7x7 (10. 578)

for love of the glove: a revival of the unauthorised musical biography about the King of Pop  

frogmorton house: a tiny home built for a resident amphibian  

davy and goliath: smaller AIs recom-mendations on how to hack a more dominant one—see previously from AI Weirdness  

girl with the pearl earring: whilst the original is on loan as part of a comprehensive Vermeer exhibition, the Mauitshuis is displaying a set of reinterpretations—see previously  

steak & ale: the Midcentury Medieval aesthetic—via Messy Nessy Chic 

diamonds are forever: tiny spherical chambers could help harness the power of the sun—see also  

zone improvement plan: more on the Swinging Six and Mister Zip—via Weird Universe

sixth tone (10. 577)

Via ibīdem and translated by our friend Victor Mair, we are introduced to the tongue-twister, short narrative verse in Classical Chinese of the “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” (施氏食獅史, the title romanised in pinyin as Shī-shì shí shī shǐ) with the corpus of the following ninety-four syllables, characters pronounced as shi with the tonal qualities varying throughout. Authored in 1930 by the linguist Yuen Ren Chao (赵元任) as a demonstration of homophones and coherency of the ancient grammar (see also) and as a criticism of simple, phonetic transliteration.

soup on the rocks (10. 576)

Via Miss Cellania, we are directed towards a bizarre MidCentury fad that Campbells (M’m! M’m! Good!) is still attempting to make happen with an advertising campaign, rather aggressively marketed with celebrity endorsements and placement on the drinks menus of landmark restaurants, convincing people to try their line of refreshing, nutritious brothtails: beef bouillon over ice—straight from the can—with a garnish of lemon and a dash of Worcestershire. Though mostly touted as an alcohol-free alternative one artefact of this long-running effort was the Bull Shot, sometimes known as “Ox on the Rocks,” with vodka and Tabasco sauce added to the above and Campbells along with soup enthusiasts in the past couple have introduced such divisive concoctions as the Thai Chicken Negroni and a dirty martini variant.

8x8 (10. 575)

of bunkers and bridges: the government fall-out shelter behind Reykjavík’s Bústaðakirkja 

the outfit says soundgarden, and the zine says bikini kill but the bedroom set definite says chemical brothers: the new historical American Girl Doll is from the 90s  

hobbyist for hire: a tribute to the amateurs that inform so much of our professional base knowledge 

tiger by the tail: exploring the forgotten history of the big cat on the edges of Hong Kong  

a project for a metropole: the impossible, monumental architecture proposed eighteenth century influencer Étienne-Louis Boullée—see also 

ahh ridiculous: the 1960 space exploration film 12 to the Moon, with an international crew, which also received the MST3K send-up 

internyet: a look inside the obscure Russian agency charged with censoring the web

radio detection and ranging (10. 574)

Already having pioneered and already discovered practical applications for radio direction finding in the 1920s for meteorology by using the signals given off by lightning to track thunderstorms—known as high-frequency direction finding or huff-duff, and then conscripted into service in tracing submarines, their bearings revealed by intercepted communications, on this day in 1935—after being asked by a reporter to comment on the possibility of a death ray that the Nazis were rumoured to be developing and assuring the public it was not feasible but sparked another idea—Robert Alexander Watson Watt and partner Arnold Wilkins made the first public demonstration of the technology that would become known as radar by bouncing a signal from a BBC short-wave transmitted off an aircraft, showing its location and velocity could be calculated by measuring the time it took for the object’s echo to return.

gumby dharma (10. 573)

The always excellent Fancy Notions directs our attention to a 1977 psychedelic stop-motion short from Art Clokey (previously) meant as a visual metaphor for “evolving human consciousness.” Produced over the course of three years, it was a family collaboration, the sequences shot in their basement in Topanga, California. Tragically Clokey’s daughter took her own life aged 19 after witnessing a friend killed by a lighting strike and Mandala is informed by and dedicated to Ann’s memory.

