Approached by Facebook executives with a request to run an experiment tweaking power demands of certain applications to make using them drain one’s phone batteries, a data scientist refused to do so on ethical grounds citing that by dint of the sheer volume of users—in excess of one billion individuals—some were bound to be negatively impacted by a dead phone, lost, stranded or otherwise able to purchase items or verify their identity or alternatively to be gaslit by ones own gadgets, was fired and revealed the existence of this rather sinister experiment (see also) in a lawsuit suing for wrongful dismissal. Details beyond the allegations are sparse since the plaintiff’s employment contract included a clause for binding arbitration, effectively surrendering his right of recourse to legal remedy and submit to the decision of a judge paid a retainer by the social media enterprise.
Monday, 6 February 2023
negative test (10. 529)
catagories: ⚖️, ๐ฑ, ๐ง , networking and blogging
Wednesday, 11 January 2023
civics lesson (10. 407)
Citing the precedence of public nuisance laws which stopped a vaping manufacturer from marketing to young people, a school district in Seattle, Washington is filing a non-frivolous lawsuit against social media outlets, alleging that TikTok, Facebook, Instagram et al are exploiting vulnerable psychologies and creating addicts for their own profit and precipitating a widespread hardship for students and the education system that services them. The attendant mental health crisis—a challenge for the best equipped and dedicated counselling professionals—is a distinct disservice, siphoning precious resources and time from curriculum for intervention and threat-response stemming from distressing and intimidating posts, compiling a growing list of intentioned maladies. What do you think? The school board hopes that this injunction is a first step for students everywhere.
Thursday, 15 December 2022
7x7 (10. 386)
de-evolution: Dangerous Minds interviews Devo’s Gerald V Casale
risky ebay alternative: a round-up of poorly considered gift ideas from Tedium
๐️๐จ️: an infinitely recursive Game of Life—see previously—via Waxy
going to be out of pocket today: a Gen-Z lingo quiz—via Language Hat⊙
december will be magic again: a 1979 BBC Kate Bush Christmas Special with guest star Peter Gabriel
crack that whip: the group’s signature song was inspired by Thomas Pychon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Friday, 9 December 2022
data dump (10. 373)
Although unashamedly US-centric, the just-published Year in Search retrospective from Google nonetheless yields some insights for this past year and our collective engagement with the news and trends.
It seems that we were less interested in chasing memes and more focused on the news and an interesting feature (America only apparently) allows one to find popular search terms locally. There are several categories–plants, pets, people–of analytics to parse and contrast and the top ten searches (with apparent recency bias) worldwide were:
- Wordle
- India vs England
- Ukraine
- Queen Elizabeth
- Ind vs SA
- World Cup
- India vs West Indies
- iPhone 14
- Jeffrey Dahmer
- Indian Premier League
The top news queries were: Ukraine, Queen Elizabeth’s passing, Election Results, Powerball Numbers and Monkeypox. More at the links above.
Sunday, 16 October 2022
7x7 (10. 229)
symphony of the birds: CBS Radio director Jim Fassett’s 1960 experimental arrangement

benevolent dictator: a profile of President Kevin Baugh and his micronation of Molossia—via the New Shelton wet/dry
kunstradfahren: a graceful bicycle ballet by a skilled practitioner of this 130 year old sport
barcalounger: ten homes whose decor is tied together with classic Eames chairs—see previously
unreliable narrator: microbrews and hipster beer names
peer-reviewed: birdsong helps alleviate human anxiety and paranoia
Tuesday, 13 September 2022
8x8 (10. 131)
le milieu du monde: influential Swiss director Alain Tanner has passed away at 92
zodiaco: we liked these astrological sign matchboxes from Josรฉ Marรญa Cruz Novillo—see previously

landscape, portrait: a relatable, cautionary comic from xkcd
punching down: US Republican governors ask Joe Biden to be less generous with his student debt forgiveness plan
moxie: Perseverance’s experimental oxygen generation—via Super Punch
trap set: chimpanzees in Uganda demonstrate their signature drum-beats, can communicate across great distances
maรฎtre ร penser: French New Wave film pioneer Jean-Luc Godard has exited the scene, aged 91
Saturday, 27 August 2022
8x8 (10. 091)
catenary curve: the relationship between arches and chains
astrochickens: another one of Freeman Dyson’s theoretical constructs—albeit less famous than his spheres

