The Christian Science Monitor had an article on Friday about the inrease in portrayals of torture on TV over the past year. Their research showed “70 instances of scenes of graphic torture or sadism on network entertainment TV from Sept. 1, 2001, until earlier this month. In the two-year period previous to this, it logged 79.” Twice as many.

Repeated exposure to images like this can’t help but inure us to the real pain and terror of physical and psychological torture as practiced around the world. I wonder if it’s any coincidence that Time magazine reported in April that “45% of Americans surveyed supported torture to prevent attacks.”

What do we imagine when we think of torture as it may be practiced by our own government? It wouldn’t be ripping out fingernails, would it? Electrical charges to the testicles? Mock executions? No. We’re the good guys. We’d do something simple and humane like a “truth serum“, right?

And, anyway, even if we did torture those suicidal Taliban down at Camp Delta, it couldn’t be more horrible than when Willow ripped off Warren’s skin on the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, could it?

Could it?

(via Rebecca Blood)

I was in Seattle a couple of years ago with a co-worker for the annual Thunder Lizard Macromedia conference. It was a good show at a good time. Flash usage was expanding, and developers were starting to realize that Flash could be used for more than Wow splash screens and cartoons. Many of the presenters we saw have since gone on to write books about Flash and Web Development: Kelly Goto, Todd Purgason, Hillman Curtis.

The company put us up at the Renaissance Madison Hotel, a pretty tony place for me, but I wasn’t paying, the company was. (Of course, nowadays, no one is paying!) The conference was being held at the Washington State Convention Center, just a short walk from the hotel through Freeway Park [Quicktime]. It’s a strange little park, full of nooks and crannies, concrete benches, boxes and waterfalls, built on a lid over I-5, the 10-lane interstate highway that runs from the Mexican border in California through Seattle and up to the Canadian border.

As we walked through Freeway Park each day, I thought about what a nice use of land it was. The roar of the waterfalls and the thick stands of trees blocked out the noise of the highway below us. The air was freshened by the foliage, and the dozens of nooks and crannies made for some quiet intimate spaces in which to relax. All in all, it just added to my impression of Seattle as an accessible, human-sized city.

Of course, my perception of the park is colored by my being 6’4″ (193 cm), a healthy white male, with a sheltered place to sleep at night, no substance dependencies, no (serious) psychological traumas, no (major) diminshment of my senses. The complete opposite of RaeAnn Champaco, a deaf and mute homeless woman who was stabbed to death in the restroom of Freeway Park at 10:15 am on January 18 of this year.

Even if she could have screamed, no one would have heard her above the roar of the waterfalls I found so soothing. Even if she had been capable of hearing her attacker coming, she might not have been able to escape him through the frequent twists and turns and sudden ledges I found so bucolic. Even if police had arrived immediately, they might not have been able to find the attacker amongst the maze of plantings and blind alleys I found so intimate.

It’s not the first time a horrible crime has happened there. Since the park opened in 1976, there have been a number of murders, accidental deaths, robberies, rapes and other crimes. An article in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly, seeks to bring some of this to light. Entitled “Topography of Terror“, the author makes the point that the danger of the park is in its design. The same features its award-winning architect, Lawrence Halprin, and I saw as a beautiful haven in the urban landscape, have made the place a preying ground for some of the worst parts of modern society.

There’s always a flip-side to any urban design. There’s always a danger that a beautiful public structure can be perverted. The challenge for modern urban planning is to take into account the beauty and the evil it attracts.