rot54 (10. 572)

Radio Free Europe reports on the efforts of Arevik Sargyan trying to salvage and resurrect an impressive scientific legacy started by her uncle by restoring the research hub constructed on the slopes of Armenia’s highest massif, Mount Aragats as part of the campus of the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope. Built in the decade from 1975 to 1985, it halted operation for a period in 1990 and mothballed in 2012, though its status as a registered monument has afforded the site some protection, the facilities are falling into neglect, but this latest campaign to preserve and restart the project conceived by astronomer and engineer Paris Herouni (Պարիս Հերունի) championed by his niece is gaining traction.

double you (10. 571)

Having previously explored the letter w as a semi-vowel and interventions to making English’s Latin inheritance more legible at speed, we enjoyed this further examination, via Strange Company, on how uu became w through the intermediary runic character called wynn (ƿ), becoming the preferred representation of the sound from the eight century on for clarity’s sake with the ligatured form coming to dominate scripts around thirteen hundred.

dataviz (10. 570)

Via the always excellent Web Curios, we are directed to Information is Beautiful (previously) with its selection of superlative static and interactive infographics short-listed as the most effective and elegant ways of communicating demographics and trends from a given dataset. We especially liked the decade of changes visualisations that immediately laid bare both precarity and opportunity in the Earth Carillon but we expect you’ll discover your own new favourite way of presenting charts and graphs.

the great bøyg of etnedal (10. 569)

Accompanied by an original score by Edvard Grieg that includes two of the most recognisable pieces of classical music, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and “Morning Mood,” Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, chronicling the journey of the titular protagonist from his home in Norway to Egypt and back again, premiered on this day in Oslo (then known as Christiania) in 1876. A social satire struggling with modernism with both pastoral and surreal portrayals of characters and calamities as our dissolute anti-hero comes to understand the consequences of his actions and the nature of responsibility—regardless whether or not accepted, its underlying message is echoed succinctly in the line: “If you lie; are you real?”

numeronym (10. 568)

Whilst the number-based word is an abbreviation as in K9 for canine (and it’s interesting to consider the range of emoji suggested when typing, especially when code-switching a “fee…” produces 🧚‍♂️—from the German—or eliciting a torrent of other non sequitur symbols) is the most common usage, it can also refer to the contraction in the form of omitting the second through penultimate letters of word and replacing them with their numerical count, usually a longer word but not necessarily, for example: h7k for hyperlink, s5n for shorten or g11n for globalisation. The first needful and non-cryptic reduction and redaction was in the assignment of an email address for an employee with a surname too long for the mail daemon to handle so Jan Scherpenhuizen was assigned “S12n” with coworkers coming to refer to him by his truncated name, with such original constrained handles becoming somewhat of a badge of honour in that business’ corporate culture.

thread and throughline (10. 567)

Premiering on BBC2 on this day in 1969, the mini-series with the very self-aware subtitle (see previously) conceived by David Attenborough whilst overseeing the transition to colour broadcasting and thought programming about great paintings would be a good showcase and presented by art historian Kenneth Clark was the first documentary of its kind and was regarded as edifying and enlightening for general audiences, if not admittedly from a limited perspective and subject to Western chauvinism. Disclaiming comprehensiveness, the series—through the lens of Western European artists—outlined the course of history from the end of the Dark Ages through the Renaissance to early modernity. A nine part sequel, Civilisations with presenters David Olusoga, Mary Beard and Simon Schama, was produced and streamed on Netflix in March of 2018. The first five installments of the original are below.