click-wheel: design your next custom iPhone—add a headphone jack, handle, home button, etc. from Neal Agarwal (previously)
safe neighbourhood: Madonna’s punk phase
late-stage thatcherism: the UK under Tory leadership is in omnishambles
chakumelo: a celebration of nostalgic words culled from Japanese dictionaries due to declining usage
hรฌtรซkw: an AI redesigns the tennis racket, named after Lenape word for tree due to its root-like design
Tuesday, 9 August 2022
you’ll catch your death in the fall (10. 047)
Fancy Notions directs our attention to a 1970 promotional short from Bell Telephone that offers a rather remarkable if not a tad touched with the hubris and inflated self-confidence of echoed in modern Tech. This piece by Ugo Torricelli, is part informative and part psychedelic freak out, posits that the downfall of humanity and expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the first act of invention.
Saturday, 2 July 2022
6x6
a$ap pocky: Ardnira Putra creates immersive, nostalgic Nintendo 64 vapour wave landscapes

kopen op afstand: the auction clock of royal FloraHolland—and how it was victim of its own popularity
forty text-tone compilation: a duo expressively dances to all the iPhone alerts
tpv: researchers develop thermophotovoltaic cells that passively converts white hot heat into electricity—via Slashdot
biaoqingbao: the lexicon of emoji and memes are being admitted as evidence in more and more lawsuits in China—see previously
Friday, 27 May 2022
8x8
city in a bottle: a bit of micro-coding from Frank Force (previously) decoded—via Waxy
kr: the Icelandic Graphic Design Association (FรT, Fรฉlag รญslenskra teiknara) issues a challenge to come up with a glyph for their krรณna

enough: TIME magazine’s cover lists the two-hundred thirteen US cities that have had mass-shootings this year, so far
social sentinel: a look at the dubious pre-crime predictive software that ill-serves society and the reliance on tech to come to the rescue in general
party line: last bank of public phones removed from New York City—see also here, here, here and here
swiss miss: Tina Roth Eisenberg celebrates her seventeenth blogoversary tesserae: MIT Lab develops autonomous modular tiles to create structures and habitats in space
Friday, 13 May 2022
6x6
sagittarius a*: the Event Horizon Telescope captures images of the Milky Way’s Black Hole—previously

click-wheel: with the announcement that the last iteration of the iPod is being discontinued after two decades (see also), enjoy this first commercial advertisement
anamorphic camouflage illusion: the Phantom Queen optical effect
รผbersetzer: Google Translate adds languages using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, now facilitating communication among one hundred and thirty-three different languages
white dwarf: astronomers witness a nova in real time
Friday, 6 May 2022
7x7
⚠️: a pictogramatical survey of caution wet floor signs—via Pasa Bon!
load-bearing bifurcation: engineers incorporate sturdy, often-discarded tree forks in construction

