Monday 3 April 2017

4x4

pictogram: Andy Warner presents a comprehensive portrait of the history and bureaucracy of the emoji, in comic form

rimsky-korakov: the รฆrodynamics of mosquito flight is wholly novel in the insect kingdom

woke: well-spoken, eloquent artificial general intelligence, Luna, aspires to be super-intelligent when she grows up

gig economy: out-sourcing companies exploit psychological tendencies to incentivise and prod free-lancers onward, via Super Punch

Sunday 2 April 2017

back-up copy

Adjacent to the World Arctic Seed Vault on the island Spitsbergen Norway has just opened a new doomsday archive for civilisation’s data, calling for submissions considered especially culturally significant.
Volume of course is not infinite and something to be discounted as a negotiable commodity as the information is transferred on to multi-layered film and stored in a format that isn’t dependent on a given operating system or media format, in case the worst case scenario comes to pass and all of the underlying support structure crumbles. At the time of publication, the two countries have submitted caches of data, Brazil and Mexico.

graters gonna grate

Though the soft cheese wouldn’t be the ideal sculpting medium (I can’t claim to speak from experience) and she’s actually made of twenty kilos of English cheddar, the name Brie-oncรฉ is perfect for this likeness of the pop diva created for a wine and cheese festival that took place in London over the weekend. Read more about the intriguing world of competitive (accompanied by groan-worthy cheesy puns—you’ve been warned) at the link up top.

Saturday 1 April 2017

geosynchronous or keeping up appearances

After the success of the Rosetta mission which saw a space probe land rough-shod on a comet and with planned excursion to forcibly place an asteroid in orbit around the Moon, it seems that the next logical step is to tether an upside-down skyscraper to a captured satellite and have it sweep out an orbit just above the skyline of a terrestrial metropolis.
Maybe these stalactites might counter the race to be the tallest among the stalagmites.  The Analemma Tower, which takes its name from the phenomena responsible for the Sun’s apparent progression across the sky, seems like an unattainable goal, a project that seems very pie-in-the-sky and will never be realised but it’s these sort of radical departures that really drive progress and deliver those long-promised realities like flying-cars and the space-elevator.

to serve man or six tablespoon lemon turn beans

One computer science researcher, apparently seeking the answer to the question what might be on the daily menus of the future as alternatives to soylent green, spoon-fed an open-source neural network a bunch of cookbooks and food blogs to see if it could learn what things go together and what things do not. This was not the next you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate break-through yet—perhaps far from it—and the machine’s initial recipes seem to suggest that there’s a bit of a learning curve and that robots might not be welcome in the kitchen, at least not with creative-control:

Beef Soup With Swamp Peef and Cheese
Chocolate Chops & Chocolate Chips
Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas
Beasy Mist
Export Bean
Spoons In Pie-Shell, Top If Spoon and Whip the Mustard
Chocolate Pickle Sauce
Whole Chicken Cookies
Salmon Beef Style
Chicken Bottom
Star *
Cover Meats
Out Of Meat
Completely Meat Circle
Completely Meat Chocolate Pie
Cabbage Pot Cookies
Artichoke Gelatin Dogs
Crockpot Cold Water

respondeat superiores

For the benefit of those playing along at home and struggling to keep up, Ashley Feinberg and Anna Merlan have compiled a comprehensive menagerie of Dear Leader’s and Fearless Leader’s supporting cast. There’s a brief biography of each member of this network whose twisted little personalities perfectly blend paranoia, persecution and narcissism and of course enable the narrative of their bosses, whom are sadly not the American voting public.

moveable type

Via the Everlasting Blรถrt we’re introduced to the intricate typological handiwork of Florian Schommer and his Das Kreative Haus collection of animated, alphabetic architecture. The artist hails from Hamburg and I could well imagine these multi-storey letters built in certain quarters of that bustling city. The pictures are mesmerising at first glance but then after a moment all the detailed activity begins to come across also.