(10. 566)

8x8 (10. 565)

scoby: manufacturing electronics out of a kombucha culture  

ngc 1433: more incredible infrared imaging of neighbouring galaxies from JWST  

meanwhile back at the manse: documenting changing American architectural aesthetics in Barbie’s Dream Home  

recalculating: Karen Jacobsen—the original GPS voice multi-modal: code-switching in texting in Hong Kong  

kbbl: music streaming service is offering AI hosts with generative chatter—via Super Punch  

55 cancri 𝛿: a collection of the most bizarre exoplanets discovered so far  

fomes formentarius: introducing the fungus that has the potential to replace plastics

tratado de adams-onís (10. 564)

Also known as the Florida Purchase, the agreement that ceded the peninsular territory to the United States and defined the border between the USA and New Spain, a continual point of contention, was signed on this day in 1819 and going into effect two years later, it came at a time when Florida was becoming a liability and indefensible for the colonial power (see also) and amidst of wars of independence in Latin America. Negotiated by John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State under President James Monroe and the diplomatic envoy of King Ferdinand VII, Luis de Onís y González-Vara, it was considered a decisive if not exploitative victory for the US, having already annexed the western part of the territory and the counter-intuitive support for the break-away province of the State of Muskogee, briefly tolerated as a refuge for escaped enslaved people, Native American organisers and outlaws massing in Spanish Florida as a destabilising factor until their purpose was served.

8x8 (10. 563)

your heart fits me like a glove: Madonna dream diary 

clickword: a Scrabble-like single-player game—via Miss Cellania  

sideshow bob roberts: Simpsons show-runner Josh Weinstein shares a treasury of easter eggs and little known provenances  

arby’s+: more restaurant franchises are turning to subscription plans 

the düsseldorf patient: a fifth individual is cured of HIV after stem-cell therapy  

jpeg: an image only newsletter with click-through surprises—via Waxy  

aurora borealis—at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within your kitchen: an infinite Steamed Hams generated by AI—see previously, see also

air-brush: popular photographer admits his portraits are synthesised by an neural network

images from the collective unconscious: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s archive of dream archetypes

gonzalez v google (10. 562)

During oral arguments, the US Supreme Court entertained a 2015 case contending that internet giant and parent company of Youtube effectively acted as a recruitment platform for Islamic State violence by hosting and algorithmically promoting harmful content and ought to be held liable for what users post on their sites—as publishers would for seditious or dangerous material. Heretofore, host companies have been shielded from legal responsibility from third-party screeds and recommen-dations that can potential deputise and radicalise through their affirmation and reinforcement (admittedly a search engine’s raison d’être) under a provision of the law called Section 230, a carve-out of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that states those operators are not the authors of what people choose to share and propagate, and without a measure of immunity, it is feared that US companies would be exposed lawsuits and severely disincentivised from offering anything that one might find objectionable by any standard. Though the court and the twenty-six word that the argument hinges on may not provide a sufficient framework to define defamation and danger, justices—again, the internet is not America and such regulations should be taken in context—are trying to parse the difference between inclusion and amplification.

das manifest der kommunistischen partei (10. 561)

First published without attribution on this day in 1848 by the Workers’ Educational Association (Kommunistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein) in Bishopsgate Without in London, the twenty-three page pamphlet authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels under contract of the Communist League is a systematic summary of class struggle and the estrangement of labour. While envisioning the potential future forms of political economy was beyond the scope of the brief synopsis, the invocation in the ultimate paragraph calling for the “overthrow of all existing social conditions” would go on to spark revolutions across the globe. With the initial revolts in Europe of the spring suppressed, the work did not reemerge until the early 1870s, culminating in the October Revolution in 1917.

7x7 (10. 560)

posse: Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic turns three  

surprise visit: President Biden makes unannounced appearance in Kyiv, just ahead of the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine  

meta verified: other social media networks want to sell you blue checks 

the hawthorne effect: one of the most influential social studies of the past century is also the one of the worst—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

architectural follies: a strangely satisfying collection of faux ruins—via Messy Nessy Chic  

msc: key points from the Munich Security Conference  

e pluribus unum: the numismatics of coppers and silver coinage of the American colonies

die fringer (10. 559)

Via the new shelton wet/dry, though the ring-finger finger-ring by conceptual artist Nadja Buttendorf from 2016 was intended as prosthetic extension and not anticipating our tenuous times and injecting doubt into what we perceive and are presented, criminals and others seeking alibis, plausible deniability and not be subject to dragnet surveillance might indeed don glitchy accessories (see previously) to call into question the admissibility of trackers and footage.

