6x6

never just a car: a supercut of automotive movie cameos

blue state: an exhibit in Los Angles structured around colour examines the many ways of casting shade

india pale ale: find out what which beer you’re partial to says about you, via the ever-brilliant Nag on the Lake

le béton brût: with greyscale Lego bricks, a man and his son create miniature Brutalists architecture, via Present /&/ Correct

paleo-futures: 1926 interview with Nikola Tesla predicting our fraught relationship with our gadgets

midsweden 365: secret tunnels excavated in the granite mountains near the town of Gällö repurposed as a underground, year-round skiing range

residence hall

Under construction since the summer of 2016, the architects behind Urban Rigger—we learn via Plain Magazine—present an innovative concept to address the shortage of affordable student housing by creating floating dormitories along disused docklands in Copenhagen.
The potential for expanding sustainable dwelling places parallel to abandoned water transport infrastructure that line the world’s rivers and canals with extant but outmoded infrastructure is tremendous and would relieve a lot of pressure in places where space is already at a premium. Units, which would have applications for sheltering refugees as well, moored and unmoored as needed, are housed in upgraded shipping containers and include an array of amenities and harness power passively through solar panels and the passing current and tides.  Be sure to visit the links above for a whole gallery of the floating dorm and a video documentary.

diglossia

Writing for the Atlantic, Sarah Zhang takes a second look (I am realizing paying attention to the re-runs and the re-cap is important) at a John Hopkins study called “The Devil’s in the G-Tails,” which demonstrated a remarkably low recall on how to properly write a standard lower-carriage g and questioned why there’s such a disconnect between handwriting (to the extent we can be bothered anymore) and print.
The double-storey g originated in the scriptorium and was transcommunicated to the foundry and remained, even though for correspondence and note-taking, the single-storey minuscule took off. Briefly in the 1950s the variants (allographs) were used by the International Phonetic Association to mark a distinction between the hard- and soft-g sounds but that convention was since abandoned. It’s something to be sure to consider what’s in the serifs and ligatures of our refined fonts and how those fiddly bits are fossils of the past and the developmental history of penmanship and printing.

cetacea

We enjoyed reflecting on this article from the Smithsonian Magazine that suggests that science and society is growing more receptive to the sensibilities of those that talk to the animals through the lens of the Inuit, Iñupiat and other aboriginal people who respected and revered their quarry and mainstay, the whale. Rather than dismissing their connection as superstition or as something totally inaccessible and inscrutable, researchers and ethnographers are taking the lore and traditions of northern people more seriously, realizing and appreciating that this “whale cult” forms a quite different paradigm than the common narrative of Western culture’s article of faith that mankind was given dominion over Nature.

froggy goes a-courting

Though taxologically distinguished from their amphibian cousins by behaviour rather than any agreed upon definition, most toads live their adult lives in dry woodlands and only return to the ponds where they hatched (a practise in the animal kingdom called natal site fidelity or philopatry) to spawn the next generation.
Their annual march down the valley goes directly through our yard but they encounter a big last-mile problem with a single lane road (read about a possible technological way to help mitigate such competition here). They’ve been managing the passage fairly well on their own but one does see a few flattened casualties but we helped out as many as we could to cross the street.