A Counterintuitive Counterinsurgency

Looks like we’ve now outsourced and offshored our counterinsurgency strategy.

The diagram here, outlines the Afghanistan counterinsurgency strategy. It was obtained by MSNBC's Richard Engel, and aired on The Rachel Maddow Show. Labeled a ‘working draft’, the slide is branded with the logo of PA Consulting Group, a UK-based firm.

The company made news in 2008, when it lost a memory stick containing data on the entire UK prison population of about 84,000. PA Consulting has worked successfully with the U.S. Navy on cost-cutting privatization initiatives.

You can see the full PDF here for an in-depth look at what we must surely be paying big bucks for.

Of eBay and Empires

Awesome animated graphic of the rise and fall of world empires from 1800 by Pedro M. Cruz. I did a double take when I saw this because it looked so much like the "found palettes" I'd been collecting from eBay. It's a category I think of as "graphic cousins" or "visual homonymns"--they have visual similarities, but little in common beyond that. If there is a word for this phenomenon, I'm not aware of it.


Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.


Fisher Price records


Enamel skillets

I tried to come up with possibilities for what the word might be, and started googling. "Homograph" is already taken and refers to words that have the same spelling, but whose meaning can only be known from the context in which it is used. "Homoglyph" is also taken. It refers to two characters or sets of characters that appear very similar and can often appear identical. Examples are the numeral zero and the letter "O", or the letters rn and m. "HOMO pict" has somethig to do with chemical bonding. "Homopict" has to do with another kind of bonding.



When I tried working with “icon”, Greek for "image", I found out that "Homicon", is an annual convention for fans of Homicide: Life on the Street, while "Homocon" is short for “homosexual conservative” an oxymoronic political identity. Google assumed there was a space missing in "homoicon", so I was taken to an art essay in the Independent, Arrows of desire: How did St Sebastian become an enduring, homo-erotic icon? “Sebastian's appeal to gay men seems obvious. He was young, male, apparently unmarried and martyred by the establishment." "Homoiconic", however, is a word used in computer coding. According to Wikipedia, "Homoiconicity is a property of some programming languages, in which the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself, from homo meaning the same and icon meaning representation."

Alas, being at a loss for one word, has caused me to use many.

What Does One Million Look Like?

So, you know the 2000 years that happened before the current millennium began? Well if you go back those 2 millennia, and then do that 499 more times, you’ll get to the year this Raquel Welch classic takes place.

Designers of information graphics often find themselves in the position of explaining large numbers. At the recent Society of News Design conference in Buenos Aires, I had the magnitude of numbers like million, billion and trillion conveyed to me by no less than three different infographics gurus. Nigel Holmes of Explanation Graphics was the keynote speaker and is the undisputed master of explaining magnitudes of time, space, and dollars. To check out his short animation from 2000 explaining the then $5.7 trillion national debt, go here and click on the first clip.


Keep in mind that $5.7 trillion is barely half of the $11.9 trillion outstanding today. So watch it twice. Then watch the others for more great explanations.



Later that week, I found this Argentine banknote at the San Telmo market. I recognized it immediately--I knew what one million looked like. But not so fast. You see, It was issued between 1981-1983 during Argentina’s hyperinflation days. it’s out of circulation now, and has nothing to do with the 20 pesos (roughly $5) I paid for it. In fact, it didn’t even have much to do with itself over the 13-year period that particular peso-unit was in use. When Argentina introduced a new monetary unit in 1983, The New York Times put it this way: “In 1970 a new, four-door automobile cost 20,000 pesos. Today, 20,000 old pesos would purchase two sticks of chewing gum; the new car costs 993 million.” Yikes, now that’s inflation.

So, I might know what one million looks like, but what it means? Well let's just say that it all depends.