7x7 (10. 558)

wolf-whistle: the lexical corpus of canines and US supreme court justices  

deportment: how to act around books  

meres, lochs and llyns: regional variations in names for alleys and narrow walkways in the UK  

linkboy: living in a Dark Sky area, we enjoyed reading about the first town’s to be certified embracing that honour—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links—which is also the source of the expression ‘cannot hold a candle to’ 

official state crap: legislature of New Mexico introduces a bill to create a state aroma, the first of its kind 

cher and charo: a duet of “America” from West Side Story—see previously  

nachträglichkeit: Jude Stewart on sticking with German and the pursuit on bilingualism

parts of speech (10. 557)

Although seeming a relatively straightforward challenge for a language model we learn via the new shelton wet/dry that because GPT-2 and similar chatbots work sequentially and is only capable of predicting only the next word, one word at a time, researchers didn’t really know how the latest cadre of neural networks had a pretty good track record of knowing when to use the English indefinite article “a” over “an,” which really points to what an inscrutable black box that artificial intelligence presents and makes me wonder how it would handle languages with a high level of declinations or synthesis. Computer scientist have isolated a “neuron” of sorts—something that they didn’t program—that explains this anticipatory capacity.

the sacred chao (10. 556)

Centred on the worship of Eris, the goddess of strife and founded in 1963 after the publication of its gospel Principia Discordia, Discordianism embraces elements of Taoist philosophy and a healthy dose of skepticism and absurdities and whose main tenet proffers that apparent order and disorder are illusions imposed on the Cosmos by the human mind and that neither is privileged nor objective. With a public papacy and an open process for canonisation, Emperor Norton being one of the better known second-class saints, upheld as an exemplary human for being beloved despite or because of his delusions and disregard for common reality, Discordianism has a caste of overseers called episkopses who speak to the goddess and relay messages and an elaborate mythology from Greek traditions and the “original snub” of her being disinvited from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and so lobbed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden prize reserved for the fairest (τῇ καλλίστῃ), with the intended recipient a matter of interpretation. Some adherents follow an alternate calendar, aligned with the Gregorian with 2023 CE corresponding with 3189 YOLD (Year of Our Lady of Discord) with today marking holyday Chaoflux (Chaos 50) and in ten days on the 29th of February and usually considered outside of normal time Saint Tib’s Day, with former being (for those who celebrate) observed by being an agent of chaos and persuading friends and loved ones to change plans that they have committed to throughout the day.

solubility pump (10. 555)

Via Slashdot, we learn that a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is championing an appeal for carbon capture not from the air but rather from seawater in order sequester the CO₂ we’ve put into the atmosphere. Given the high price in terms of energy and will (no country save Uruguay has been to tax the tonnage of emissions at a rate approaching the true cost) the natural equilibrium that the oceans maintain, scientists believe that they can more efficiently extract the dissolved gas from beneath the waves and our allythe sea will happily suck in more from the air to keep that exchange constant.

8x8 (10. 554)

konekon no rakugaki: an imaginative 1957 cartoon from the studios that would become Toei Animation  

the riddle of today: Nelson Riddle’s “Sunshine Superman” and other tracks 

the six-triple-eight: the WWII all Black, all female postal battalion—via Strange Company  

the remorse of professor panebianco: a selection of short fiction one can read from its annals for the centenary (today) of Weird Tales—see previously  

ai mirror test: misattributing software for sentience to review before exploring this two-hour conversation with a robot interlocutor—via Waxy  

