I usually have relatively little-known songs, or even songs only I know, go through my head. It's even weirder when a song goes through your head and it takes you a while to realize that the words reflect something going on in your life. 

Hilarious bit from Wikipedia re: confusion about the lyrics:

'There remains confusion and debate over the line "Are we human, or are we dancer?" [or "denser"] ... the lyrics were inspired by a disparaging comment made by Hunter S. Thompson, where he stated America was raising "a generation of dancers". ... [Killers frontman Brandon Richard] Flowers [said] "It's supposed to be a dance song, [the beat] goes with the chorus...If you can't put that together, you're an idiot".'

Right, like, dense. It all works. 

Calder-inspired logo for accuracy.org

A couple of months ago I had a great talk with several of my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy -- Hollie, Layla and Ben -- about our new webpage and we decided part of what could be great about our webpage was the address, accuracy.org -- and that we should highlight that further. This got me doodling lots of things about accuracy.org. (One long-standing thing was spelling it out: double you double you double you dot a see sea you are a see why dot oh are gee -- I wondered if accuracy.org was the longest url where each letter is also a word. Pretty sure that's not the case, but I'll leave that to the gamers.) 

But I eventually came up with this:

Accuracy.org

Which is obviously Calder-inspired. Today I realized, along with millions of others, through google's temporary logo (which my intern Sam notes reacts to his moving laptop) that today is Calder's birthday. One thing that's not quite right about the google logo is that it depicts each piece of the mobile as appearing monochrome as they move, which is not how they appear in the real world. If really you look closely at a real-life Calder as it turns, because of the lighting, it changes color -- especially when it "flips" and you see the other side (indeed, "real-life" is part of what a Calder is about, mimicking life, "turning a leaf over"). That's part of what inspired my "a" -- seeing things "from both sides", "in a different light". Other obvious influences -- of motion, of pieces making up a whole -- are the Yin - Yang as well as Umberto Boccioni's "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space". Need to keep tinkering with the new logo it before we put it on our webpage, but have been using it on the twitter feed, @accuracy