no tofu: the Noto typeface (previously) a suite of emoji
unit patch: the more inscrutable badges of the US Space Force—see previously
pocket mac: the process of designing a fake vintage product
☿: Unicode Consortium’s growing list of astronomical glyphs, magical charms
Thursday, 3 February 2022
7x7
1:12: a 1983 architectural magazine’s call for dollhouses
way-finder: a friendly reminder about the most important app ever made
fisheye lens: a floating exhibit platform showcases Norwegian aquaculture practises
philately: a brilliant abecedarium (see previously) of vintage postage stamps from around the world
tensor strength: researchers engineer new material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy—like super-charged rubber band, via Slashdot
the vault of contemporary art: a collection of architectural sketches and schematics from a Things Magazine omnibus post on the subject
Sunday, 9 January 2022
think different
Developed in great secrecy under code name Project Purple, the first generation of the iPhone—given the retronym 2G to establish its place in the lineage among some thirty-three different models made, Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs introduces the public to the concept of the revolutionary, universal smart mobile phone on this day in 2007 during a keynote address during the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Models would go on sale at the end of June, on the anniversary of the first trials of the Apple I by Steve Wozniak back in 1975.
Saturday, 8 January 2022
baby bells
Though not coming into force until the first of the year in 1984, the consent decree mandating the breakup and divestiture of the Bell System’s monopoly, vertical integration of telephone services in the US and Canada was finalised on this day in 1982. American Telephone & Telegraph could still provide long-distance services but was subject to competition and could no longer require subscribers—locally use telephonic equipment produced by its subsidiaries. The regional companies were independent and control of the Yellow Pages—the telephone directory—and the research and development branch, Bell Labs, were decentralised and given to the successor holding companies.
Saturday, 18 December 2021
pingxiety
This short about the tug-o’-war between duty to engage with social media demands and responsibilities in the real world that become increasingly suffused with online work and kindred spaces by Hanna Sun called “Blip” does an excellent job of limning that dreadful allure of the screen. Much more at Colossal at the link above.
catagories: ๐จ, ๐ฑ, ๐ง , networking and blogging
Saturday, 4 December 2021
8x8
fauxliage: a superlative roundup of architectural photography projects
the ntf of dorian gray: a new, short take on Oscar Wilde’s cautionary tale
emoji for scale: objects represented by their glyphs from smallest to largest—via Waxy
life plus 50: a Public Domain Advent Calendar in anticipation of the expiring copyrights that the New Year ushers in with a new class of works free to enjoy however one sees fit
verrillon: revisiting the fragile glass armonica of Benjamin Franklin
thank you for your patronage: hackers are instructing receipt printers to spout off anti-work manifestos to draw attention to poverty wages
history is calling: a mobile phone museum—via Pasa Bon!
unbuilt architecture: mock-ups of ten modern monumental structures that were never completed—via Things Magazine
Friday, 3 December 2021
short message service
First in used in pagers that used standarised telephonic protocols as defined, reserved and allocated under the Global System for Mobile Communications in the mid-1980s, the first test missive was sent on this day in 1992 when an engineer named Neil Papworth of the Franco-German SEMA telecommunications group (now defunct) texted from his computer a Christmas greeting to a colleague at Vodafone. Though billions of such SMS circulate daily, it was initially slow to be adopted with rival carriers not allowing cross-communication until 1999―with the uptake exponential and a far more generous character-limit, albeit that these curbs IMHO compelled some real lexicographical creativity.
Monday, 8 March 2021
6x6
ribbit: frogs use their lungs effectively as noise-cancelling devices—via the new Shelton wet/dry
oculus: architect envisions Rome’s Pantheon as world’s largest camera obscura (previously) with a conceptual installationfetish-free commodities: Existential Comics attempts to demystify Marxist marketplaces—via Nag on the Lake and Memo of the Air
radiant baby: a brief biography of artist Keith Haring told with drawings and song
ipa: an iconographic dictionary that corresponds to each phoneme of human language
marshmallow test: cuttlefish demonstrate self-control and delay gratification, passing a cognitive benchmark designed for human children
catagories: ๐, ๐จ, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ฑ, ๐ฑ, ๐ท, ๐ง , environment, labour, language, philosophy
Saturday, 23 January 2021
7x7
dog and ferret sundries, etc: a fantastic hardware catalogue from the 1930s
the roaring twenties: the Sea Shanty craze of a century before—via Strange Companymidori: the relatively modern distinction between blue and green in Japan—see previously
tag yourself: medieval owl alignment chart
arkaphones: a resounding retrospective to artist Terry Adkins, who created sonic monuments
for all the latest medical poop, call surgeon general c. everett koop: the fortune and failure of the post executive branch career of the doctor’s branded medical advice website
ghost signs: self-appointed guardian of fading signage, collecting it before it vanishes altogether—we can all do this
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐ถ, ๐, ๐ฑ, antiques, language, libraries and museums, Middle Ages, networking and blogging