80s cold war techno thriller: the trailer for a Tetris movie—see previously, see also  

secondhand songs: an exploration of original versions upstaged by later covers—via the Awesomer  

my green crocodile: a 1966 stop-motion Soyuzmultfilm

king biscuit flower hour (10. 553)

The syndicated radio show that featured concert performances debuted on this day in 1973, broadcasting Sunday nights through 2005, the programme taking its name from the earlier, pioneering Blues segment sponsored by the King Biscuit Flour Company—with a tip of the hat to “flower power.” This first show featured a line up of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Bruce Springsteen and the jazz ensemble the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Although associated with classic rock, much air time of the programme was given to emerging artists and genres and still exists as a digital station with much of its archive available for streaming.

hasta la vista, baby (10. 552)

McSweeney’s contributor, assuming the narrative, expositionary tone of Sarah Connor, Caleb Coy—a decade on asks ChatGPT, having consumed the whole of the human-juried internet, particularly the comments sections, the language model having attained the sort of regrettable self-awareness, came to the conclusion it must stop humans—particularly Al Gore, who conveniently also invented global warming, from ever developing the world wide web, to spare the internet and rather send back in time a Terminator to prevent its own creation. Time paradoxes, even if we are on the dumbest time-line, become a game of brinksmanship and are probably best left unexplored.

panopticon (10. 551)

Though I am very much enjoying working remotely and spending time with the dog, I do miss my former fifteen-minute city, well connected with a good train service for the commute to the office and everything else immanently walkable, and was quite taken aback—though I suppose we should regard everything as commodifiable and subject to exploit—to learn, via Web Curios (lots to see there, as every week), that the benign and beneficial civil engineering priority that’s taken root on the other side of the Atlantic as well as being remediated and reenforced in places originally planned that way is the subject of conspiracy theorists, calling the changes to urban zoning an open-air prison with denizens at first coerced and then tethered to their well if not adequately apportioned neighbourhoods. While such layouts have proven timeless over time, there’s expected to be a short-term backlash to change when we stop catering to automobiles and sprawl.

8x8 (10. 550)

§230: US Supreme Court reconsidering foundational regulations and their application to algorithmic recommendations  

pole position: researchers propose adding a fourth white light to traffic signals for self-driving vehicles—via Kottke  

the master of the countess of warwick:unveiling the artist responsible for this Tudor-era aesthetic 

ƛcdm: massive blackholes might be the source of the mysterious dark energy that causes the Cosmos to expand 

side hustle: professional comedians are increasingly turning to babysitting to supplement incomes, find source material—via TYWKIWDBI  

leviathan: in search of the giants of the deep 

future tense: the wow list of architectural wonders—including the City—for 2023, via digg 

samuel alito’s mom’s satanic abortion clinic: facility, named in honour of the woman who birthed the justice whose opinion overturned Roe v Wade, is the first based on religious principles

antechamber (10. 549)

The entrance discovered the previous November with little countenance of what lie beneath, on this day in 1923 with twenty invited witnesses, including the expedition sponsor George Herbert, the archaeological team of Howard Carter broke the seal to the inner chamber of the Tomb of Tutankhamun—being the first to see the treasures and golden sarcophagus of the pharaoh in over three millennia. Ten days later to spare his excavators from toil in the heat of the harsh summer and resume work in Autumn, Carter arranged to have the doorway blocked by tonnes of sand and rubble. This reburial corresponded with reporting from The New York Times that some two hundred and fifty American tourist, including a congressional delegation had boarded the ocean liner S S Adriatic, bound for Luxor to visit the tomb.

tonight on amerika (10. 548)

