Sunday 3 April 2016

go canada!

Collectors’ Weekly curates a fine gallery of the collected and concerted advertising campaigns of the Canadian-Pacific holiday-making enterprise.
From the earliest days when the trans-continental railroad was complete, the company ran a screen-printing workshop, employing some of the finest graphic artists, like Thomas Hall and Norman Fraser, to create iconic and timeless travel posters to allure travelers to venture far and wide within its expanded empire that progressed from trains, to planes, cruise-liners and even resort hotels. Be sure to visit Collectors’ Weekly to be treated to much more of this dazzling, vintage ephemera.

Saturday 2 April 2016

doctor zaius, doctor zaius

A Kazakhstani scientist with the alliterative name of Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a pioneer in the early 1900s in the field of artificial insemination.
Praised and later eulogised by sociologist Ivan Pavlov, Ivanov’s chief accomp- lishments were in the field of animal husbandry and of interest to horse-breeders, but reportedly his research also dabbled in controversy, hoping to create ape-human hybrids, called humanzees—for no particular reason. Early trials failed and the premature death of simian donors and the aftermath of the Soviet revolution put a stop to his further experiments. Contemporaries even composed an opรฉra-bouffe called Orango to lampoon and chastise Ivanov’s ambitions, but it was not staged until 2011 to somewhat less knowledgable audiences. Let’s be sure to thank the Frinkiac for the ease in finding this appropriate illustration.

hacktivist or equities and securities

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations dropped its suit against one global technological giant, served a backhanded measure of victory to the company for having the integrity not to relent in the face of the governments dragnet policies of surveillance, once the agency realised that there was a back-door way, a security flaw to exploit, to access a user’s data, telemetry, call logs and contacts despite (or perhaps in spite of) the company’s refusal to cooperate.
This one subpoena was arguably a matter of national security and public safety but there would be no way of putting this genie back in the bottle once even one exception was made. The company begged-off, in fact, that they were unable to engineer a work-around to the device’s security protocols, but now the FBI has contracted its work out to another company that could apparently bypass the safety measures, but no one is quite sure how. I find it a little incredulous that purely technical means were applied, but it’s hard to say—especially not that the FBI is magnanimously offering its newly-acquired expertise to help local law-enforcement to shoehorn their way into the phones and gadgets of relatively small-fry criminals (or suspected criminals) to keep tabs on their entire networks and supposed syndicates. There’s a legal provision that could be invoked called “equities review” that could force the former plaintiff to disclose what recourse they found that led to them dropping the case, arguing that it’s better for companies to be made aware of an exploitable flaw so they can patch it instead of affording a few then a lot of parties entry, but I suspect it will be hard to compel the FBI to reveal its sources and stooges.

billboard and hoarding

Though the ways advertising space is appraised these days might be somewhat transformed, I think we can all be nostalgic over Messy Nessy Chic’s appreciation of the faded art of hand-drawn artisanal signage with its distinctive type-faces.
Though it’s only an echo of the craft, we’re often treated to ghost signs or brickads preserved on the faรงades of older buildings after the business has long since disappeared or the nice, bold penmanship of daily menus written on blackboard easels on the sidewalks before cafes and restaurants. There are a few professionals who still ply the aesthetic but I am hoping that there’s a bigger revival.

Friday 1 April 2016

gene-pool

Once considered lost with just a few male members observed who’d not yet been informed that their species had gone extinct, the kakapo (though with many challenges still ahead) are slowly making a recovery, the population having been sequestered on a remote island off the coast of New Zealand. The turkey-sized flightless and fearless parrots, having evolved over the millennia with no natural predators suffered terribly with the arrival of Europeans, who brought with them hitchhiking pests like cats and rats, that hunted the birds to the brink of extinction, like many other charismatic creatures.
The rescue scheme of the New Zealanders, involving the eradication of invasive species on otherwise inaccessible islands and transplanting threatened populations there to recover, has been a successful one for this and other feathered friends, but what’s really remarkable in the case of the kakapos is that a consortium of researchers have taken advantage of this success-story, with the total number of individuals having grown to a meagre but manageable one hundred and twenty-five, to sequence the DNA of an entire species, and not just some select exemplars. Of course, this sampling is not characteristic of a normally viable and genetically diverse population, but the significance and what knowing all the subtle differences in health, vitality, mutations and foibles that make each of the subjects (and us as well) unique is something heretofore unexplored—and suggests potential for further understanding about the mechanics of evolution and perhaps gives the conservators the chance to play match-maker.

separation, alignment, cohesion

Photography editor Alan Taylor of The Atlantic shares a select gallery of oddly satisfying and soothing images that illustrate the Chinese art of precision crowd formation. There’s no element of the mob to these carefully coordinated scenes, which in most cases broke the records (some of the aspirations are unusual) that they set out to break and raised the bar for the next gathering.