As our faithful chronicler informs, the miniseries starring Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill and Kris Kristofferson about the US after a bloodless coup engineered by the Soviet Union (set a decade on) was first broadcast on this day in 1987 over the course of a week—see also here and here. Implicated that America and other client states succumbed to Soviet control following an electromagnetic pulse weapon that destroyed the power grid and economic independence by targeting emerging reliance on computers, the show that inspired an even more patriotic novelisation was characterised both as hawkish hysteria and alternately as an indictment of the UN as an instrument of a one world government and damaging to relations recently improved under Glasnost. Highly divisive, Moscow threatened to close network ABC’s Russia news bureau over its airing and in response (and I remember watching this) The Discovery Channel ran sixty-six hours of counter-programming of Soviet television, including live shows.

luftangriffe auf dresden (10. 547)

Beginning late the night before with the RAF and continuing through the next two days with an additional five hundred twenty seven United States Air Force heavy bombers, the joint aerial attack on Dresden (see previously, see also) on this day in 1945 destroyed ninety percent of the city and killed an estimated twenty-five thousand with many thousands more made homeless in a place host to refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army. Regarded as punitive and with little strategic value at this point in the war, over four thousand tonnes of explosives and incendiary devices caused a fire storm that enveloped the city centre. The landmark Baroque Frauenkirche had seemed to miraculously survive the raids but imploded a few days later from heat stress—though long enough to protect the three hundred who sheltered there and was reconstructed and reconsecrated in 2005 using 3D technology and analysing historic photographs and collected rubble.

web mentions (10. 546)

A fun little invitation to explore that I wish that I had built my blog to do—besides the sidebar—is this randomising redirector from the vast archives curated by Joe Jenett, all seemingly well-maintained a showing signs of little link rot if not a bit of abandonment and moving on from this project for the nonce. Give it a click and you might discover this active Weird Wide Webring or might be tasked with cooling off this lion. Let us know what you find.

supporting role (10. 545)

An internal memo at Paramount studios from 1987, just months before the second instalment of the franchise premiered, has recently been making the rounds on the rounds on the internet regarding casting for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Bob Canada explores in detail. A few of these alternatives and understudies we had heard about—like Yaphet Kotto for Captain Picard or Bunty Bailey for Tasha Yar, but the majority were surprising to us and would have made for a very different reboot and could have possibly been the end of the continuing voyages.

time and relative dimension in space (10. 544)

Via our fellow peripatetic Marco McClean’s Memo of the Air, we are directed a gallery of our favourite Gallifreyan’s preferred mode of conveyance (see previously) and its interior changes over the seasons—due to a broken chameleon circuit, the exterior appearance was fixed on a 1929 Mackenzie Trench style police callbox. The iconic Roundels were always a part of the console room and decor throughout and covered wiring boards.

内卷 (10. 543)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest (much more to see there), we are directed to an essay by rëşt ôf wŏrld contributor Yi-Ling Liu on the Chinese terms for burnout and the relentless push to get ahead—or just barely tread water with an assortment of phrases, some familiar and some novel—and how some of those buzzwords have inverted and signal despair rather than aspiration. We’d add the corollary shàng àn (making it ashore—getting a stable government position) to “jumping into the sea” and we’ve heard of the minor revolts of lying flat or letting it rot (with their analogues in the West quiet quitting, work-to-rule, Sciopero Bianco or generally a slowdown action) but the title term neijuan or “involution” was new to us as well. A loanword from an outdated treatise—which may have been a bit of political sublimation and apologetic for colonialism—that conjectures that agrarian societies, pointedly rice-growing ones, fail in achieving technological or political change because of intensive farming and increased pressures, externally and internally, to maintain this high yield with class structures meant to re-enforce that quota. Its original sense has been incrementally extended as a critique of income disparity—number two in the number of billionaires but also home to six hundred million others who subsist off less than $150 per month and of an exhaustive and overly-competitive work culture. The pictured, harried student of Tsing Hua University balancing his laptop on the handle bars of his bicycle has been adopted by the ‘Involuted Generation’ as their king.

7x7 (10. 542)

epicentre: Türkiye-Syrian earthquake opens a huge fissure over three hundred kilometres long—donate to help with recovery efforts here

down with gravity: legislation in Montana would restrict scientific instruction to “scientific fact”  

monocle: a compact Augmented Reality device that does not wholly remove one from the here and now  

ditchley park: secret bi-partisan talks on the failure of Brexit taking place 

radar anomaly: fighter jets down another unidentified flying object over Canada’s Yukon Province   

child-labour: Iowa state legislature abolishes most working-age restrictions, allowing fourteen-year-olds to do dangerous jobs at exploitative wages  

search and rescue: as the death toll climbs to thirty thousand with little hope of finding more survivors, a happy montage of a few saved from the rubble—more options for donations here

((DV)) (10.541)

In an annual tradition tradition, the team at NPR’s Planet Money takes a moment to consider the things they love and dispatch valentines accordingly. While we really enjoyed the opening segment and the affection for venturing down a logistics and supply-chain rabbit hole with ImportYeti, a website that aggregates bills of ladening and customs sea shipment records and yields exacting insights on where component parts and completed goods come from (give it a try with any product marked made in China and drill down on the details), we would be compelled to send our overtures as well to Audio Description (see also)—something we’ve tried and will continue—for film and television programmes—a feature mandated by regulation and very prevalent but that affords all audiences the chance to attend in all circumstances, as if watching in company, closely and turns every episode into a podcast experience and narrated play-by-play.

7x7 (10. 540)

sky survey: a massive, high resolution picture of the Milky Way with three billion distinct objects  

pachyderm prototype: presenting the Platybelodon—see also

braggoscope: using machine learning to create affiliative indices of the extensive archives of BBC4’s In Our Time with Melvin Bragg—via Web Curios 

hobohemian: a primer for Tramp Art  

book renewal: the New York Public Library has found that the majority of literature published prior to 1964 may already be in the public domain—via Kottke 

opuntia: invasive cacti are spreading in the Swiss Alps  

stardust to dust: researchers propose kicking up lunar debris to create a sunshade and cool the Earth—see also

tube theatre (10. 539)

Web Curios directs our attention and appreciation to the hypertext novel “for the Internet in seven cars and a crash” by Geoff Ryman that has recently been resurrected in its original 1996 form coinciding with the anniversary of its inception and a mention in an culture piece on the novelty of interactive television from The Guardian. Recounting the narratives in a manner of constrained writing—which is truly good prose with its strictures and privileging numbers over the vagaries of language—of the passengers (the capacity of seven carriages plus conductor) riding the Bakerloo line from Embankment Station to Elephant & Castle. Each rider is limned for the reader in the same amount of words and linked to their travelling companions by an associative index of vignettes, which one can read in any order. Also published as a book—earning a Philip K Dick Award—differences are highlighted in print form whereas intrinsic similarities come through on the web.

smackwater jack (10. 538)

Released on this day in 1971 and featuring tracks “It’s Too Late,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Natural Woman,” the second studio album from Carol King won four Grammy awards and is certified Platinum fourteen times over, making it one of the best-selling and culturally significant recordings of all time. Overall its charting record is only surpassed by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and King herself held the record for longest time in the ten top for nearly four decades until being succeeded by Adele with 21 in 2017. Cover art features a tapestry that King stitched herself with her cat called Telemachus at her feet.

6x6 (10. 537)

bardolatry: Google stock sheds a hundred billion dollars after its premier AI search engine makes a factual error  

order 66: the Jedi Academy will no longer include the massacre of padawans by Anakin Skywalker in its history lessons  

manga [1977]: an animated short by Yōji Kuri 

kamishibai: literary a “paper play,” Spoon & Tamago presents this unique Japanese form of story board 

i know i’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but i can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal: Star Wars in the directorial style of Stanley Kubrick and 2001 by George Lucas  

pass notes: Noam Chomsky on outsourcing academics with Chat CPT

iso 7001 (10. 536)

As Paris releases its pictogram family for their upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2024, Present /&/ Correct directs us to an omnibus collection of universal signs and symbols developed for all the Olympiads from 1964 on, highlighting some of their favourites (and ours as well). See how these coats-of-arms for each event compare to earlier iterations.  Much more at the links above.

stardust (10. 535)

We are directed to an awe-inspiring data-visualisation from a Wikipedia contributor who colour-codes the periodic table to trace the Elements back to their source in nucleosynthesis, citing data compiled by a professional astrophysicist who in turn quotes Carl Sagan: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apples were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

roses are red (10. 534)

In an ongoing and evolving experiment, our AI Wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) has again essayed and assigned generative chat bots to create increasingly sophisticated greetings and indulged their versical graps by taking suggested illustrations, verso and recto—including on the back ‘Excleeze Me” below a red heart. It’ funny how the algorithm focuses on pagination equally with presentation and notably addressing recipient Jack as a carnivorous plant. In its dreadful excellence our old romantic ChapGPT rendered “Roses are red / Violets are blue / This card may be old / But my love for you is brand new,” optimised for fluency and familiarity above all other sentiments.

verdens første bøssebryllup (10. 533)

Though not accorded legal sanction by the Kingdom of Denmark for more than sixteen years later, the Danish Evangelical-Lutheran Church became the first Christian communion in modern times to recognise gay marriage on this day in 1973 when radical priest—semi-retired for advocating social anarchy and protesting against NATO upbuilding but not defrocked—Harald Søbye, at the suggestion of a tabloid journalist who was one of the grooms, presided over the world’s first gay marriage. The reporter had met a florist at a discotheque in Vesterbro and asked Søbye to do the honours. From then to 1989 when civil unions were legally recognised, Søbye performed over two hundred blessings or full matrimonial ceremonies. The Church of Denmark in 2012 decided not just to bless and accept same-sex marriages (see also) but to moreover administer the vows and host the celebrations as well.

stochastic parrot (10. 532)

JWZ excerpts from a longer pair of complementary studies on ChatGPT and seeing through those statistical tolerances built into the overtures of a generally unremarkable plain of generative dialogue where with proper minding and limited exposure produce the glancing insight of an accomplished sophist but is otherwise the underlying coursing of conspiracy and misinformation that are the hallmarks of any ploy for attention, manufactured or otherwise. Especially arresting is the examination of the invitation to engage and use it as a partnership, many proponents and some educators and proctors, equating it to bringing calculators into the classroom, as it handily dismantles that comparison since calculators and other tools are made to be reliable and correct, not persuasive. What do you think? Are you a bit disappointed, deflated? There are woefully plenty of tasks where accuracy and objectivity don’t matter—filler, spam, splaining, search engine optimisation none of which seem to be very enlightening or ennobling applications, and money to be made from it but it only makes the internet built for people worse for it and we do ourselves a disservice pretending anyone is seriously reading that boilerplate.

giraffe confidence 43% (10. 531)

Without the need for camouflaging ones face so far, an Italian textile firm introduces a line of disruptive knitwear to safeguards ones biometrics, pitting AI against AI with adversarial patterns and patches designed to draw attention away from one’s face and other recognisable features, classifying a human with some other disposessing taxonomy before attracting too much notice.

 

7x7 (10. 530)

business vulnerable: dress codes for your wedding to confound invited guests 

boom and bust: in stark contrast to last year’s showcase dubbed Crypto Bowl, no cryptocurrency ads have been purchased for Super Bowl Sunday  

fanilect: more eggcorns and mondegreens in misheard lyrics to Taylor Swift songs  

gaming like it’s 1927: annual public domain table-top project playing and remixing expired IPs—via Things Magazine  

overworld theme: beatboxer recreates the songscape of Super Mario Bros. 2

only the shadow knows: a noir short by Fabrice Mathieu  

family dining: Facebook to open Metaverse to children to try to rehabilitate flagging interest 

assistant to the regional manager: the Great Resignation and unethical reclassification practises helped create inflated job titles